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["Don Bowen" <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

The next major goal of the movement conservatives is to get rid of that last
vestige of the Roosevelt era populism, the Social Security Check.  Reagan
tried it with dire predictions and did not get far.  He did trim the edges
with minor tweaks to the inflation numbers and appointed a commission headed
by Alan Greenspan to "solve" the problem.  Greenspan's solution was a huge
tax hike on American wage earners.  Money above current SSI needs were
colleted and put into "special" government bonds.  During Bush I the huge
deficients were starting to worry balanced budget republicans so they came
up with a way to use the SSI funds to mask the true deficient.  These
"special" bonds were not to be reported on the deficient but were reported
on the debt.  Almost half of the $10.5T debt is monies owed to the Social
Security Administration.  That is until this latest grab where payroll tax
monies coming in are no where near half the $700B bailout.

The idea was that in a few years when SSI inputs lagged behind SSI outputs
those bonds would be redeemed.  If as many seem to think, those bonds were
not redeemed it would be a default on US bonds.  One reason they want rid of
SSI is because the tax hikes needed to redeem those bonds will be huge.

I fully expect then to trim around the edges and to continue the attacks
about how it will be useless in a few years but that is all an attempt to
stave off those tax hikes.  If they can convince enough people that SSI is
dead then they will have little problem killing it outright and save those
tax hikes.

Don Bowen  KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html