"The 1994 elections had given a powerful boost to the Republican Right and scepticism about all social programmes. The President repeatedly adjusted to anti-welfare initiatives emanating from this quarter, securing re-election in 1996 by first tempting his opponents to overplay their hand and then accepting much of their programme. But Clinton was eventually to decide that it would be better -- perhaps even smarter -- to take a different approach to Social Security."
What this meant specifically was that Clinton "chose his State of the Union message in 1998 to highlight the fate of the retirement system and to urge the need to use the improvement in public finances to 'Save Social Security First.' In his 1999 State of the Union address he was more specific, urging that 62 per cent of the budget surplus . . . should be devoted to Social Security over the next fifteen years." At this point Clinton also proposed that $700 billion of the new trust fund should be invested in the stock market to obtain a higher rate of return -- that is, a portion of the fund would have been invested socially in the stock market, a proposal VERY different from the "individual retirement accounts" privatization proposal that would have allowed individuals to do so. In fact, this portion of Clinton's proposals made the right go totally apeshit about creeping socialism, leading Clinton to painstakingly explain that there would be no "political interference" in the affairs of companies where the trust fund held shares.
While these proposals eventually did not pan out, Blackburn notes that "Clinton's repeated attention to Social Security gave it a higher profile than at any time since the crisis of the early 1980s. He did not propose more generous terms for the old age pension and related benefits but he did insist that those benefits should be honoured." In part because he took the stance that he did, the Republican drive towards privatization was at least temporarily halted.
None of this means that Clinton wasn't a pig; it's simply an illustration of the impact of the differing constituencies that support the Democrats as opposed to the Republicans. In HIS State of the Union address Bush used the occasion to bring up "individual retirement accounts" again. To argue that the fate of Social Security is not at stake in the actual outcome of the coming election -- or to argue counterfactually, as Yoshie did, that it would actually be more dangerous with Kerry than with Bush -- is irresponsible and untrue.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!