Clinton's absurd plan to commit future surpluses to the trust fund was unhelpful, because it was economically incoherent and contributed to popular misunderstanding of how the system worked. But it is unfair to say he proposed privatization. He suggested private accounts for low income workers without employer funded 401(k)s, which would receive federal matching funds. These would have been a supplement to SS. Ellen
I didn't say that Bill Clinton proposed privatization. However, his administration appointed a series of commissions that offered only unattractive policy options -- including "diverting a portion of the Social Security payroll tax into mandatory private retirement accounts," not just "add-on" accounts -- on the political agenda (while excluding sensible ones from it): e.g.,
<blockquote>NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES FISCAL POLICY AND SOCIAL SECURITY POLICY DURING THE 1990s Douglas W. Elmendorf Jeffrey B. Liebman David W. Wilcox Working Paper 8488 http://www.nber.org/papers/w8488 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 September 2001
. . . In order to secure Senator [Bob] Kerrey's decisive vote for the 1993 budget agreement, President Clinton agreed to create a commission on entitlement reform and appoint the Senator as chairman. The commission set for itself the goal of developing a package of revenue and spending measures that would bring Social Security into long-run balance and hold the unified budget deficit at its 1995 level relative to GDP in the long run. In December 1994, the commission issued a staff report summarizing entitlement and tax reform options. The Social Security options included raising the age of eligibility for full benefits, reducing cost-of-living adjustments and spouses' benefits, subjecting more benefits to taxation, and diverting a portion of the Social Security payroll tax into mandatory private retirement accounts. Not all of these options would have been required to bring the system into balance, but they are representative of the approaches that were generally under consideration at the time.</blockquote>
That's how they move politics to the right -- by moving the terms of the debate to the right -- whether or not they adopt the most anti-working class option in the end (they seldom do). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
