Is there a problem with giving non-retirees the "option" of investing part of their pay-roll tax into the stock market rather than putting all of this money into the social security trust fund? Yes. First-- it is not retirees that would do this. Retirees are no longer PAYING into social security; instead, retirees are now drawing from that fund. Second, transferring this kind of wealth from a safety net into the Stock Market would also transfer third rail of American politics from our retirees and their safety net, straight onto Wall Street. We are not about to let our elderly starve, so if Wall Street tanked we would bail Wall Street out (as we are doing now, even without this added incentive of rescuing people's social security "private accounts") to protect our elderly regardless of how the problem occurred in the first place. This transfer would effectively make the American
tax-payer now and forever the permanent insurer of Wall Street. Once this was done, it could not be undone-- the costs associated with such a plan would be enormous. Simply calling this an "option" is nonsense-- anyone exercising this "option" would effect everyone else within social security -- indeed, the tax-payer would have to step in to fulfill obligations to our current retirees since some of the money that should be going into our social safety net would no longer be. This is a ridiculous notion and it is an attempt to privatize a program that works. Many Republicans utterly disagree with every bit of this nonsense-- yet, still Republican elected officials push this, and continue to try and mix us all up with semantic nonsense like "investment account" instead of "privatization." Why? I can only speculate-- but I think this goes back to an old, and enduring hatred by some in the GOP of FDR. A hatred, incidentally, that MOST Republicans in this Country do NOT share. That is why everything must be done to confuse the American public about this -- and why this advertisement by Senator Obama is accurate.









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