No, But the Privatizers Gave It Their Best Shot

First, how bad is the situation?

• The Social Security Trust Fund has been around for about 70 years.
• It’s at an all-time high of over $2.5 trillion dollars.

• Social Security has been tweaked many times to keep it in ballance.
• If we do nothing the Trust Fund will run out in about 2035.
• But Social Security would not be bankrupt.
• Its continuing payroll contributions would still pay about 70% of legally required benefits.

• In 1983, the Trust was a few months from running out of money when Greenspan fixed it.
• That was 100 times closer to a crisis then now, and no one even remembers.
• That fix was good for over 50 years, and we’ve got about 25 left to go.

What Would Bush’s Privatization Plan Have Done?

• It would have diverted almost half the Social Security payments into private accounts, starting immediately.
• That would have forced Social Security to dip into the Trust Fund immediately
• The Fund would have run out up to 20 years sooner.

• And then when the Trust Fund ran out, with half the payments diverted to private accounts, payments to those under the old system would have been slashed something like 70%.
• This really would have been a crisis.

• With privatizers claiming there’s a crisis for that last ten years, and proposing a plan that would cause one, it’s pretty clear that a crisis is what they want.
• But then, a lot of Republican have wanted to kill Social Security from it’s inception.