George W. Bush Regrets His Failure To Accomplish Even MORE Damage.
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| Here’s how I looked when I was being the decider. |
They Really Will Say Anything. In Chicago on Thursday, former President George W. Bush was touting the November 9th publication of his his book, Decision Points. In a moment of accidental truth telling, he revealed that his “greatest failure” as president was his inability to “reform Social Security” (code for privatizing it and handing retirement savings to Wall Street). At Huff Po’s website, the story (first reported by the Chicago Tribune) has garnered 13,425 comments in its first 12 hours.
No surprise. Bush, you’ll recall, wanted to privatize the Social Security program. That’s the highly successful primary safety net for older Americans of retirement age – yes the one having “security” in its title. Many believed, and still believe, that privatizing the program would transform it into a gamble untethered to anything consistently secure, i.e. the stock market.
Tellingly, by picking Social Security, Bush dodges greater regret for the morass of lies and distortions that led to our invasion of Iraq, and its mismanaged and corrupt occupation. He apparently doesn’t consider the bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina as a candidate for “greatest regret.” The scandalous way in which the Justice Department was converted into a political campaign organization? Nope. Nor was the trashing of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to subvert the voting process. Greatest regret? Not for a financial cataclysm caused in largest part by Bush administration indifference to oversight. All of these, and more, it seems, did not strike Bush as candidates for “greatest regret.” Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the competition for the title.
It Gets Worse. The record of the financial success of the stock market is chequered. One may predict – without partisanship – that some future retirees would, indeed, make out fairly well; however, if the past is prologue, and economic and market performance cyclical, more future social “security” recipients would suffer than those who would flourish. People do not fully understand that equity prices can stay depressed, even yield negative returns, for long time periods. The risks are many. About the risk, a 1999 Brookings Report concluded what – in light of Wall Street’s recent and continuing shenanigans – is even more accurate today:
The risk that asset prices will decline around the time workers begin to retire; The risk that annuities will be expensive to buy when the worker must convert his retirement nest egg into a level annuity; And the risk that price inflation during the worker’s retirement will seriously erode the value of his annuity. The existence of these kinds of risk means that there is a continuing and crucial role for traditional Social Security, even in the case of workers who earn middle-class wages throughout their careers.
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| SOCIAL INSECURITY: Yes, some win; but far more lose, and often disastrously. Do you want to tie your retirement income to a gamble on whether you’ll be above or below the break even line when you retire and have to then convert the principal to an annuity? |
After all the havoc he perpetrated in so many areas domestic and international, he chose as his greatest regret something that, if he had succeeded, would have caused substantially more suffering for many future retirees.
So, in effect, Bush chose as his greatest regret something other than the damage he actually accomplished. In his failure to “reform/privatize” Social Security, he regretted not having perpetrated additional damage.
