Why does George W. Bush hate Alan Greenspan?
And why does the Republican Party think it's most important domestic agenda item is to convince the American people that Ronald Reagan was a liar and a fraud?
In the early 1980s Greenspan and Reagan put in place a plan to "save Social Security." Looking ahead, they realized that the demographic bubble of the baby boom was going to create a generation-long hiccup in the program's assumption of constant and gradual population growth.
The situation was a lot like the one that was giving old Pharaoh nightmares back in the days of Joseph.
While the baby boomers were working, America would have a larger-than-usual workforce, disproportionate to the retired population. That's your "seven fat years." After the boomers began retiring in 2011, and during the decades in which they collected Social Security benefits, American could expect a larger-than-usual retirement population, disproportionate to the size of the workforce. That's your "seven lean years."
The wise thing to do — as Joseph advised Pharoah — would be to take advantage of the fat years to create a stockpile (or "trust fund") that would see you through the lean years that followed.
Problem was that nobody thought of this at the beginning of the seven fat years, when the boomers first entered the workforce. That meant they'd need to stockpile with extra zeal during the 30 or so remaining years in which those seven fat cows were still wading the banks of the Nile.
Thus Greenspan suggested, and Reagan signed into law, a payroll tax hike that still holds the record as the Biggest Tax Increase in American History. That tax hike hits people my age (I'm 36) and younger particularly hard — we've been paying the premium payroll tax our entire working lives.
But the billions of dollars in payroll premiums we've contributed very well may have done the trick. The trustees of the Social Security Administration say that the trust fund created from our larger-than-usual payments will keep their program healthy and intact until at least 2042. The Congressional Budget Office thinks our contributions will carry the program through until 2052. By that point, the last wave of boomers will be in their late 80s, baby busters like me will have begun retiring and the seven lean years will have nearly run their course.
The Bush administration wants to convince the American people that none of the above happened. They treat us as "a generation which knew not Joseph." They treat us as a naive people who can simply forget and forgive the billions of dollars in payroll premiums we have already contributed to ensure the future of Social Security.
Or else they are trying to say that Greenspan and Reagan were fools or worse. What happened to the billions of dollars they took from us over the past two decades? The implication underlying all of Bush & Co.'s hype about a Social Security "crisis" is that Greenspan and Reagan simply took this money and ran.
George W. Bush is implying that Ronald Reagan was a sleazy con artist who bilked working people out of billions of dollars.
Even stranger, Andrea Mitchell implied the very same thing about her husband, Alan Greenspan during a discussion on Social Security on NBC's Meet the Press:
"You're going to have to deal with the essential question, which is that our population is not growing fast enough, combined with immigration, to create enough workers to support a pay-as-you-go retirement system."
Um, Andrea, your hubby already dealt with this essential question more than 20 years ago. And as a result, every paycheck I've ever earned has contributed to a trust fund that exists precisely to deal with this question.
The money is there, in Pharaoh's coffers. Those of us who paid that money haven't forgotten.
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