I’ve been pondering President Bush’s possible motivations for his Social Security privatization push, and the only thing I can come up with is this: the private sector sees that massive pile of money sitting in the Social Security trust fund doing virtually nothing (well, except financing the federal deficit) and would really like to use it to capitalize commercial enterprises.
Joshua Marshall offers another, more nefarious, motivation: Social Security privatization is the first step in Bush’s plan to keep the federal government from having to pay back the trillions of dollars it has borrowed from the trust fund–and to destroy Social Security in the process.
I’m just as willing as the next liberal to believe that Bush is capable of such a nefarious act, but as compelling as Marshall’s idea sounds, he offers no explanation of exactly HOW privatization is the first step. When someone hypothesizes an entire chain of events that would tie the administration’s current efforts to this dastardly goal, then I’ll analyze it and see if it seems logical and fits the facts. Until then, I’m inclined to think it’s just your run-of-the-mill Republican privatization effort–granted, on a scale that’s unprecedented in American history.
Categories: Politics