One can reliably conclude that a political policy is failing when the stage business used to promote it gets more elaborate.
Thus, the bit of cabaret that President Bush engaged in this week at the Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.Va., may be the surest sign yet that his campaign to dismantle Social Security is in trouble.
Bush's subject du jour was the Social Security trust fund, which currently holds roughly $1.7 trillion in U.S. government bonds. Beginning in the 2020s, this fund (which will be worth more than $6 trillion by then) is supposed to be liquidated to help pay retirement benefits for the baby boom generation. The process will take a couple of decades. At the end of that period, the fund will probably be exhausted, but most of the baby boomers will have moved past retirement anyway to, um, celestial pursuits.
Bush's purpose in Parkersburg was to portray this mechanism, which was painstakingly designed by a 1983 reform commission headed by Alan Greenspan, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as a fraud. The trust fund is basically fictional, he suggested; it's just a bookkeeping device that conceals Social Security's true fiscal crisis. By suggesting that Social Security has less money on hand than it seems to, he's hoping to win support for his highly unpopular plan to privatize the system.
Accordingly, he staged a photo-op pilgrimage to the four-drawer cabinet in the Parkersburg facility in which the trust fund's bond certificates are filed and briefly riffled through the pages. Then, smirking inanely for an audience of handpicked supporters, he ridiculed the idea that "the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet."
"There is no 'trust fund,' " he added, "just IOUs."
Bush's performance came straight from the right-wing playbook for the attack on Social Security. Its essence is that because the trust fund assets are merely bonds owed by the U.S. government to itself, they don't exist in any normal financial sense. When the time comes to redeem the bonds to pay benefits, the argument goes, the only way to come up with the money would be to raise taxes sky-high, which would destroy the economy. No one wants to do that, so it's best to pretend that the bonds have no value.
