I think privatization is a red herring.

Bush picked the one thing we would have to fight for, knowing that he couldn't win. But while we put all our attention in that, he slips tort reform, bankruptcy, and ANWR through us like a knife in the ribs.

The sad thing is, we have had no choice but to follow Bush's lead, so far. I only hope that he has slightly miscalculated, and social security and the other things allow us to take back at least one house in 2006, and the presidency in 2008.

On edit: I know that social security as a whole must be defended. I was using privatization as shorthand for "Bush's entire fucked up plan"

They think they have a shot at doing it, now. That's why he's trying to convince people to give it up to Wall Street. It being a diversion, from other similarly unpopular issues that ALSO harm regular Americans, is just a side effect. The GOP Social Security destruction campaign hasn't ended yet and will never end as long as they are in the majority.

As arrogant as they are, Karl Rove still wants to build a permanent majority. You don't take on an issue of this magnitude until you have increased the margin of victory and held it for a few elections.

Remember, this isn't the small government Republicans anymore. These are the "Hey, government is pretty neat if you own it" Republicans.

House and Senate is a good time to privatize Social Security.

how hard will it be to put it back together? I'm guessing it will be real hard, and that is what they are counting on.

The real deal is shifting the cola adjustment from wage based to CPI based, which would cut benefits from 30-40% of wages to more like 11% of wages. A huge savings for the wealthy who will not have to give up their fine tax cuts in order to pay off the pension t-bills for all those damn boomers.

the whole destruction plan that has to be defended against.

"A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:


Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html

What I mean by 'red herring' here is that they put up piratization knowing it is going to go down in flames because it is economically unviable. At the same time they keep demanding that the Democrats come up with a 'reform plan' (while they refuse to do this themselves) for fixing the 'crisis' which really isn't a social security crisis per se, SS is doing fine thanks, it is a government funding crisis created by the confluence of the unsustainable bush billionaire tax cuts and the demand for repayment of the ss t-bills as boomers start to retire.

So they pretend that their focus (the red herring) is piratization, but really what they want is a way to cut benefits so they can afford their fine tax cuts for billionaires. One sneaky way to do that is to adjust the cola - the difference between CPI adjustment and Wage Inflation adjustment is just confusing enough to give them a backdoor route. The trick is to get the Dems to propose it, or at least propose something, and then move from there.

I certainly did not mean that we should accept piratization: it is stupid and massively unaffordable. The point is that they know this too and they are not stupid.

for this can be found in the Democrats' realizing this and acting with the correct defense, reminding people that SS is not broken and does not need to be fixed.

all of them are

Look here! I enact there. Look there! I enact here.

Wherever the smoke is in this case, the fire is elsewhere. But there's always a fire.

herring: all issues are on the table

I think it was a smokescreen-there was a small chance of winning some support, but they ran with the SS thing and all this other crap gets passed