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Shock Therapy (Part 1)
by Hannah B.
 As all good torturers know, fear and uncertainty can be wonderfully motivating. In Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine, she explains how this simple principle has been used by international financial institutions to push through neo-liberal economic policy around the world.
In the wake of crises and disasters, the boys from the IMF and the World Bank would show up, loans in hand, preaching the gospel of privatization and austerity.
The natives, their better judgment clouded by fear and confusion — or bribes, when needed — would generally submit. It was called “shock therapy.”
Klein has, however, been at some pains to deny any deliberate engineering of crisis by the neo-liberal shock cadres. And though I’m generally enamored with her thesis, here we part ways.
To my mind, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that deliberate engineering is sometimes precisely what’s going on. Case in point, right here at home: Social Security.
A
recent headline from my local paper: “Social Security 13.6 Trillion
Short.” Big, scary number, but you’ll search the article in vain for
any contextual detail. Just how much is 13.6 trillion? And when will
this shortfall occur? Next week? Next year? Sometime in infinity?
They don’t say. Just the scary number. The lack of context, boys and girls, is a clue you’re being played.
The correct answer is: “Sometime in infinity”.1
It’s
the Bush Administration making its annual noises about the Social
Security “crisis.” Alan Greenspan has been out hyping the same message.
On Democracy Now, for example, he pronounced that “There is no
alternative” to increased private funding of retirement.2
But
wait a minute. Alan Greenspan? I dimly remember him as the guy who
“saved” Social Security, back in the reign of St. Ronnie Reagan.
Greenspan chaired Reagan’s National Commission on Social Security
Reform, for heaven’s sake, and made the recommendations that became
the Social Security Amendments of 1983. A bipartisan Congress passed
them, and Reagan signed them into law. St. Ron said at the time:
“This
bill demonstrates for all time our nation’s ironclad commitment to
Social Security. It assures the elderly that America will always keep
the promises made in troubled times a half a century ago. It assures
those who are still working that they, too, have a pact with the
future. From this day forward, they have one pledge that they will get
their fair
share of benefits when they retire.”3
Now Alan’s saying we have to privatize? What terrible disaster’s occurred since 1983?
In
fact, the disaster was the 1983 “reform” itself. Its main provision was
an increase in Social Security taxes calculated to generate 25+ years
of ever-increasing surpluses, surpluses that could be dumped into the
general budget to grease the skids for tax cuts to the super-rich.
In
1983, 20 million in extra Social Security taxes and interest was
collected, 20 million more than needed to pay retirees. In 1988,
Reagan’s last year in office, the surplus was 38 billion. By 2006, it
was 182 billion,4 and nearly 2 trillion in bonds sat in the Social
Security Trust Fund, mostly surplus tax payments and interest
accumulated since 1983.5
The 2006 surplus was 1/3 over and above
the $544 billion mailed out to beneficiaries that year. 102 billion of
it was interest paid to the Trust Fund, and 80 billion was excess
payroll taxes: 13% of total collections.6
Tossed into the
general budget, the 2006 surplus easily financed the Department of
Education budget (67 billion),7 with plenty left to pay for the
Administration for Children and Families (47 billion).
ACF, by
the way, is welfare, Head Start, child support enforcement,* adoption
assistance, foster care, child care, community block grants, energy
assistance, and programs for the mentally retarded, refugees, and
Native Americans.8
That’s how big the yearly Social Security surplus is.
Alternatively, the 2006 surplus would fund about a year of the war in Iraq. That’s how big the war budget is.”9
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