Socialist Security Solutions

Socialist Security Solutions

If I lied to your elderly parents living on a fixed income that someone was coming to tear down their house and destroy the final golden years of their retirement, would you like me? Would you send me a check once a year for $12.50 in gratitude for the fear and apprehension I was causing? Or would you demand I tell the truth and suggest that I take my 10% discount at Motel 6 and shove it? I know the answer, but it escapes me why no one else seems to act.

AARP, the “spokesman” for the older generation of Americans has these cute TV ads, paid for by member dues, that show a plumber coming to look at a clogged drain and pronouncing, “drains clogged, guess we’ll have to tear down the house,” followed immediately by a wrecking ball crashing through the living room wall. What’s it all mean? Well, according to AARP, if the administration does something about Social Security, all of us old folks are going to be destroyed just like that house. Sorry, I’ve been listening carefully to what is being said and I don’t see that happening. It is not only hyperbole, it is blatant lying!

I watched the President’s State of the Union address and commented last February on his Social Security pronouncements (Creating the Perfect Retirement), and I watched his primetime press conference this last Thursday. It has been pretty clear throughout, that no proposal on the table is going to change, reduce, endanger, jeopardize or have any effect on any of us who are over 55 years old today. We are the people that AARP supposedly represents and that means they are lying when they suggest that our Social Security guarantees are going to be razed.

Ask someone in their twenties about Social Security. I used to do it in my political science classes during the block on domestic policy. They will uniformly tell you that they don’t expect it to be there by the time they retire. Guess what? The Social Security administration, the General Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office all agree! These are the folks that have a vested interest in seeing something done, but they are also the disaffected and disinterested demographic that isn’t reading the details, absorbing the facts or making informed voting decisions on solutions.

It doesn’t matter a whit whether the exact date of the default is 2040 or 2052, the fact is that in less than fifteen years the Social Security system will begin to take in less from workers than it pays out to retirees. And, by the 2040 or ’52 time frame, the IOU’s of the “Trust Fund” (is that an oxymoron when speaking about SS?) will be expended and the system will be unable to continue at the required benefit levels. Hey AARP, would you check some insurance tables and tell me how many of those clogged drain folks are still going to be expecting checks by then? Depressingly few I predict.

Why then don’t the Democrats and the lobbyists of AARP want anything done to fix the system before the need becomes critical? How about the loss of all of that attractive “Trust Fund” money that can be used to provide welfare handouts to the constituents who keep them in office? If we offer people the opportunity to put their own money (remember that basic—it’s your money!) into private accounts and then get that money to leave to your heirs when you die, then it won’t be available for patronage. The redistributors of wealth don’t worry about thirty years from now when they will no longer be in office. They worry about largesse from the public treasury today to keep the class envy alive and keep those lower income votes pouring in each election.

More on Socialist Security Solutions next time.