Are the democrats really responsible for the Social Security to be used in ways other than as pensions?

[Der Lange]

ANOTHER fiction spread by those who want to destroy Social Security by "privatizing" it. If anything, the greatest danger to Social Security is the Republican right and George W. Bush.

First of all, Social Security is not in collapse and the word "downfall" is entirely inaccurate. It is well over 30 years in the future before any basic differences in income and payments will reach a negative balance, and much longer after that before the Trust Fund would be in trouble.

The Social Security Trust Fund has been used to falsify reports of government debt for decades. As the first poster partially got right, a Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson, borrowed from the fund to finance his ill-founded "guns and butter" program for both war and expanded welfare programs (yet ANOTHER reason protests against the Vietnam War were RIGHT).

However, that generated a debt to Social Security owed by the Federal Government's general fund. It is still outstanding - something that critics of the program today attempt to conveniently ignore.

This practice was followed enthusiastically by Nixon. Ford also engaged in it but to a very minimal extent. Carter took practically nothing from the fund.

But the BIG boodler of all time, before George W. Bush, was Ronald Reagan. It was under his Administration that the smoke-and-mirrors game was perfected to mask the true condition of the country's finances, by counting the trust fund as part of the national bank account. This, of course, was a deception. On top of that, to fund his outrageous (until now, anyhow) defecit spending, Reagan also looted the fund. Part of the money ironically went to pay off seniors ruined by the scandalous savings and loan collapses that followed Reagan's deregulation of financial institutions and his lax enforcement of the remaining laws governing those institutions.

The elder Bush might have made more raids on the fund but fortunately lost his re-election bid.

Clinton was no angel in this matter either. A chunk of the "surplus" he claimed in his Administration really belonged to Social Security. But he did manage to make an attempt to deal with the looming "unfunded liability" resulting from government borrowing from the fund, ill-advised Social Security contributions tax cuts, and changing demographics.

Geroge W. Bush has simply been making a meal of that money, all the while crying crocodile tears over the "need to reform" Social Security. And he too is padding his reports on government finances by improperly counting money in the trust fund.

The City of New York decades ago was bankrupted by pension fund liabilities the city never even bothered to prepare to pay. The City of Los Angeles several years later came close to the same problem.

Private companies with big pension programs have turned out to be fakes, for the most part - either through mal-administration of the funds, or consequent to mergers and acquisitions, many major pension plans have become costly failures damaging the lives of the people who earned their right to pensions. It turns out that Regan pulled a cute trick with some of his measures encouraging mergers and acquisitions - pension funds after an acquisition were no longer protected from use. They were considered a disposable cash asset of the acquiring company. Well, THAT money sure wasn't allowed to sit around waiting for some useless retirees to get!

Whether private pension programs, or Social Security, the "reforms" needed are to protect the funds from the grasping greed of politicians and corproate executives. The LAST place Social Security funds should be spent is in the Wild West of the stock market.

If you worry about Social Security, exact a pledge from the person running for Congress in your district to begin a structured, steady program to repay all the "government loans" taken out of the Trust Fund and keep Social Security out of the hands of the public and private boodlers!