Compare and Contrast

Today there are protests at town halls where constituents are disagreeing, quite vehemently, with the ideas of their congressional representatives.

The same thing happened in 2006 during the fight over a letting a small number of American workers put a little bit of their contribution to the government run system “Social Security” system into a private account to invest in a couple of different government designed plans.

The Democrats opposed the plan to let the citizenry keep a little bit more of their hard earned dollars by denying that there was anything wrong with the “Social Security” system. “It’ll be solvent for another 30 to 50 years!” they yelled in the halls of Congress and on the teevee talk shows.

Now they’re in power in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government, just in time to be caught taking a piss on this “Third Rail”.

Social Security could face a deficit within two years, according to U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus who met with The Tuscaloosa News editorial board Tuesday.

“The situation is much worse than people realize, especially because of the problems brought on by the recession, near depression,” said Bachus, R-Vestavia Hills, in an interview with the Tuscaloosa News editorial board.

Bachus, the ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, said most people seem unaware of the impending crisis. He initially said Social Security could face “default” within two years, but his staff responded later saying the Congresssman intended to say “deficit.”

“What this recession has done to Social Security is pretty alarming,” he said. “We’ve known for 15 years that we were going to have to make adjustments to Social Security, but we still thought that was seven or eight years down the road. But if things don’t improve very quickly, we’re going to be dealing with that problem before we know it.”

Things won’t improve at all quickly, as the Stimupalooza kicks in at the beginning of next year. In fact, all the gains we’ve seen this past fiscal quarter will very likely fade away and be just a happy memory.

No, they won’t address this point when debating the “Government Option” or any other part of any reform package which may escape Congress. And I predict that when they do finally get around to discussing the topic, their solution will be to up the withholding from the paychecks of those Americans currently working to attempt to stave off the collapse for just a little bit longer.

But hey, I wasn’t expecting it to be there for me anyway. I’ve known that since high school.

Link found via the Gateway Pundit
As a personal anecdote, The Mom went down last week to file for her SSI bennies. When I spoke to her this last weekend she told me about her visit. I kindly asked her that if she wouldn’t mind, and could afford to do so, to please just put either the even month or odd month checks straight into the bank so that I might inherit some of my money back.