In the course of reporting this attack, the Militant has contrasted the essence of the Social Security program--a series of entitlements won and defended by working people in struggle--with its false depiction by capitalist commentators as a pension program, that, walled-off from other government accounts, is threatened with insolvency as the number of retired people increases.

That accounting sleight-of-hand is a key part of the steady propaganda chorus that accompanies the commission's work. Capitalist politicians, economists, and editorial writers join in an effort to dupe working people into believing that the government cannot "afford" to go on paying out benefits at the present level.

"Nobody has any idea how we will manage in a couple of years, when millions of baby boomers start collecting their Social Security checks," wrote Paul Krugman--an economist who has disputed the most alarmist and right-wing versions of this argument--in the September 30 New York Times.

Such voices cite the state of the Social Security accounts (set up as Sarsgard describes.) They claim the accounts will plunge from a surplus of more than 150 billion dollars a year today into deficit, as baby boomers--people born in the decade and a half following World War II--become eligible for their pensions. Benefits have to be cut, and "reforms" have to be instituted, if the scheme is to survive, they say.

Working people have a different framework. They start with the reality of Social Security and how the social wage it represents was won. In decades past, working people demanded that the government make provisions for the retired, the disabled, and the sick, at the same time as they fought to establish limits on the working day, and to improve wages and working conditions. The Social Security Act was a byproduct of the massive struggles that formed the industrial union movement in this country in the mid- to late-1930s. Later, the entitlements listed under the legislation were expanded under the impact of other struggles, especially the civil rights movement and other social ferment of the 1950s and '60s. The capitalist rulers conceded such programs out of fear of these mass movements, in which could be seen the revolutionary potential of the working class.

Today, millions of working people oppose the preparations to undermine Social Security. In defending it, they defend not the particular bookkeeping entries tagged with its name, but what they fought for in the first place: the right to a pension, a disability allowance, benefits to widows and widowers, and other entitlements.

The to and fro over the so-called Social Security "lockbox" shows the duplicitous character of the way Social Security is presented in the capitalist media. The lockbox is a fictional creation of the demagogy of capitalist politicians, and nothing more. The funds marked "Social Security" have long been absorbed into the government's take. Meanwhile, each administration, however reluctantly, pays out the entitlements provided for under Social Security, as it is obliged to do, regardless of the given state of the Social Security accounts.

As Congress and the White House have seized upon the September 11 events and embarked on a stepped-up bipartisan war drive, they have unceremoniously dumped any pretense of a lockbox. "Both parties [have] withdrawn their commitment not to spend any part of the Social Security surplus," noted the New York Times on September 29. "The Social Security lockbox has been cast aside," stated the paper more bluntly on October 1.

As working people continue our historic fight for the establishment of comprehensive cradle-to-grave social security, we need to strip away the fake presentation of Social Security as anything but a a social right that they--the capitalist rulers--resent paying for and that we--working people--must fight to defend.  
 
 
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