Because now its going to go broke even sooner than expected – woohoo! Extra bad national bankruptcy! Double Plus Good!
…according to the CBO, per Heritage, “the Social Security surplus will only be $16 billion this year, and only $3 billion next year”; it will show a deficit, or “go negative,” in 2011.
How can this be happening? I thought Pelosi, Reid, and the left all assured us several years ago that there was “no crisis.”
That they did. In May 2005, during the Bush administration’s weak attempt to build support for partial privatization of the system, “Pelosi accused President Bush of creating a crisis and manufacturing an issue.” Before that, in late 2004, as it became clear that Bush would try to mount such an effort, the pair jointly said, “We cannot support any plan that relies on massive and irresponsible increases in debt, which could destabilize financial markets and lead to large tax increases.” The current irony of that joint statement is provided at no extra charge.
The fact is that a crisis has been building for decades. It has seemingly come out of nowhere only because the POR (Pelosi, Obama, Reid – ed note) economy’s recession has sharply reduced Social Security tax receipts. Any recovery in collections arising from an economic comeback will necessarily build on a smaller base. That is why Social Security is on track to go negative six years earlier than was anticipated just a year ago. If February’s monstrous stimulus package doesn’t reignite job growth, it will probably go negative in fiscal 2010. The “save” part of Team Obama’s risible “save or create jobs” goal will do nothing to increase Social Security tax collections.
Once Social Security goes negative, we will have come to the point so many have long feared we would reach. To cover the system’s cash drains, the government will have to, in some combination, raise taxes, borrow more, or reduce benefits, year after year after year.
More importantly and tragically, the “no crisis until 2040 or so” crowd, which has been lying all along, will have accomplished what I believe has been their long-term goal, which is making even partially privatizing Social Security politically and financially unachievable. It appears that they’ve “won.” The economy and personal liberty have lost.
We certainly won’t be able to borrow, and no Democrat will ever think of a genuine cut in spending, so the only thing Democrats will be willing to do it raise taxes…and it doesn’t matter if any particular tax increase merely pushes off economic doomsday by two years…that is the time frame Democrats live in: election by election. To them, its ok to “solve” the problem for just one election cycle because, if they win, then they can just “solve” it again – we are dealing with the most monumentally stupid people to ever be involved in human governance, dear people.
All it would have taken is just a small bit of partial privatization and this would have been avoided – but Democrats were afraid that if we, the people, had an extra 1% of our income to invest, we’d be the people making a mess of it!
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