Apparently I was at a Union Rally 

I found out that James Sensenbrenner was having a town hall meeting at the Wauwatosa Library yesterday. So I decided that I would go up and see what he had to say, and maybe ask him about his Real I.D. bill which I had blogged about earlier. I knew I would be in trouble when I arrived at the library to see union guys passing out pamphlets trying to scare people about Social Security privatization. There was in fact a pretty large crowd, and a lot of people signed up to ask questions. It lasted two and a half hours, and it was almost a waste of time. First of all, I never got a chance to ask my question before the time was up, mostly because all the union hacks asked the same question over and over again (over 50 people signed up to ask questions). And what a surprise... Sensenbrenner had the same question every single time. I thought he did a very good job selling his views on privatization, and selling the reality of the Social Security problem. In fact, he's done a hell of a much better job than Bush has done.

Here are some of the notes I have from what he said.

Social Security Will Fail: Nobody really has any doubt about this. It will fail, and it will cost to fix it. The nature of economics says simply that it will be cheaper to fix things now while we have something in the trust fund, rather then wait until 2042 when the fund is empty. The sense I got from the union guys there was that this was somehow a lie. There has to be something people just weren't thinking about... and that they have the brilliant idea that will save Social Security.

We Need to Prevent a Generational War: This is something very few people ever bring up, and obviously something very few people at that meeting cared to think about, seeing as how I was maybe the youngest person there. The long we wait to fix this problem, the more young voters there will be. There will come a point when we'll simply look at the program, do the math, realize we won't get shit, and say Fuck You to all those seniors. Forcing us to pay higher taxes now when we still won't get benefits in the future will only incur our wrath. Of course, cutting senior's benefits now will do the same. This leads to his third main point.

There are Only 3 Real Solutions: Increase the tax, cut benefits, or get a higher rate of return on whats there. Increasing the tax will piss off young workers, because we know we won't get anything in the end the way it's going. Cutting benefits will piss off seniors because they've already paid in and want what they were promised. So you need to find a way to get a higher rate of return. How do you do that? Seeing as how right now the trust fund, by law, can only invest in government securities (which are the only risk free investment in the world), and those securities only have a rate of return of between 1.5% and 2%, invest in other places.

Who Does the Investing?: Clinton in 1999 asked that a political appointee, the Sec. of the Treasury be allowed to invest 40% of the trust fund in the stock market. Congress shot it down. Sensenbrenner's reasoning, and it makes sense, is that it would invite corruption. Having a single person in charge of that much money, where everyone in the fund is affected by his decisions is too risky. Purchases in the stock market could easily be tied to campaign deals, or other shady politics. So that means that the only other person who could invest your money is... well... you. He talked a lot about using the current Federal employees Thrift Savings plan as a model, as well as the Wisconsin and California State employee pension plans as models. Both the state ones have performed extremely well almost every year.

On Raising the Cap: I've never heard this before, and I think I'll have to research it. According to Sensenbrenner, In 1937 the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of the Social Security program. In that decision, they said that it would only be constitutional if benefits were tied to how much you put in. Thus the cap was put in place to prevent Bill Gates from getting hundreds of thousands of dollars every month when he retires. If the cap were lifted, he would have to get that paycheck. It was pointed out that Social Security was actually fairly progressive in its benefits already. That means that people who put in less every year during their working career actually get more upon retirement. Couldn't a fourth benefit point be added for the Bill Gates of the country? The answer was yes, but it would be risky. Doing that could very well fly in the face of the 1937 court decision, which means that the court could then call the whole program back into question, and we don't know how they would decide. Granted it's fairly unrealistic that they would strike down the entire program which has been around for 70 years, that so many people depend on. But who knows what type of decision they would make.

So did you get to ask Jim about Real I.D.? Yes I did... but that's for my next post.