President Bush has stepped up his assault on Social Security, announcing clearly in his State of the Union address that Social Security reform is his number one priority, and urging Congress to move quickly to overhaul the nation’s most successful social program to create individually-managed private investment accounts.

But his plan is running into some difficulties within his own party. According to a Jan. 25 New York Times article, Republican senators voiced their concern to the President that “the drive to change the Social Security system was faltering because the public was not convinced that a fundamental overhaul was necessary.” Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon reportedly told President Bush that the key to making the change is for him to use his bully pulpit “to calm the seniors and win the youth.”

Social Security was created in 1935 to ensure “the security of the home, the security of livelihood,” by providing a modest income to help support working families when they retire, become disabled or when the wage earner dies. Today, more than 46 million people depend on their Social Security checks to survive. For nearly two-thirds of older Americans, Social Security provides 50 percent or more of their income, and 31 percent of retirees have little or no other source of income.

For as long as Social Security has been in existence, conservative Republican presidents, backed by business groups, have tried to dismantle the program. Bush first proposed privatizing Social Security in 2001, shortly after taking office. Stiff opposition, however, including Democrats, organized labor and many advocacy and grassroots organizations, helped relegate the issue to the back burner.

“The Sept. 11 event and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq helped blow Social Security off the table during Bush’s first term,” said Local 237 President Carl Haynes. “But we knew if he got four more years in office it would be only a matter of time before Social Security reform made it back on the agenda because he had made it a re-election campaign promise. The fight this time around will be a lot tougher as the President has now made Social Security reform a top priority on his agenda.”

At a recent forum on the issue, Bush warned that Social Security is in grave danger. “The Social Security system is an account where money goes out to pay for retirees and is put in the system by people who are working,” he said. “And that has changed. More and more retirees have taken out money relative to the number of people putting money in…It means that you’re either going to have to raise the [payroll tax] of people, or reduce the benefits. And the longer you wait the more severe the pain is going to be to fulfill the promise for a younger generation of workers coming up.”

If the administration insists that Social Security is in a crisis, many economists do not. Robert Reich, secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration and a noted Harvard economist, is one. “You can sum up Social Security privatization in four words: a really dumb idea,” he wrote in a recent article in the magazine The American Prospect.

“Start with the irrefutable fact that Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system,” Reich wrote. “The payroll taxes of today’s workers go to today’s retirees. And when today’s workers retire, they’ll be supported by the next generation’s payment into Social Security. In other words, Social Security is a compact between generations, based on trust. I pay into Social Security to support my parents’ generation in their retirement because I trust that my children’s generation will pay into Social Security to support my generation in our retirement. If their Social Security payments are diverted into their own private accounts, their money won’t be there for my generation’s retirement. The compact will be broken.”

Lee Price, research director for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said, “The administration’s proposal to divert funds from Social Security to private retirement savings accounts will, over time, leave retirees with significant less guaranteed and total monthly income than if we pursued a strategy of fully-funding benefits as provided under current law.

“By 2075, the administration’s proposal would reduce retirement income for a medium-income, one-earner couple by 23 percent (according to the projections by the president’s commission on Social Security) and by 42 percent (according to Goldman Sachs), as compared to the income level that they would be provided by fully-funding Social Security.”

“Currently, Social Security is running a hefty surplus; the payroll tax brings in more dollars than what goes out in benefits,” according to financial journalist Roger Lowenstein in a recent New York Times magazine article.

“By law, Social Security invests that surplus in Treasury securities, which it deposits into a reserve known as a trust fund, which now holds more than one-and-a-half-trillion dollars. But, by 2018, as baby boomers retire en masse, the system will go into deficit. At that point, in order to pay benefits, it will begin to draw on the assets in the trust fund.” All the system needs, according to Lowenstein, citing the annual report of the Social Security trustees, actuaries and economists who study the Social Security system, is “a small adjustment of the sort that Congress has approved in the past” to resolve the potential shortfall.

The motivation for Bush “is an ideological one,” said New York Times reporter Richard W. Stevenson. It’s an “opportunity for Republicans to remake a system that has long been seen as a liberal-democrat social welfare system.” The conservatives, he added, would prefer a free-market system where individuals fend for themselves.

Robert Reich, among others, suggests it’s more than that. “The federal budget deficit, already over $400 billion this year, is projected to be more than $5 trillion over the next 10 years,” Reich says. “To make matters worse, my generation of boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, is huge. It’s so big, in fact, that our payments into Social Security have been more than enough to pay the retirements of my parents’ generation.

“But instead of investing the surplus, the federal government has been using the extra funds to pay for the war in Iraq and everything else the government’s doing. Remember the Social Security lock box?” Reich asks. “I hate to break it to you this way, but the lock box has been raided. This means we’re doubly dependent on the next generation’s Social Security payments. If those payments are diverted into private accounts, 76 million boomers are in deep doodoo.”

Labor unions in every state are revving up for a fierce battle against privatizing Social Security. Local 237 members who care about the existence of Social Security for their family now and in the future must get involved.

“The stock market is like a wild ride on a roller coaster,” said Carl Haynes. "Private accounts are risky whether or not you know anything about investment. The average American worker, many of whom earn a miserly salary anyway, cannot afford to take that kind of risk with their money and their future. We’re paying into Social Security and the federal government has been investing our money in guaranteed government securities. The program has worked all these years. We cannot allow the Bush Administration to jeopardize our future and tamper with Social Security.”