No. Where did you get that?
You can't hang it all on GWB.
He's perpetuating the scam. He's continuing the lie that you can "fix" a Ponzi/pyramid scheme. They collapse. That's what scams do.
Bush desperately wants to keep it propped up long enough for the next politician to deal with, instead of being honest with the people who are being ripped off by the politicians.
His problem is that we know we're being ripped off by the politicians. And he's still blathering about it.
Well, to begin with, I'm with you on just bagging the whole system outright. In a perfect world, it could happen. BUT... The world ain't perfect and we've got scads of fearful and gullible citizens out there who'll catch the talking heads at six o'clock and dutifully gulp all it down hook, line and sinker.
GWB's changes are nowhere near as radical as what you and I would advocate, and he's bogging down because of the difficulty in educating the general populace. Even without the MSM and the Dems, he'd have an uphill fight getting folks to understand what his proposal would mean to them, much less getting them on board as supporters.
Fact is, as you well know, most folks don't know where to get a decent Executive Summary of the President's plan and less than half of them would read it even if they had it given to them for free.
So, as much as we dislike it, we're along for the ride and I think we'll profit more from taking what we can get from a President willing to tackle the issue, than we would from holding out for the arrival of a perfect world where we can dsimantle the system altogether. Think of it as an incremental approach to the problem that, if it brings good results, will prove the naysayers wrong and pave the way for a future shift of the system toward something wholly privately controlled.
Just think, if we can get the whole thing transformed into a privately controlled account over the next 20-30 years, we could even get the Democrats to be the ones to vote to abolish it. Wouldn't THAT be ironic?
Oh, and about the 80k; it was just the way you phrased what you wrote.