April 30, 2005 - The parameters of the President’s plan to “reform” Social Security are out on the table. It features diverting one third of Social Security revenues to the private sector capitol market; raising the age at which retirees are eligible for benefits; indexing benefits to wages rather than the cost of living; and means testing benefits. Under the President’s plan the benefits paid to “poor” recipients would not be reduced or indeed might grow while middle class retirees would see their checks shrink and affluent retirees would forego almost all of their present benefits. There is not one word in the President’s package that would include what his father used to call “revenue enhancement”. Bush the Elder had to call a spade a shovel because he had us read his lips.

Put all together the President’s plan for Social Security is to reform it out of existence, at least as we know it. He does it by slicing off one third of the revenue as a snack for Wall Street and converting what is left into a soup kitchen. A program that was conceived as a system to insure wage earners the opportunity to end their lives without falling into abject poverty would be converted into a means tested welfare program – a program that will soon be the target of conservative rhetoric just as surely as a generation ago they railed against apocryphal Welfare Queens who made a business of bearing children. The President’s “reform” program is the fruition of Newt Gingrich’s promise to starve the savage beast of Social Security by cutting off its funds. Reform, as the President’s men define it, is the central feature of the Bush agenda but they use the word as a synonym for destruction by increments.

Take the administrations answer to the looming crisis in health care financing. The slogan is simple and straight forward. Cut spending – but without cost control – by reforming the system. The President’s solution is to replace both government financed single payer system and employer sponsored health care plans with what he calls medical sayings accounts. Government subsidy of that program would be limited to sheltering the accounts from income taxes. The Medicare – Medicaid system as we know it would disappear as it is reformed out of existence.

Then there is the administrations approach to the UN. They are trying to sell John Bolton as the right man to “reform” the international organization. For the neo-cons any international body that refuses to rubber stamp American adventurism is in dire need of Bush style reform and John Bolton is just the man to reform it. They have not figured out a way to privatize the UN to the extent that they have privatized the business of making war. Rest assured that they are thinking hard to find a way. Reform is such hard work.