101st Fighting Dems

This is good to see. While Bush is on his privatization tour claiming that the Social Security fund consists of "worthless IOU's," he never gets around to addressing the fact that his proposals not only fail to make Social Security solvent, but wouldinvolve putting a few trillion of dollars into additional "worthless IOU's."

Representative Nancy Pelosi is getting tough-- and other Democrats had better follow suit. Nobody likes Bush's plan, and this issue can be a big win for the party. Here's part of her statement:

"This is the first time that a President of the United States has declared that we, the United States Government, will not put the full faith and credit of the federal government behind the Social Security trust fund. What this President is saying is, we have two kinds of debt. Let's see how we get the debt first. It is in deficit spending, so we have to go borrow in order to keep the government going.

So where does he borrow? He borrows from the Chinese. He borrows from the Japanese. He borrows from the trust fund. And what he is saying now to the American worker: "We will honor our debt to the Chinese and the Japanese, but we are treating you differently. We are not honoring our debt to you." These are funds that workers and their employers put in the account to have a trust fund to cover any shortfall that would be there to cover their retirement benefits. And this President is openly declaring that he has no intention of paying the trust fund back what he has taken from it."