Originally published July 5 2005
Editorial: New Social Security accounts do more harm than good
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to Republican proponents, the revised Social Security initiative in Congress right now could do more harm than good, since the plan would put Social Security surplus in private accounts in order to prevent more federal borrowing from those funds, according to a commondreams.com article.
The Republicans may have outdone even that caricature with their new proposal on Social Security.
"Lock Box Lite" doesn't even pretend to solve any fundamental problems with Social Security.
Its main purpose is to give Republicans political cover from the debacle of president Bush's botched Social Security sales job.
Bush came out of the gates in January intent on spending the "political capital" he claimed to have earned in the 2004 election.
The fact is that Social Security has a $1.8 trillion surplus and can pay 100% of scheduled benefits until 2041 or 2051, depending on the projections.
His proposed "private accounts" would have taken money out of the Social Security Trust Fund, in effect creating the very crisis he was pretending to solve.
This would make up for the current payroll deductions that were going into private accounts and therefore would not be available to pay retirees their promised pensions.
Now, the entire U.S. National Debt, run up over 230 years, totals $7 trillion.
And Bush wanted to borrow nearly that much to make worse a problem he was pretending to fix and that didn't even exist in the first place.
Is it any wonder that the more Bush talked about the plan, the more the public rebelled against it?
The plan is for the government to sequester the Trust Fund surplus into Treasury bonds until retirees begin drawing them down in 2017.
All of the bills in both pockets still have to be repaid.
And if Bush really wanted to help Social Security, instead of simply pretending like he was, he could balance the budget by raising taxes on his wealthy benefactors or cutting back on his prodigious spending.
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