You have to wonder who exactly Bush thought he was helping with this bizarre stunt:
[T]his 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.
It’s all in there: the private accounts, the indexing, every other airheaded idea that you thought had already died months ago. Before anybody forgets Social Security privatization died an unmourned death, with every new Luntz-approved catchphrase (‘personalization,’ ‘personal accounts,’ ‘modernization,’ whatever) proving less popular than the last. By the end Republicans were reduced to denying, indignantly, that they ever supported such a ridiculous scheme.
I wouldn’t take this story too seriously because few Pubs come from safe enough districts to take on Social Security in the full light of day. This scheme died the moment it appeared in a newspaper.
Speaking of underhanded legislative gimmicks, here’s a new one from our friends Frist and Hastert:
“Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play. The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member.”
Travel back with me, if you will, to a day in 1987 when a long-ago campaigner for good government, Rep. Dick Cheney, reacted to that horrible Jim Wright holding a vote open for an additional 15 minutes:
Republicans denounced this as an outrageous departure from regular order. Then-Rep. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) railed against “Jim Wright and his goons.” And a Republican congressman named Dick Cheney denounced the move as “the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power I’ve ever seen in the 10 years that I’ve been here.”
Cut to that selfsame campaigner standing on a windswept field, observing today’s congress and crying a single, silent tear.
***Update***
Yes, Cheney has stood on that field and cried that tear before. Some public service ads are too poignantly moving to run just once.
Think of this Cheney person, kids, the next time you litter wreck Congress.
neil
Haven’t you already used that one?
Oh yeah.
jg
But Kerry voted for it before he voted against it and he wouldn’t release all his service records.
jaime
Cut Bush some slack. He saved Los Angeles.
Rusty Shackleford
Is it any mystery as to why Democrats become unhinged sometimes?
This stuff never ceases – it actually seems to be snowballing. Not only do we have to object to these shenanigans but we have to fight through the Republican talking point drones all over again.
BushCo could render the Democrat party completely useless with a few more of these “retro” greats. I saw that the foiled 2002 terrorist plot in L.A. was first spun during the 2004 campaign and is getting re-played today.
SeesThroughIt
Bwah! Great allusion, and it has the added hilarity of positing that Dick Cheney is capable of crying human tears.
Hoodlumman
Agreed. Let’s just let the system bankrupt itself and be done with it altogether.
S.W. Anderson
John, this isn’t hard to understand at all. It’s a simple case of judging others by the way he (Bush) is himself.
Faced with the prospect of having to read and get a good grasp of something as big and complicated as the federal budget — even a fairly detailed synopsis of the budget — Bush simply punts. He gets one or more aides to tell him a few things about it or has them write some two-page memos hitting the high points for him.
Bush probably expects people in Congress all pretty much do the same thing, the same way. So, he figured there was a chance he could sneak his privatization scheme through without anyone even noticing until the legislation was on his desk to be signed into law.
Steve
Well, let’s say no one notices, somehow, and the budget gets approved as-is. It’s still only an allocation of funds. It’s not enabling legislation to actually do anything!
It seems like a pure political stunt, a gesture of defiance, more than anything substantive. If you act strong, sometimes people think you’re strong.
Edmund Dantes
Half the fun of this blog is watching to see who doesn’t actually read the headings to see who actually wrote the main post.
jg
Is it a stunt? How many wingnuts will agree he can do this? If it goes to the Supreme Court where will they rule on his ability to submit a budget without approval or notice. What next will he try?
Zerthimon
I wouldn’t go so far as to say privatizing part of Social Security is an “airhead” idea. The main problem is that currently it’s unfeasable due to the budget deficit. But people on both sides think there is value in the ideas of some privatization and indexing. I’m afraid that people have become so polarized over that issue that while they are rejecting Bush’s own specific ideas, they are also rejecting some of the more legitimate concepts behind it without really giving it enough thought.
S.W. Anderson
OK, Edmund, mistake acknowledged. Always happy to make someone’s day a little brighter.
GOP4Me
Snipe away, liberals. Bush was just trying to do SOMETHING to help save the moribund program first spawned by your Socialist martyr of a President, FDR. I take it most of you are in your twenties or thirties, my age range. If you’re smart, you’ll do what I’m doing: stockpiling money. There isn’t going to be any for us in Social Security by the time we’re 65, that’s for sure.
I don’t like every aspect of Bush’s plan, either. But apparently Al Gore’s lockbox was about as porous as the US borders were under Clinton. And Bush’s plan is a lot better than nothing, which is the Democratic alternative. Pretty much the Democratic alternative to every Republican plan, actually: do nothing, wait for bad things to happen, let the Republicans clean up the mess, and then snipe at them while they do. Snipe away, liberals.
ppGaz
Let’s cut the crap, righty apologists. Bush is acting out the CATO Institute plan for dismantling Social Security.
Not fixing it. Not saving it. Not reforming it. Doing away with it.
That was where he was headed a year ago before the reality of the unpopularity of his “ideas” sank in. And through the entire charade a year ago, he proposed no actual plan or scheme, with numbers and alternatives, to accomplish anything in particular. The entire thing was a scam from the get-go.
What this new stunt means, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But I can assure you, it ain’t goin’ anywhere.
Joey
Oooohhhh, harsh. But really, is socialist really an insult? It’s not like your beloved GOP is actually conservative anymore. Remember, my friend, it was a “socialist” Dem who balanced the budget. You
conservativesneo-cons fucked that up. (BTW, I’d take FDR over any other man in history to lead my country, except for that nasty internment camp business)Hey, you fucks control all the branches of government. Do you honestly think anybody would listen to Dem ideas anyway? (This is of course, lending creedence to your theory that they have no ideas, which is something I don’t really want to do, but…)
Will do.
Edmund Dantes
Bah… SW. I’m just messing with you. It took me awhile to get used to it too. I happened to start reading alot right before John added Tim so it confused the hell out of me for like 3 weeks.
stickler
Oh, for pity’s sake. Where have you been for the last four years? You wonder who Bush thought he was helping?
Follow the money. It was plain as day when the Medicare prescription drug benefit was lumbering through Congress, and it’s sure as hell obvious now: the drug companies and the insurance companies cut a fat hog off the American taxpayer. Any actual assistance to any actual old people is purely coincindental
Follow the money. Social Security “privatization” means a Mississippi River of tax money being invested — where? In the stock market. And what are the management fees for that going to be? Gargantuan.
Yeah, Al Gore’s lockbox started to leak … about the time George W. Bush got a huge tax cut passed. Poof! There went the surpluses which were supposed to shore up the system for when the baby boomers would retire.
“Doing nothing” is a damned sight better than torpedoing the system and adding trillions to the national debt. Remember the iron Bush-era rule: If George W. Bush proposes something, you can guarantee that it will be incompetent, make the problem worse, and cost a whole hell of a lot of money (cf., Iraq; Medicare; Homeland Security; etc., etc., ad infinitum world without end, Amen).
Geoduck
John should post in red and Tim in blue…
CaseyL
Everyone keeps saying the damn thing won’t pass, now that word of it being slipped into the budget’s gotten out.
Everyone keeps saying the damn thing won’t pass because the GOP Reps don’ want to have to face voters after destroying SocSec.
Everyone keeps saying that, even if the damn thing does pass, Bush can’t really act on it.
I wonder where those everyones have been for the past 5 years.
If the past 5 years have taught us anything at all, it’s that “What Bush Wants, Bush Gets.”
The House has never denied him anything he wanted.
He’s played fast and loose with budgeting rules, esp. in funding his goddamn war, and in funneling the money to his cronies.
Here’s a question: say the impossible happens, and Congress does strip the SocSec program out of the budget bill.
What’s to stop Bush from going ahead as if it passed?
What’s to stop Bush from reallocating that $700 million, regardless of what Congress does?
That’s a serious question.
Anyone want to try answering it?
Richard Bottoms
9/11, 9/11, 9/11
stickler
What’s to stop Bush?
The heroic defense of Constitutional principles by the moderates in the Republican Party. Like Arlen Specter and John McCain.
(Sorry; have to stop typing now — I started giggling so hard I spilled my beer all over my keyboard.)
Aaron
Thank God I have not paid into SS in over 15 years.
Though I am pretty sure once the Dems get back in office the private accounts will miraculously be resurrected with the media helping along “this great new idea to save social security.”
neil
I’m pulling a pretty nifty expat trick, myself. See, in my new country, I don’t have to pay into the pension program because I’m a citizen of the US which has guaranteed benefits. On the other hand, I don’t have to pay FICA on my foreign wages because they’re in a country that has a pension program.
This is good, to me, because here we have one of those new-fangled privatized systems, and it pretty much sucks and will probably be dismantled in favor of an American-style system a few years. It goes without saying that Bush used this country as a proof that his little scheme would work.
Steve
I wouldn’t put my money on this, but even if private accounts are inevitable, I still think we’re better off if we wait until the administration that gave us Katrina, the Iraq war, and Medicare Part D is out of office.
What Clinton proposed in the late 90s was add-on private accounts, keeping the existing Social Security system intact. At a minimum, resurrecting that idea would improve our national savings rate, which is something we desperately need. Add-on accounts can also be fully self-directed, because even if people manage to blow all the money at least they have a safety net under that. There are still serious problems, but at least you don’t have trillions of dollars in transition costs, which is probably THE major issue with the Bush plan. It would be flat-out stupid to take on that kind of new debt just to “fix” the possibility of a deficit of payments 50 years from now.
John
SS should be left alone until it becomes such a complete failure that it can have no hope of continuing. Thank god the democrats are blocking this idea that may allow this stupid beast to continue to live. BTY, is the point to save SS or is it for americans to have enough money when they retire that they are not a burden on socity. You can do one or the other but not both.
Dougie
Why would small-government, non-welfare state ideologues want to continue with a program they believe to be socialist?
GOP4Me
Socialists nationalize all industries. They’re the ultimate statists, and the net effect of strangling competition is stagnation and decay.. Bush and the neo-conservatives, on the other hand, give industries subsidies that enhance their power and their ability to develop new outlets for employment, trade, and financial improvement. You couldn’t ask for a larger difference between the two.
So you concede that Republicans control government because Democrats have no idea how to control government. Even if we handed over control of it to them tomorrow, what would they do? Enact some Stalinist mumbo-jumbo, then sit back waiting for the terrorists to strike us again? Great alternative. No wonder Kerry won. Oh, wait… HE LOST.
Those tax cuts are the only thing that saved America’s economy from 8 years of Clintonomics. Without them, we’d all be selling apples for $.10 apiece or something right now. Just like our grandpappies did under Roosevelt’s boondoggles.
Doing something that’s 90% right is a damn sight better than doing nothing, trying to figure out the 100% right answer while your enemies attack you. If you don’t agree, we’ll have to leave it at that.
I envy you. It’s a waste of my money.
In other words, SS creates the problem it’s supposed to cure.
That’s why the program is being privatized and de-socialized, you dunderhead.