Save Social Security.

• Position: Comment

Throughout his Presidential campaign, George W. Bush indignantly denied that he intended to privatize Social Security. Whenever John Kerry would level such a charge, the Republicans would squawk about Democratic scare tactics.

But it didn't take Bush long after November 2 to announce that he did, in fact, intend to privatize at least part of Social Security. At his first press conference after the vote, less than forty-eight hours after the polls closed, Bush said that "reforming" Social Security was one of his top priorities.

His friends on Wall Street could not have been happier. Allowing people to invest even a small fraction of their Social Security taxes in the stock market would bring huge profits to investment companies.

And it is these groups--along with recalcitrant Republicans who have waited seventy years to invalidate the New Deal--that have been" behind the privatization effort all along.

As far back as 1996, The Wall Street Journal did a story with the none-too-subtle headline, "Privatizing a Portion of Social Security Could Shower Billions on Mutual Funds." That article noted that this "could be the biggest bonanza in the history of the mutual-fund industry."

These same companies began a massive PR campaign to convince the American public of the need for privatization. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in Mother Jones that same year, reported that "investment companies and the Fortune 500 are funneling millions of dollars in seed money to think tanks, 'grassroots' organizations, and politicians friendly to the ideas of privatization."

These investments would be well worth it if Bush's privatization plan goes through. Wall Street companies stand to gain as much as $75 billion a year, according to Kenneth Worthington, an analyst with CIBC World Markets. He wrote a recent report entitled, "Bush's Plan for Social Security Reform Could Be Electric for Financials."

To execute this tingling money grab, Wall Street investment houses and anti-New Deal Republicans have sparked an outcry about an impending crisis in Social Security, a crisis that demands immediate action. So successful have they been that many pundits and journalists have now adopted this crisis as a given. Tim Russert on Meet the Press prattles on about it as though doomsday were at dawn. Even a recent article in The New York Times by Richard W. Stevenson that was critical of Bush's privatization plan included the Chicken Little line that Social Security is "about to come under intense financial strain."

Do not be deceived.

The crisis is confected. Social Security is not about to go bust. According to a study by the Social Security trustees, the system is solvent until 2042. A General Accounting Office study extends that solvency to the year 2052. In either...