Molly Ivins: Lynching Social Security

[Dudley_DUright]

In the Texas legislature, they are called "prior-roarities," such a happy coinage. What should come prior?

When the pitter-patter of falling year-end columns comes again, not necessarily next year, but certainly four years from now, I fearlessly forecast a dismal unanimity: that the Bush Administration II suffers from bad and dumb prior-roarities.

<snip>

Let's get this straight. The Republicans do not want to fix Social Security, they want to kill it. Period. They don't want to "partially privatize" Social Security, they want to end it. What they want is a private pension system like the one their pointy-headed heroes at the University of Chicago dreamed up for Chile, the poster child of why we should not do this.

This same rigid, inflexible, impractical the-market-is-always-best ideology is like a form of mania with these folks. As Paul Krugman patiently points out, "Claims that stocks will always yield high, low-risk returns are just bad economics."

In fact, it's more than passingly reminiscent of another rigid, inflexible, politico-economic orthodoxy: communism. And just as capable of robustly ignoring reality.

more...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18336

[izzie]

1. I have saving and the bank took as much as I got.

So much for the stock market keeping your retirement fund. We know who will get it and why they are putting up the ad money.

[papau]

2. Molly Ivins understands-I wish the rest of the media understood and spoke

:-)