Bushies placing the blame before the robbery

<![CDATA[Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation uses my line: Ken Lay Would Love SS Privatization. I agree with Scott Rosenberg that Josh Marshall’s explanation of the Great Social Security Rip-Off of 2005 is excellent for its clarity and brevity.
Now that Ken Lay’s name is being picked up by the Liberal press (what took so long?), let’s add another fabulous name from the past to explain the unprecedented level of greed driving the Bush push to privatize Social Security: Charles Keating. The difference between the S&L Crisis, which was triggered by Republican banking reform, is that, this time, the money will be paid into the pockets of the rich upfront rather than after they have pillaged the public weal. With that kind of leverage, Bush’s base can turn the United States into a legitimate third-world country, free from regulation and any semblance of a fair economy, from which they can flee to any tax haven they choose.
Also, this time the Republicans are already blaming government qua government for the problems they are creating. The S&L folks only managed that trick years later (note that the link if to the Michael Milken-sponsored Milken Institute and suggests “Congress [used the S&L bailout legislation] to deflect blame to directors, officers, lawyers, accountants and others who had been caught at the tiller when the system sank into insolvency.”)
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is simple: Democrats try to use the government to do something good for people, even though they screw up a lot, while Republicans use government to rob the people while blaming government for their dirty work.
Update: Paul Krugman’s column today is a must-read:

Today let’s focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.

That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a “day of reckoning.”

Here’s the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund.

When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

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