It's time to derail Social Security privatization

In a nutshell:

1) Social Security was never designed to many any retiree rich. It was designed to prevent every retiree from being destutite. For about 70 years, it has worked just fine.

2) Social Security is not broken. The Social Security administration itself estimates that the trust fund has no problems at all before 2042. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, this is a highly conservative estimate, and that over the past decade, the SSA has consistently predicted the 'zero point' to be about 35 years in the future. In fact, since 1994 it's gone from 35 years to 38 years away. Nice!

3) Every "plan" to "fix" Social Security rests on one of two fallacious assumptions. Some plans rest on both of them. These fallacious assumptions are:
a) Assuming that under the current system, worker contributions will grow at a certain rate (say, 2%) but that under a new system, investments would grow at a larger rate (say, 4.6%). Over time, the growth in the value of investments closely matches the growth of the economy as a whole, and many attempts to justify privatization rely on using different numbers for the two cases.
b) Assuming that borrowing money 35 years in the future (when the 'zero point' is reached) is a Very Bad Thing, but that borrowing money now to pay for 'transition costs' in the trillions of dollars is a Perfectly Fine Thing. Wouldn't you rather defer borrowing trillions to a point at least 35 years in the future, especially when that point might shift ever farther into the future, as it has done for the past decade?

Well, enough. Democrats are going to have to be ballsy if they want to prevent the destruction of another sensible American ideal. We need to fight back, and we need to start now -- for the radical right is certainly starting now. Here is a handy primer from Digby about how the Republicans destroyed Clinton's healthcare reform -- when the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

We should all read, learn, plan, and act NOW.

Quote from the Digby piece:

"September 19, 1994 - The New York Times reports remarks -- never subsequently denied -- that Bob Packwood made to his Republican senatorial colleagues during closed-door strategy sessions while he was managing the Republican attack during the summer. "We've killed health care reform," Packwood told his fellow Republican senators. "Now we've got to make sure our fingerprints are not on it." For many this is the "smoking gun": proof of a carefully plotted, and secret, Republican strategy."

Thug Rule II: Feral Cities

The New York Times Magazine has an article in its annual 'ideas' issue about so-called "Feral Cities".

Quote from the Times:

"The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells."

Building on the ideas posted in my previous "Thug Rule" post, I will note that the breakdown of social order in the face of thugs armed with the real weapons of mass destruction -- cheap guns, ammunition, and explosive -- is one of the most pressing technological issues of our era. It's worth noting that the balance between order and chaos has historically tipped one way or the other based on available technologies and the political will to apply them. Rome, in the fading days of its glory, was ruled by the mob, because no military technology existed at the time which could be usefully applied in an urban context where preservation of property value was important. Millenia later, Louis XIV demolished entire neighborhoods of Paris (I believe Colbert was the architect both of the policy and the new boulevards) to creat long, wide, straight streets converging to plazas, which could be policed in extreme cases with cannon and musket fire. These new lines of sight/fire replaced the easily mobbable warren that had been the Paris streetscape before, and the application of technologies of urban design, scientific policing, and the general rise in prosperity brought on by the industrial era caused thug power to decline dramatically. Now we appear to be on the verge of the post-industrial era, and the emergence of thug rule at both the national level and the urban level will be one of the greatest problems of the 21st century. One answer is totalitarian methods of control. Louis XIV pioneered these as well. As one wanders the Louvre, it's worth remembering that its gigantic (literally palatial) halls were created to house the bureaucracy of governmental control pioneered by the "L'etat, c'est moi" state of the Sun King. Today, with electronic surveillance and database technologies, combined with highly precision weapons of policing/combat, highly centralized government can fight back -- but the middle-class middle ground of civil society is lost, for the social and technological factors which made this middle layer so powerful over the past two centuries are fading away.