Posted on 04/11/2005 1:15:20 PM PDT by SmithL
Washington -- Who killed Social Security overhaul?
A: Harry Reid. B: George W. Bush. C: AARP. D: Monica Lewinsky.
Answer: D.
Seven years ago, the first Baby Boomer president traveled the country to warn that his generation's impending retirement -- 76 million people, equal to the populations of California, Texas and Florida combined -- would bankrupt the generations to follow.
"It would be unconscionable if we failed to act," President Bill Clinton said at a forum in 1998, when he made fixing the nation's retirement program a top priority of his second term.
Clinton's efforts then, in light of President Bush's now, induce an extraordinary sense of déjà vu.
Clinton appointed a bipartisan commission, which delivered in 1997 three options to save the giant retirement program. They included a now-familiar list of possible benefit cuts, from changing indexing formulas to raising the retirement age.
One of the options would have allowed workers to divert 5 percentage points of their payroll taxes to personal accounts -- the first such proposal by a government commission.
Clinton started campaigning for changes, without saying what he endorsed. "I don't want to dodge any of that," he said, but "if I advocate a specific plan right now, then all the debate will be about that. The first thing we've got to do is get the American people solidly lined up behind change."
So he traveled the country in 1998, giving speeches, radio addresses, and holding town hall meetings with young workers and retirees.
He warned that it is better to "fix the roof when the sun is shining," and ran through the familiar arithmetic of the declining number of workers supporting every retiree. He urged finding ways to allow poorer workers to build wealth so they could "own a share of our nation's prosperity."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yet another stain on Clinton's legacy. Social Security reform was close, but no cigar. It just wasn't in the Starrs.
Rush read some/all of this today on his radio show...thanks for posting it.
He likes them on the tart side.
Wrong its A) Harry Reid. Clinton was all talk and no do!
Listen, anyone or anything under Lewinsky had a very good chance of dying.
Answer: D – Monica Lewinsky
Naturally, she acted alone.
"It's kind of the Nixon-goes-to-China theory," Stenholm said. "It takes a Democrat to do some of the hard choices in social programs."
Yeah, right! (sarc)
Knowing slick willie as we do can you doubt he'd of fixed it by raising the age for retiring and adding more taxes to SS?
The Bent One's only successes came when he adopted parts of The Contract With America and later took credit for what the congresional Republicans had conceived.
Well, better that private accounts weren't started at the height of the stock market boom. Imagine if the funds had been invested at 2000 prices.
They'd still be worth much more than the assets in the so-called Social Security Trust Fund.
Any plan that Bush signs will also raise the age and no doubt lift the current $90K cap, a tax increase. There will most likely be some means testing and hopefully a change away from wage indexing as well.
We shall see but like someone said above, only an honest democrat could get meaningful SS reform. A Republican will get killed by the media as we see what's happening now.
MoodyBlu
All President Bush has to do is start calling it the Clinton Plan ... and I-gar-own-tee-you bubba, we'd hear no more from the dims.
Looks like somebody was listening to Rush this morning.
Nope! I don't get Rush in my corner of the planet.
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