They're Really Unbelievable

If you flash back to last year, the only thing on the President's agenda was the privatization of Social Security. He talked it up in town meetings, made a photo-op visit to look at the trust fund IOUs (remember the "these are only worthless pieces of paper" bite?), and generally put the issue onto the front pages. Democrats united, made it a priotiry to protect the earned benefits for our seniors, and Bush got walloped. The more he taled, the less people liked the idea. By the summer, this radical restructuring of Social Security was dead on arrival.

So Bush learned his lesson.

He stopped talking about it and simply inserted it into the budget:

Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.

His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

"The Democrats were laughing all the way to the funeral of Social Security modernization," White House spokesman Trent Duffy told me in an interview Tuesday, but "the president still cares deeply about this. " Duffy asserted that Bush would have been remiss not to include in the budget the cost of something that he feels so strongly about, and he seemed surprised at my surprise that Social Security privatization had been written into the budget without any advance fanfare.

Duffy said privatization costs were included in the midyear budget update that the Office of Management and Budget released last July 30, so it was logical for them to be in the 2007 budget proposals. But I sure didn't see this coming -- and I wonder how many people outside of the White House did.

Nevertheless, it's here. Unlike Bush's generalized privatization talk of last year, we're now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.

700 billion dollars. The plan isn't really to privatize Social Security, it's to bankrupt it... and turn it into a welfare benefit rather than something you earn over time. Look, Americans are horrible savers, especially these days. The federal savings rate is at its lowest time since the Great Depression. And NOW the Administration wants to take the once piece of the social safety net that remains strong and cut the ropes?

They're really unbelievable. Especially in HOW they do these things. They shove them in the back of a budget where they think nobody would notice. They stick it next to the other provision to eliminate the lump-sum death benefit and survivor benefits from Social Security. Meanwhile defense budget continue to skyrocket.

To quote Gene Sperling on the budget:

(it's like) a man who leases three fully loaded Hummers, finds it stretches his family's budget to the breaking point, and decides his family has to start buying cheaper peanut butter.

These people are not fit to sit in the chair at Coretta Scott King's funeral and pay tribute to a woman who fought for the poor and underprivileged all her life.

This budget isn't likely to go anywhere, given the outcries from Republicans and the fact that it's an election year. But it's important for the whole country to know what priorities the White House has. And it's important for the country to ask if they share them.