Truth - Al Franken [83]
The polls bore Lenin out. As Bush’s “60 Stops in 60 Days” Social Security tour wore on, his plan become less and less popular in every age group. After only two weeks on the road, it was becoming clear that things weren’t going according to plan. Only 37 percent of those over sixty-five supported private accounts, even though polling indicated they knew their own benefit checks weren’t in danger. Jonathan Weisman gave an illustrative example in his March 15 Washington Post story, “Skepticism of Bush’s Social Security Plan Is Growing”:
At 69, Gene Wallace knows the White House’s proposal would have no impact on his Social Security check, but if Bush believes that will silence the Republican mayor of Coldwater, Mich., Wallace grumbled, “he’s all wet.”
“I’m a parent as well as a grandparent. Somewhere along the line, they are going to be eligible for retirement assistance,” he said, with all the energy he could muster three weeks after open-heart surgery. “It’s everybody’s concern what happens to this country.”
See? Some Republicans are okay. But let’s get back to Butler and Germanis’s evil Leninist plot. There must be some aspect of it that worked out as planned. Remember: They not only wanted to isolate and weaken the opponents of privatization, they also wanted to “create a focused political coalition.” But who would possibly support messing with a system that had worked so well for so many people for so long?
What we must do is construct a coalition that will gain directly from its implementation. That coalition should not only consist of those who will reap benefits from the IRA-based private system Ferrara has proposed but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.
Ah, the banks. That’s where the money is. That’s who wants this. They’d be perfect for the coalition.
Did this aspect of Butler and Germanis’s plan bear fruit? To answer that question, I’d like to share with you the story of the person in this world who is most opposed to Social Security privatization. Franni Franken is not an analyst at a liberal think tank, nor a member of the AARP. Well, actually, she is. But that’s not the reason she goes ballistic anytime she hears the word “private” in the same paragraph as the words “Social Security.” Franni takes the same attitude toward Social Security that she took to our kids when they were toddlers. Don’t touch. If you touch them, I will destroy you.
See, when Franni Bryson was seventeen months old, her father, Donald, a World War II vet, died in a car accident on his way home from his job at the paper mill. That left her twenty-nine-year-old mother to take care of Franni and her four siblings—Kathy, seven; Carla, five; Neil, three; and Bootsie, three months old. Franni’s mom had a high school education and, as soon as Bootsie started school, got a job working odd hours in the produce department at a nearby supermarket. Her paycheck, a very small veterans’ widows’ benefit, and the survivor benefits from Social Security weren’t always enough to keep the heat on during the Maine winters, or the telephone or the lights for that matter, but they did put food on the table. (Though a terrific cook, my mother-in-law sometimes had to serve fried dough to feed her family.) Neil went into the Coast Guard, and all the girls went to college. If it hadn’t been for Social Security, I never would have met Franni in Boston my freshman year, deflowered her, and gotten her to renounce the Pope.
But I digress.
Bush’s privatization plan had Franni on edge for months, and she read every article about it that she could find. When she read in the Wall Street Journal that, if Bush’s plan passed, “only two or three firms” would wind up managing “the tens of billions of dollars that will pour into private accounts each year,” and that one of those firms was the State Street Corporation, it rang a bell.
Sure enough, Franni dug up the August 1999 issue of the Investment Dealer Digest, an industry journal, which chronicled