From an Obama speech on September 20 in Daytona Beach:
And I’ll protect Social Security, while John McCain wants to privatize it. Without Social Security half of elderly women would be living in poverty - half. But if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week. Millions would’ve watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes. Millions of families would’ve been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves. So I know Senator McCain is talking about a “casino culture” on Wall Street - but the fact is, he’s the one who wants to gamble with your life savings.
There are two formal plans McCain has supported privatizing Social Security. In his 2000 campaign, McCain’s social security plan was described in the NY Times:
Mr. McCain called for 20 percent of the Social Security payroll tax to be placed in individual retirement accounts in which workers would be able to choose from an approved list of investment options. He said they would also be guaranteed that they would never get less in benefits than if they had stayed in the current Social Security system. To pay for the transition to such accounts, Mr. McCain would devote $729 billion of the non-Social Security surplus over 10 years to Social Security.
That plan, which would have privatized 20% of Social Security payroll-based contributions, would not have affected senior citizens currently receiving benefits at all. There doesn’t seem to be any maximum age, so it’s possibly Floridians could have enrolled in 2001 and entered retirement this years, having 7 years of partially privatized Social Security. But even for those people, McCain’s offered a guarantee that they would never receive less benefits, so if the market tanked they’d be ensured the baseline funds.
The second possible plan, Bush’s 2005 proposal which McCain supported, doesn’t provide for workers older than 54 to participate in privatization. Though it offered no guarantees of benefits, no one enrolled in that plan would be eligible for social security yet. Thus no one affected in that scenario would “rely” on social security. (That plan did not privatize current retiree’s holdings either.)
Obama lied when he told senior citizens their Social Security fund would have evaporated under McCain’s plan. That’s simply not the case in either privatization plan McCain’s supported.
Tags: Obama