Sunday, November 14, 2004

Social Security

Admittedly, I can't make much sense of financial wheedling. I barely have a grasp of tipping and interest. With that caveat....

Reality doesn’t care if Bush proclaims that investing Social Security funds in the stock market will be good for individual workers — reality will go ahead and crash the stock market on its own schedule, not on Bush’s. In Bush’s first term, he started out insisting on privatizing Social Security, but when the stock market crashed, he shut up about it, until recently.

Conservative pundits like to intone about how good the stock market is over the long term. But what if you just happen to retire during a stock market slump? Where is the guarantee of a decent retirement income? That guarantee is what reactionaries want to do away with, and workers will suffer for it. They keep silent about how much money Wall Street and the stockbrokers are going to make off of the infusion of money, charging fees every time a stock is bought or sold. Where do their fees come from? From the private retirement accounts, cutting the amount that seniors will get, even when the stock market is going up.

Reality bites, especially when you try and ignore it.
  People's Weekly article

Having been duly initiated into rabid nationalistic defense dogma by my niece, I recognize that many people are going to jump down the throat of that article because it's written by a Communist. Screw the message, we decide its merits on the identity of the messenger.

Of course, I myself have become shamefully accustomed to doing just that very thing when the Idiot in the White House opens his piehole. Mea culpa. But, what I think I can say here with confidence is that Bush's God will have a lot of work to do to help most of us Americans figure out how to maneuver our meager earnings into an always winning (just in case the market crashes when we're needing to collect) stock portfolio for our retirement security. Something tells me there are going to be some big losers. But I guess we can always press them into military service.

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