“However, he overlooks one possibility: before Bush leaves, the neo-libs may well achieve their Holy Grail—an economy that provides an excuse to privatize social security. To wit, a massive stagflation may well occur in 2008, with wages (and therefore contributions) falling, and inflation (and therefore payments) rising. Ergo, projected numbers for social security viability will look dismal.”

Were there economic collapse, the stock market wouldn’t bail retirees out.  The stock market itself would tank.  Hence privatization isn’t the answer to anything.

Joe Conason is right to question whether ‘rescue of social security’ is a smart campaign topic for the Dems, or is even a real problem for the country in the next fifty years or so.

However, he overlooks one possibility: before Bush leaves, the neo-libs may well achieve their Holy Grail—an economy that provides an excuse to privatize social security. To wit, a massive stagflation may well occur in 2008, with wages (and therefore contributions) falling, and inflation (and therefore payments) rising. Ergo, projected numbers for social security viability will look dismal.

“… solvent for decades to come” isn’t good enough when you won’t get anything until after that.

Retirees will always get something because workers will always be paying into Social Security.  In fact decades from now retirees will get more Social Security than people get now, due to economic growth.  Future workers will have more income with which to pay in and will still have more take-home pay than they have now.

Health care is a real crisis.  Social Security is a phony “crisis.”

You’re right.  Hillary has not been evasive about Social Security.  She has been clear that she plans to eliminate it.  You just need to listen to what she says.  Once again, she’s right with Bush on this one.

Of course the cap should be raised to accommodate future demands.  Simple enough.  But Hillary very evasively said she will not consider doing anything to fund Social Security until she has successfully established solvency in the entire government.  Or some words to that effect.  So what does that mean, exactly?

Well luckily she answered that question a few days after she gave her tangled response in a debate.  Because her proposal is to have individuals set up their own private 401k account (to be handled by those big donors to Hillary from Wall Street), and the government would “match” or “contribute” to the workers’ 401k accounts.  Uh-huh.  Let’s see.  401k private accounts handled by Wall Street with their absurd per-account fees and account churning.  Maybe the government would contribute.  Not the employers, which would make the business world very happy.  So they will give more money to Hillary.

Then she said, with a straight face:  but this is not privatization of Social Security.

Well, actually, yes it is.  That’s exactly what it is.  She just thinks the public is so stupid that if she says 401k, they’ll think oh boy, money for me.  But it’s really just more money for Hillary.  And that’s why Hillary doesn’t want to talk about Social Security. 

In fact, when you think about it, how dare she refuse to discuss any topic that legitimately is of interest to a voter?  She said she will not even discuss it. 

Gore had it right.  It’s just like letting the corporations “borrow” the money that’s supposed to be set aside for employee pension obligations.  Then when the money’s owed, the company announces it’s broke.  Social Security should be assessed on a higher cap, say $125,000 of income, and the money should be set aside and never used by the government for any other purpose.

Oh, there is a problem associated with SS that no one wants to talk about, including Joe Conason.

The problem is that soon enough, the government won’t be able to HONOR the checks it might issue to recipients and will have to stop issuing them because it has no money with which to pay any of its bills, of which SS benefits are one.

Why will we have to do without? Because we haven’t managed to steal enough oil to save our bacon, so to mix metaphors with foodstuffs and crankcases. Iraq is only a stopgap and partial solution. We have yet to invade and occupy the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and perhaps Venezuela so as to prop up the dollar with our stolen oil that Conason won’t discuss lest his publishers “Scheerize” him.

We’re talking WEALTH here, not money, something that your friend Krugman won’t discuss either lest he give away the game and show the way to the Enronization of the USA . . . yes, a lot of countries want us propped up because they realize that a bankrupt USA will take them down with us in the vortex behind our fall, and I suspect most of them don’t mind our stealing arab oil to stay afloat and keep the global economy humming on borrowed Chinese money.

Social Security is the very LEAST of our worries right now. The old people (like I) can just die of one thing or another, and no one will care, because that is what old people do, so starvation or exposure can take its place with cancer and heart attacks and trying to drive automobiles like competent adults (instead of doddering old fools) as the cause of death---which cannot be escaped.

We only have one issue in this 21st century, and that issue is oil. When it runs out, we can take stock and see where we have to go from there, but until it does, there is NO OTHER ISSUE which should take up more time than our quest for economic security via oil theft.

Indeed, the death of Social Security checks will help the rest of you to survive because we old people will die and make room and food and shelter for the remaining ones. Sure, in the short term some will suffer, and some will not, but no one is worrying about the near trillion dollar trade deficit and no one is worrying about a nine trillion dollar debt; why worry about SS which is doing fine so long as we can steal enough oil to keep on paying our old people?

It is disappointing to hear Obama demagogue the phony Social Security issue.  However, he knows the corporate media will back him on the matter.  Members of the high-income elite are trying to wiggle out of paying the taxes for the U.S. securities held by the Social Security trust fund.

For its part, the Bush administration is engaged in a con game wherein they assume slow growth when evaluating Social Security’s prospects, but robust growth when speculating about the supposed advantages of privatization.