Sticking It to Congress (American Spectator Article By Freeper)

WASHINGTON -- Despite some of the most atrocious reporting on any national public policy debate in history, public opinion stands strongly in favor of Social Security reform that includes personal retirement accounts. Curiously, the results of a poll released last week that had nothing whatever to do with Social Security may have a bigger effect than any of the others on the current national debate.

According to the Gallup survey, President George W. Bush's overall favorability rating stands at 52%, which is consistent with his numbers over the past four years (save for his post-9/11 bump into the stratosphere). Meanwhile, favorability for Congress rests at an abysmal 37%, its lowest rating since 1999, the year after the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. This data comes as President Bush is locked in the fight of his life on Social Security against obstreperous congressional Democrats and pusillanimous congressional Republicans.

Heretofore, the president has taken an "all options on the table" approach, urging members from both parties to join the dialogue and share their ideas. The approach hasn't gotten President Bush very far. Most Democrats have remained unwilling to join the discussion. And many Republicans have been less than helpful. For example, last week Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called personal retirement accounts "a sideshow."

"I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," President Bush declared after his successful re-election. Now may be the time.

ONE OPTION THE WHITE HOUSE might take is to shame an unpopular Congress into doing what it otherwise demonstrates an unwillingness to do. A Congress with a 37% approval rating has no political capital to compete with a president who cannot run for re-election and therefore has little to lose.

Moreover, Congress is an easy body to ridicule. It is mostly faceless. The few names and faces that do emerge from the crowd often do so because of scandal. Average Americans know little about how it conducts its business. And, as the Gallup poll shows, it enjoys little public enthusiasm.

It is almost inevitable that the president and Congress will come to blows, anyway. The last two years of our last two- term presidents (Reagan and Clinton) were wildly disruptive. It's almost as if the players in Washington feel like time is running out on their window to settle old scores. And so President Reagan was distracted with Iran-Contra. And President Clinton was impeached.

Nonetheless, it would be difficult for President Bush to distance himself from and hammer away at a congressional Republican majority he, more than anyone else, helped to create. Which is why it is so fortuitous for him that Congress struck the first blow. Last week the U.S. Senate past a budget bill that rejected President Bush's call for curbs in Medicaid spending. The move was widely reported as a throwing down of gauntlets by a Congress.

Now it appears that presidential partisans are fighting back. According to Robert Novak, "Analysts at the Republican National Committee (RNC) have sent this warning to the House of Representatives: the party is in danger of losing 25 seats in the 2006 election and, therefore, of losing control of the House for the first time since the 1994 election." Given the fact that in the first two months of the year, Ken Mehlman's RNC has out-raised Howard Dean's DNC by $21 million to $9 million, this RNC memo reads more like a threat than a "heads up," no?

A NEW DEPARTURE FOR THE White House in its Social Security campaign might be to begin attacking Congress as a do-nothing body populated by self-interest career politicians who are, in real time, shirking their responsibilities. President Bush could easily convince Americans that Congress has its priorities out-of-whack. Example? While half of Congress refuses even to admit Social Security faces financial problems, they wasted the nation's time last week obsessing about Jose Canseco's book and steroids in baseball.

One high-level Capitol Hill staffer, whose boss vocally supports personal retirement accounts, agrees. "Most of the members [of Congress] have found the carrot unappetizing," he told me on the condition of anonymity. "The White House should see how they like the stick."

Patrick Hynes is a Republican consultant and a freelance writer. He is the proprietor of the site Anklebitingpundits.com

The president, and/or his supporters, needs to start making the point EVERY day that members of Congress do NOT participate in Soc Sec..Let the American people start to connect the dots for themselves..IOW, if SS is so freaking wonderful, why does Congress put their retirement money somewhere else.. BTW, wasn't one of the points in the Contract with America that Congress would never exempt itself from the laws it passed?..hmmm..

He is currently working for the CATO Institute, where he is in charge of message development and dissemination for Social Security reform.

The SocSecurity message should be simple:

on face value, the government "prints money" - but what it actually prints is dollars - and dollars - or anything else - are useful as money only if they are scarce. At the end of the 1970s we got a whiff of what happens when dollars become plentiful - they become less valuable.

so the government gets its money from taxes. Taxes - even taxes "targeted on 'the rich'," - aren't a free lunch for society. Because as the experience of the end of the 1970s showed, high taxes can "price themselves out of the market" - suppressing the economy and throttling government revenue in the process.
so while any individual can invest by lending money to the government, society as a whole cannot do so on a massive scale. No individual can invest by lending money to himself - and the government can't invest by lending to itself. Yet that is precisely what the bonds - the government obligations - in the "Social Security Trust Fund" purport to represent.

The "Social Security Trust Fund" is not an investment vehicle but a bluff; the numbers entered into it could be raised or lowered at will by the government, and that would have no economic effect whatsoever. The Social Security FICA tax, a.k.a. "the payroll tax," is simply a tax. Most of it goes to fund present retiree's Social Security, and the government spends the rest and still has a current-accounts deficit.

It is never too soon to stop doing something stupid, and allowing the government to make sham "investments" running into the trillions of dollars is downright silly. The only way to stop doing that is either to repeal the FICA tax or to divert its revenue into private (yes, "risky") accounts. You can say all you want about the risk of private investment, but at least there is opportunity there. The "safe" government bond will not help our grandchildren fund our children's Social Security at all. The SSTF is a bluff and nothing more.

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