By Phillip M. Bailey
Free-market advocate Stephen Moore has succinctly affirmed the Republican fiscal platform goal of the last 30 years: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”
There was a time when Moore, former president of the anti-tax group Club for Growth, and his ideas of privatization were so far to the right that even conservative icons like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich winced. Although the GOP has concentrated on eroding the New Deal via a stampede of deregulation, privatization and laissez-faire economics, not even the Reagan Revolution was brazen enough to centralize their domestic policy around altering FDR’s most prized accomplishment.
New Deal, meet George W. Bush.
Using soft terms like “ownership society,” President Bush is using his two-percent mandate to marshal a full-court press on one of America’s most progressive fiscal safety nets. Vice President Dick Cheney makes public appeals to college campuses, Treasury Secretary John Snow reassures Wall Street, and conservative pressure groups, namely Progress for America, utilize television ads to persuade mostly uninformed youth. Disturbingly, the Bush & Co. drumbeat is the same: fear first, distortions second and questions last.
“First step,” Bush told TIME magazine in December, “is to make sure everybody understands we have a problem.” What exactly? Social Security trustees have said the program at its current rates will provide all benefits until 2042, and fulfilling its basic obligations decades after. And privatization isn’t neccesarily the answer. The Jan. 24 edition of “Business Week” reports that, “Even if the stock market matched its historical average, private accounts wouldn’t fill the gap for something like 90 to 100 years. And that doesn’t even count the extra $1 trillion to $2 trillion in transition costs required to set up such accounts.”
And the Democrats? Well at least this time they’re not cosigning. Regrettably the bulk of the “Republican-Lite” Party refuses to embrace progressive alternatives that could end this casino-corporate proposal once and for all. With centrists like John Kerry constituting the “left bank” of American politics, questioning unfettered capitalism today is sacrilege to what Adolph Reed Jr. calls “free-market theology.” Conclusion: the Democrats are hoping public opinion won’t be swayed by the Bush Administration’s forceful campaign. Good luck.
Sadly, the citizens with the most at stake here, college students, remain lethargic on an issue seen as dull, complicated and even irelevant. When columnist Adam Collins’ well-intentioned appeal ran in the Jan. 18 edition of The Louisville Cardinal, he said, “Pay attention … put down your Bud Light and take a minute to learn more about a major decision that is flying by you,” it mostly falls upon deaf ears. It is doubtful that a complex, long-contended issue like Social Security will generate mass mobilization among the “activist wing” of the collegiate left. That is until the manufactured crisis of Bush & Co. turns into a real economic catastrophe … or Michael Moore debuts a film about it.
Phillip M. Bailey is a junior double-majoring in Political Science and Sociology, Chair of the U of L
SNCC and is a columnist for The Cardinal.
E-mail him at: pbailey@louisvillecardinal.com
