Bush Declares Ownership Society – Tells Convention He's Ordered Invasion of Social Security Trust Fund
by Greg Palast, The Observer
New York
– Of all the bone-headed, whacky, breathtakingly threatening schemes
George W. Bush [tried] to sell us in his acceptance speech [Thursday
night] is something he and his handlers call, “the Ownership Society.”
Sounds cool, “ownership.” Everyone gets a piece of the action.
Everyone's a winner as the economy zooms. All boats rise.
Sure. Behind the hooray-for-free-enterprise crapola is that dog-eared game-plan to siphon off Social Security revenues to pay for making Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent.
Here's
what Bush has in mind. Social Security is an insurance plan. You
pay in, you get back. But it's hard to get your money back when there's
a war where the Clinton surplus used to be. It's not the war on terror,
or the war in Iraq, though Lord knows those have cost us a bundle with
nothing to show for all the lost loot. I'm talking about the class war
that Dubya and his Dick Cheney have waged on the average working person.
We're
talking an economic Pearl Harbor here. While firemen and policemen went
running into falling buildings, the Bushmen were preparing to relieve
some gazillionaires, such as say, the Bush family, of the need to pay
the taxes that the rest of us pay. Work as a teacher, you pay Social
Security and income taxes on every darn penny. Sit on your yacht and
speculate in the stock market casino and you are off the hook on taxes
on the “capital gains.”
Bill
Clinton proposed putting his big surpluses into a Social Security
“lock-box” for that predictable rainy day. But [Thursday night], Bush
instead propose[d] to give the stock-options class a boost by lopping
off a chunk of Social Security insurance revenue for gambling in the
stock market. He had this same idea in 2000. If he'd had his way on his
inauguration day, the average “owner” in America, investing in the
stock market, would be 7% poorer, many flat busted. Some “security.”
Happy elderly “owners” would be hunting for lunch in the garbage cans
under Madison Square Garden.
(Click here to read the rest of the article.)
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