Social Security Murkiness
As I read and listen to people talk about the current administration's steamrolling push to privatize — rather, "personalize" social security, the continuing surprise (similar to the surprise that so much truth about the president can be exposed and people will still vote for him) for me is that so many people seem so accepting of all the manipulative propaganda. How can this be, I wonder.
I imagine that there is at least this contributing factor that leads to misinterpretation of privatizing proposals: the public has always misunderstood how social security worked.
Since the beginning of the program, many, many people have mistakenly thought of social security as a savings account: one puts money into one's account, then draws it out after retirement. For whatever reasons, it seems that our government never tried too hard to clarify this misconception.
Well, there you go: if it's just an individual's "savings account for retirement", why shouldn't that individual be allowed to put the money where it will earn a higher rate of return? Doesn't the individual know better than the big ol' government?
With this misconception in mind, there is no credible reason why moving one's "savings account for retirement" to a different bank, in effect, should have any detrimental effect on the program. If they are just "savings accounts" why not move them to better banks?
The point, of course, is that they are not in any sense "savings accounts". One does not "put money in" in order to take it out later; one puts money in to distribute it to current retirees. There is no "savings account". And so it is that allowing people to "put their own money" into "personal accounts" will divert a huge amount of money away from current benefits payouts, resulting in the equally huge price tag for "personalizing".
This certainly is a black mark against privatizing, but there are many reasons why I don't like it. Mostly I object because the lure of the stock market has the same smell as the lure of the casino: if some win big (earnings well ahead of general economic growth), it's because many, many people lose small. Played for captial gains, it's a pyramid scheme. The only people guaranteed not to lose are the ones who take a commission on each transaction: these are the ones offering up the large amounts of money for propaganda to "educate" the public about the benefits of "personalizing".