RUSH: Tim in Salem, Oregon, back to you, Open Line Friday and the phones. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you very much. When the changes are made in Social Security, what’s gonna be the reaction?
RUSH: Well, what specific changes do you think are inevitable?
CALLER: Well, I think there’s so many that I don’t know.
RUSH: Okay. What leads you to believe there are going to be changes in Social Security?
CALLER: Because they keep talking about it all the time. They were gonna reduce the benefits.
RUSH: Well, when was the last time this was tried?
CALLER: I don’t know that I know, Rush. I know they talked about it a lot.
RUSH: George Bush tried this. It was one of the first things he did in the second term after 2004. The reason I ask is because it died in about nine months because the left just destroyed him. Bush gave up. His whole effort on Social Security was ‘privatization.’ He was gonna privatize a little of it, and according to people looking at it from the back end of it after it failed, ‘That was the wrong way to go about this, because that word ‘security’ in there, Social Security, that means to people, ‘It’s always gonna be there,’ and if you are going to ‘privatize’ it, that opened up quite a door for the critics to just run right through and say, ‘The ‘security’ part here is, for the first time since the program was created, being tampered with because the money is going to go to the stock market.’
”And we all know what happens to the stock market: It goes up and down and sometimes people lose their shirts and are we gonna have people lose their shirts?” It was a great idea, it had to be done, and privatizing a certain percentage of everybody’s retirement is a great idea. The sales effort was insufficient for this. Now, you’re referring here to the fact that Social Security is an entitlement and people are dancing around having to deal with these entitlements at some point, but nobody has really had the guts to do so. One of the things that they’re talking about is raising the retirement age. Another thing is privatizing a certain percentage of the contributions that people make to it every year or what have you. Reducing the benefits for current contributors, not current beneficiaries.
The fastest way to kill any Social Security reform is to tell current recipients, ‘Hey, guess what? The (whatever it is) 700 bucks a month (just to pick a figure), next year it’s gonna be $600.’ Finished. You’re dead. It isn’t gonna happen. The effort is brought to screeching halt. Look at what’s happening in Wisconsin. The short answer to your question, ‘What’s the reaction gonna be?’ is, ‘Pure, 100% childish panic and violence brought to you by the usual suspects on the left, to try to stop it.’ The left does not want any reform that will reduce the size of government, that will reduce the agent of government’s involvement in your life. I mean, it’s gonna be huge. Doing it is gonna require sufficient Republican majorities and a Republican in the White House to do so.