Six years after winning one of the most contested elections in U.S. history, and 2 years after defeating an animated corpse, George W. Bush has never been less popular within his own country than he is now. Just prior to his annual State of the Union Address in January 2007, the commander-in-chief enjoyed the approval of a whopping 28% of the nation. Indeed, the past few years have treated us all to a heretofore unachieved level of incompetency on the part of the federal government, from the War in Afghanistan to Iraq to Katrina to domestic spying to whichever scandal draws your ire most. As disillusionment sweeps through the Republican base that so ardently maintained Bush's mandate and the president himself limps through his years as a lame duck, the entire country is left to mull over what could have been. I do, anyway.
The traumatic experience of 9/11, coupled with the ongoing failure of the Iraqi occupation, compels my compatriots to focus on the foreign policy failures of this administration. However, Bush is, in certain circles, both enthusiastically and unenthusiastically lauded for his domestic economic policy. Unemployment remains low, and growth remains strong, thanks in large part to a series of tax breaks enacted in 2001 and 2002. Though the income gap has widened and wages have been called "stagnant" by the Wall Street Journal, the sprawling American economy trucks along.
In a way, perhaps it was to be expected that a man so concerned with the health of the private sector would so badly injure the health of his own government's financial standing. Smaller tax revenue was used to pursue pie-in-the-sky foreign policy objectives, and the result has been a doubling of the national debt over the course of Bush's tenure. Lost in the anti-terror rhetoric and the pro-business pandering are the days of reforming social-assistance spending, the bread-and-butter for our sick, poor, and elderly. And no single issue has journeyed downward as far as Social Security reform has, starting as a topic of supreme urgency at the end of the Clinton Years and ending as an utterly peripheral subject to the current power-holders in Washington.
The Clinton Plan for Social Security augured the resuscitation of a system that will prove unworkable in 20 years. According to a speech at Georgetown University by then-President Clinton, Social Security's trust fund - the money taken from our bi-weekly paychecks in order to fund the program - will return deficits, meaning that the government will have to borrow in order to finance the handouts. The picture at the top of this post demonstrates the anticipated budgetary shortfall in the trust fund. In the same speech, Clinton argued:
I think it should be the driving principle of this year's work in the United States Congress -- do not have a tax cut, do not have a spending program that deals with that surplus -- save Social Security first.
Though offering lipservice for Social Security reform, Bush has not made it a central pillar of his long-term economic plan. This, I would argue, is because social-assistance simply isn't the modus operandi for fiscal conservatives. Instead, Bush and like-minded supporters seek to dismantle the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by allowing (inviting?) the imminency of bankruptcy in the Social Security trust fund. By then, personal accounts that drastically cut the level of monetary support will be our only solution, when Bill Clinton's government-led proposal 10 years ago would have saved SS and eliminated the national debt.
More on that later.
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