Editorial: A Social Security bellyflop

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

Six years after President Bush campaigned for president on a plan to fix Social Security, the government's longtime payroll withholding program to augment the incomes of senior citizens is in worse shape than ever.

Trustees for the program released their annual report Monday. The report showed that the Social Security trust fund will run out of money in 2040. Last year their report said the trust fund could hold out until 2041.

What will the report say next year? Will Social Security then be given until sometime in the late 2030s to go bankrupt? We suspect that might be the case, and Bush will bear much of the blame because he squandered his chance to initiate timely reform.

He ignored his campaign pledge during his first term, 2001-2004. Then last year he suddenly remembered it and he and his staff barnstormed the country. His plan would have allowed people to divert 4 percent of their federal withholding into private accounts.

No one could figure out how diverting money amounting to trillions out of the flagging trust fund was going to make it more solvent. Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., ranking member of the Budget Committee, analyzed Bush's plan and said it would bankrupt the Social Security Trust Fund by 2031.

American wage earners, too, did the math and panned the plan so loudly that it is beyond revival. In his State of the Union speech in January, Bush meekly called for a bipartisan study of Social Security, a study that has yet to get started.

If Social Security is not there for workers now in their 20s and 30s, or there in only radically diluted form, they may want to remember Bush's 2000 campaign. Social Security, for him, was more a springboard to the White House than a national issue in need of intelligent new direction.