Simple Question: Where’s the Mandate?
The President of the United States has claimed that he has a mandate to privatize Social Security. We still maintain that he has a mandate only to serve as President, and claiming that he has a mandate for each and every one of the issues that he chose to campaign on is a grossly arrogant distortion of the Democratic process. Furthermore, he has said “I’m looking forward to leading the Congress, and I’m looking forward to taking the case to the American people.” The last we heard, the Executive Branch of our government is separate from the Legislative Branch, and Congress should pitch a genuine fit over the very idea of the President “leading” them!
But more to the point, if the President does indeed have a mandate to privatize Social Security, why does he feel that he needs to “take the case to the American people?” Wouldn’t a mandate imply that the American people have already handed the case over to the President? Could it possibly be that he knows that his claimed mandate was at best a fabrication, and at worst an outright misrepresentation?
We’d also like to know who’s paying for the trip? Any Presidential tour is expensive– the cost of running Air Force One alone is $56,000 per hour. And the tour is obviously another “road show” like his campaign “town hall meetings,” where he will discuss his agenda with a hand-picked and thoroughly screened audience. It’s a propaganda mission, pure and simple– we taxpayers should not be paying for it, and we should know who is.
The cost of the looming Social Security reform debate is estimated to be more than $100 million. Most of the funding for the privatization side is coming from Wall Street, which should not be a surprise since they stand to pick up a billion dollars or more in earnings if Social Security is privatized in accordance with Bush’s plan. Using the roundest of numbers, Bush is proposing to borrow more than a trillion dollars to create the private accounts. Setting aside the fact that he is really suggesting that the government borrow this money to “repay” the Social Security Trust Fund which has already been borrowed and spent… a billion dollars is exactly one tenth of one percent of a billion. When was the last time you found an investment that cost a tenth of a percent in administration costs? And remember, those are the roundest of numbers, used for illustrative purposes only. Bush will need to borrow more than a trillion, and Wall St will rake off a lot more than a billion.
Is it any wonder that the Wall Street fat cats lined up with bags of money for the Bush campaign? Or that they are getting back in line with more bags of money to the privatization campaign?
Those of us who have worked for living (as opposed to those who inherited wealth or “earned” it on the global Monopoly board) have been investing in our future through our Social Security deposits. The Trust Fund, even though it has been lent to the government, is our money and and our future financial security. Does Bush have a mandate to give it away to his rich friends, or is it simple theft?
If he has some sort of “moral mandate” from the Christian Right, there should be a lot of preachers screaming from the pulpit that Bush needs to read the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of pottage. Bush is trying to sell our birthright for a lot more than that. To us, the privatization scheme looks a lot like a classic Mafia protection racket, so perhaps the President (and Congress) should re-read RICO as well.
–SG
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