How to sell privatization.

In a word, lie. Media Matters caught the far-right Heritage Foundation cooking the numbers on their "Social Security calculator." You put in your info, and it tells you how much better off you'd be under Fearless Leader's "plan." The calculator was promoted by Washington Times writer Donald Lambro, who has been shown time and again to be a fraud: http://mediamatters.org/archives/search.html?topic=Donald%20Lambro

For a start, Bush has been saying this very week (possibly even today) that he has deliberately avoided putting forth a plan. You know, he's busy educating the public on the wonderful world of regressive taxation. He hasn't proposed anything. All he's done so far is to demand a paradoxical 'fix' that neither adds to the cost nor cuts the benefits. Ahhh, it's good to see that voodoo economics are alive and well.

That's the obvious part. What Media Matters discovered was much more subtle:

". . . the calculator purports to compare scheduled benefits under current law with benefits under a hypothetical privatization plan, but it cuts 26 percent from scheduled benefits, including those for people as old as 54. But if a worker is 54 years old today and retires in 2018 at age 67, he or she would receive all currently promised benefits for 24 years before the cuts that Heritage assumes would occur in 2042."

So... privatization works if you subtract 25% of Social Security benefits. And ostensibly if this wonderful plan were free. Of course, we know that it will cost trillions. Whereas the Social Security system as is uses less than one percent of its annual intake on overhead costs and administration.

Crackpots all.