Liberal Talk Radio

The Carpetbagger reports that, against all odds, House Republicans are planning on bringing add-on private retirement accounts to a floor vote next session. Classic move, of course: use your weakness as a strength. Polls consistently show the Prez’s approval on Social Security hovering in the 30s.

But this particular move is bizarre for reasons that go beyond the usual Rovian jujitsu. Apparently the accounts, now euphemistically called “grow accounts,” are going to be financed with the Social Security trust fund. This is the same trust fund that the President himself claimed DIDN’T EXIST just four months ago. To hammer the point home, he even went so far as to take a dramatic trip to the Bureau of Public Debt in West Virginia to prove the point:

I have just come from the Bureau of Public Debt. I want to thank Van Zeck, Keith Rake, and Susan Chapman. Susan was the tour guide there at the Bureau of Public Debt. I went there because I’m trying to make a point about the Social Security trust. You see, a lot of people in America think there’s a trust, in this sense — that we take your money through payroll taxes and then we hold it for you, and then when you retire, we give it back to you. But that’s not the way it works.

There is no “trust fund,” just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay — will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs.

That’s right. There is no trust fund, sayeth the President. All that money from the surplus? Doesn’t exist. Except if the House GOP needs it. in that case, we’ll make sure we can come up with it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if and when this comes up for Bush to sign. Will he remind Hastert and DeLay about all those useless pieces of paper he saw in West Virginia?

P.S. (for the sake of intellectual honesty): I realize that there’s a slight difference between the surplus (extra money that SS is taking in between now and 2016) and the trust fund (the total accumulation of said surpluses). The house GOP wants to use the surplus, not the trust fund, to fund these “grow accounts.” Still, the plan doesn’t pas the straight-face test: we’re not going to have any more surpluses in 10 years’ time. Which means these accounts are going to lose their funding source at the exact moment that Social Security becomes insolvent. That’s just crazy. It’s like putting on a band-aid and then taking it off right before you actually cut yourself. Thanks, guys!