***About 47 million people receive a Social Security check every month. They include retirees, the disabled, survivors of workers who have died, and dependents of beneficiaries.

***Two-thirds of the elderly rely heavily on Social Security. For 20 percent of the elderly, 7 million people, Social Security is all they have. Without Social Security, 48 percent (!) of elderly beneficiaries would have been below the poverty line in 2000.

***Social Security isn’t broken or in crisis. Social Security is currently running a surplus. Only in 2018 or 2020 will it have to start dipping into the Social Security Trust Fund to pay full benefits. It will be able to continue payments until 2042 or 2052—estimates differ—when the Trust Fund will be exhausted. At that point, Social Security—if it has not been weakened—will still be able to pay, out of current payroll taxes, about 75% of the benefits it has promised.

***The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t empty or worthless. The Social Security Trust Fund consists of U. S. Treasury securities which have been earning, and will continue to earn, interest. They are the same kind of U. S. securities which are purchased and held by foreign governments. The government will have to redeem the securities in the Social Security Trust Fund or create a world financial crisis.

***Social Security doesn’t need to be fixed immediately or in haste. Some experts don’t think it needs to be fixed at all. The present “crisis,” and the urgency of fixing it, are inventions of the Bush administration, which doesn’t want to fix Social Security’s distant problems but to dismantle it entirely.

***Social Security was successfully “tweaked” in 1983. By increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age from 65 to 67, Congress adjusted Social Security in 1983, when it was only weeks away from default. Today, the rate of the payroll tax is 12.4 percent, and the retirement age is 65 1/2 years.

***Social Security could easily be fixed again. President Bush’s tax cuts for people with incomes over $500,000 a year could be rolled back. Or the ceiling on income liable to Social Security taxes, which now stands at $90,000, could be raised. Or benefits for the wealthy could be limited. These obvious solutions don’t appeal to President Bush, whose policies favor the rich and who wants to get rid of Social Security.

***The Bush administration wants to privatize Social Security. Privatization will allow workers to put part of their payroll taxes into private or personal retirement accounts which would be invested in stocks and bonds. At retirement, low income workers will have to purchase an annuity to protect them from poverty. Whether they can leave the unused portion of the annuity to their heirs isn’t clear.

***Personal retirement accounts involve cuts in guaranteed benefits and exposure to the risks of the market. Workers who opt for personal retirement accounts will experience a corresponding cut in their guaranteed benefits, and their account will come with no guarantees. It will be subject to the rise and fall of the market. Workers who retire when the market is low may find that payroll taxes diverted into their accounts have earned less than the roughly 3 percent they would have earned through Social Security. Furthermore, the market is not expected to grow much in the foreseeable future.

***Privatization won’t fix Social Security’s possible shortfall, so all guaranteed benefits will have to be cut. Benefits would probably be cut by slowing down their rate of growth. They would be based on prices rather than, as now, on wages, which generally grow faster. So benefits would slowly shrink, and the standard of living of people dependent on Social Security would slowly drop.

***Many, perhaps most, people will get less money, total, under privatization than they do now from Social Security. As mentioned earlier, benefits will be cut--probably by being calculated differently—but personal retirement accounts will in theory make up the difference and even surpass the amount now provided by Social Security. Experts point out, however, that personal accounts are unlikely to make up for benefit cuts, much less exceed Social Security’s roughly 3 percent return, unless the stock market experiences an all-out, uninterrupted boom for 75 years. How likely is this?

***The transition costs involved in privatization will be enormous. These costs are reliably estimated at over $1 trillion for the first 10 years (the administration figure of $754 billion is only for 6 years), $3.5 billion for the second 10 years, and $15 trillion over 40 years. The prospect of borrowing so much money, on top of our record deficit and record trade deficit—plus the looming costs of the Iraq war, the prescription drug benefit, and President Bush’s tax cuts (if made permanent)—is frightful.

***Privatization would ultimately destroy Social Security. With all or a large portion of payroll taxes being diverted into personal retirement accounts, the Social Security Trust Fund would founder.

***Privatization does not reflect American values. The values implicit in personal retirement accounts are those of self-interest alone. Such accounts reflect an ethos of every-person-for-himself-or-herself. Social Security in its present form tells us and others that we are bound to one another and care about each other’s fate.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY ***Support organizations opposing privatization: American Association of Retired Persons (AARP, 601 E St., NW, Washington, DC 20049; 888-687-2277; www.aarp.org) and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (10 G St., NE, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20002; 800-966-1935; www.ncpssm.org). ***Register your opposition to privatization at theWhite House (president@whitehouse.gov). ***Communicate with your representative (for many of us, this is Fred Upton, 202-225-3761; talk2fsu@mail.house.gov) and senators (Carl Levin, 202-224-6221; senator@Levin.senate.gov; and Debbie Stabenow, 202-224-4822; senator@stabenow.senate.gov). ***Sign Debbie Stabenow’s petition to Bush against privatization at her website (http://stabenow.senate.gov/socialsecurity).

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