The recent Bush plan to allow private retirement accounts has not been well received. You might think that the debate is over, but it isn’t. A provisions to start up the private accounts program was quietly included in the President’s budget for 2007.

Think about what is being proposed on a grand scale. With private accounts, the premise is that citizens can do better at investing than the government. In all but the most rare individual circumstances that is absurd, but, arguments about your individual merit as an investor are not relevant. If you are that great an investor, Social Security taxes and Social Security benefits are not going to be of consequence to you. Even if you are a great investor, Social Security is your ultimate diversification, being based on the entire economy. It depends only on whether the government and Social Security survive.

What is important is what the premise implies. It implies that Social Security is irrelevant, or more, that people would be better off without it. Regardless of whether you believe that or not, it might be useful for you to think about where the motive to make that assertion comes from. Did it come from people that like the Social Security system? Obviously not.

Who has an interest in putting and end to Social Security? Those who opposed the creation of Social Security in the first place:

“The promise of secure retirements is a "hoax." Taxes paid by workers are "wasted" by the government rather than invested prudently. And "the so-called reserve fund ... is no reserve at all" because it contains nothing but government IOUs.

President Bush? No, Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon and his party's platform in 1936.”

Republicans hate a lot of things, but by far, the thing they hate the most is socialism. That is because they fear it the most. Social Security is not strictly socialism. Socialism means state or collective control of the means of production. To the extent that SSA taxes are partially paid by employers, Social Security does have some impact on the means of production. However if you think about it, Social Security is a tax on employees, not employers. The part paid by employers is simply window dressing to make employees feel better, that the employer is picking up some of the tab. They aren’t really, SSA is just part of the employees total compensation.

I suppose in the mostly dark recesses of the Republican mind, if Social Security were abolished, they think that they would be able to cut 7% from their payroll. That is infantile. While nominally payroll seems to go up when SSA taxes are raised, as in 1982, payrolls are adjusted to market levels in short order. In other words, Social Security has cost business little or nothing in the long run. It is a tax on workers as opposed to an income tax.

The main reason Social Security is the preeminent conservative angst is that income taxes are ultimately going to be required to actually pay part of Social Security benefits starting in about 2015. This is because the Social Security Trust Fund is held in government bonds, which must be redeemed to pay benefits.

If you examine the chicanery centered on the SSA taxes for the last twenty five years, you find some interesting facts. When it was instituted, Social Security operated by collecting about what it needed to meet current benefit payments. What came in was paid out. In 1982, that all changed. Greenspan and Holton proposed that SSA taxes be accelerated to save up for the pending retirement of the baby boomers. It must have seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

The Greenspan plan sunk accelerated collections of SSA tax into government bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund. The result was essentially force feeding of the government coffers. Government grew and income taxes went down financed by a long term debt obligation whose repayment horizon lay in the distant future.

Under Clinton, the force feeding of SSA collections into government began to be referred to as the Social Security Surplus. Clinton used it to pay down other national debt, rightly assessing that in order for the debt to the Trust Fund to be repaid, we would need a solvent government. Paying down the extra-Social Security debt and balancing the budget seemed to assure that the government’s indebtedness to the Greenspan plan could be serviced.

No wonder they called Greenspan the “Maestro”. Did he or did he not foresee what the results have been, that increasing taxes were just being deferred until later? Did he foresee that the debt owed to the Social Security Trust Fund would be placed at risk by future politics? I expect he did. I expect that he foresaw that given the apparent surplus created by the SSA tax that politicians would not be able to resist lowering income taxes. It seems to have been a gamble that the political environment might change and that it would pay off for the wealthy. It has, and we are facing the question of whether we will be able to pay back the money lent to government by the Social Security Trust Fund.

So no matter that the SSA taxes have been spent on the operation of government, allowing lower income taxes in the past, the reality of the debt obligations of government to Social Security is coming home to roost. Republicans just simply do not want to honor the pay back the money that allowed them to avoid higher taxation in the past.

Mr. Greenspan also played a not so amusing game with Social Security Cost Of Living Adjustments (COLA). In introducing measures to reduce the reported CPI, he engineered a compounding reduction in the benefits paid to current recipients. COLA is based on the CPI and if the CPI is cooked, which it has been, to show less inflation, Social Security pays out less. By some estimates, Social Security payments should be 40% higher than the are now. That’s not chump change.

Now Mr. Bush has come along and thrown the country into staggering debt and continues to operate government at a deficit. Why, if Clinton “understood” the problem, does Bush not? Well Bush does understand the problem but he has a different agenda. He does not intend to honor the government’s obligation to the Social Security Trust Fund, or at best, intends to use the baby boomer bubble to argue that the system is flawed and should be permanently scraped. Scrapped in favor of private accounts, or even better, nothing.

So if Mr. Greenspan has concocted the current state of the Social Security system you have to wonder what his motivation was. If Mr. Bush is trying to destroy it due to insolvency, you also have to wonder why. And we are back to the point that Republicans hate Social Security. They also hate Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Public Schools and just about any social spending you can think of. Republicans like money. Democrats like money too but seem to be more able to part with some of it from time to time.

Essentially, Social Security is the symbol to Republicans that they are losing the class war. The symbol used to be unions, but the tables have turned on that. Republicans take class warfare very seriously because class warfare is about money. So while Social Security does not really have any impact on payroll or the bottom line, they view it with suspicion because it feels like socialism. And, in the not too distant future, the tax cuts that they have been enjoying are going to stop in order to pay back the Trust Fund.

Only God and the Republican National Committee know how far the Republicans will go in rolling back the social programs born in the Progressive Era. If you like the social programs of our government, you had better be preparing for a fight.

To be continued...How can Social Security be saved?