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| Bush's Plan To Bankrupt Social Security | |
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| by Phyllis Schlafly | January 17, 2007 |
President Bush's secret plan for Social Security has just been released to the public in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by
TREA Senior Citizens League, a million-member seniors advocacy group.
For four years, the President carried on an energetic public relations
campaign to promote his plan to privatize part of Social Security, but
he kept under White House lock and key the "Totalization" agreement his
administration secretly made with Mexico in June 2004.
Is that any way to run the government, or to commit billions of
taxpayer dollars? Maybe we've been needing Nancy Pelosi to demand "the
most honest, most open" government in history.
If and when President Bush personally signs this agreement, it
will automatically become law without any congressional action. The law
that would have allowed one House of Congress to reject it by a vote
within 60 days is generally thought to violate the Supreme Court's 1983
decision in INS v. Chadha, which declared unconstitutional a one-House veto of a President's action.
Senator John Ensign (R-NV) has introduced S.43 to require Totalization agreements to be treated like bilateral trade
agreements. His bill would permit a Totalization agreement to go into
effect only if affirmatively passed by both Houses of Congress.
Unless we live in some sort of Bush dictatorship, that's the
very least of what Totalization should require. It ought to be
considered a treaty and require approval by two-thirds of the Senate.
Totalization is the bureaucratic buzz word for the plan to put
millions of illegal Mexican workers into the U.S. Social Security
system. They would collect U.S. benefits based on their U.S earnings
under false or stolen Social Security numbers plus alleged earnings in
Mexico.
American citizens must work ten years to be eligible for Social
Security benefits, but the Totalization agreement would allow Mexicans
to qualify with only 18 months of work in the United States, and
pretend to make up the difference by assuming work in Mexico. It is
highly doubtful that the illegal aliens ever paid into a Mexican system
for eight and a half years.
It could be "virtual" work or "virtual" payments (just like the
"virtual" fence we may have on our southern border, or the "virtual"
law that promised to build one). A 2003 Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report tactfully refused to comment on "the integrity of Mexico's social
security data" and warned that the cost to U.S. taxpayers is "highly
uncertain."
The United States has totalization agreements with 21 other
countries in order to assure a pension to those few individuals who
work in two countries (legally, of course) by "totalizing" their
payments into the pension systems of both countries. All existing
totalization agreements are with industrialized nations whose
retirement systems are on a parity with ours.
Mexican retirement benefits are not remotely equal to U.S.
benefits. Americans receive benefits after working for 10 years, but
Mexicans have to work 24 years before receiving any benefits.
Mexican workers receive back in retirement only what they actually paid
in plus interest, whereas the U.S. Social Security system is skewed to
give lower-wage earners benefits greatly in excess of what they and
their employers contributed.
Mexico has two different retirement programs, one for
public-sector employees, which is draining the national treasury, and
one for private-sector workers, which covers only 40 percent of the
workforce. Most of the Mexicans who illegally entered the United States
previously lived in poverty, where they were unemployed, or worked in
the off-the-record economy, or worked for employers who did not pay
taxes into a retirement system.
The Bush Totalization plan would put millions of Mexicans onto
the rolls of the U.S. Social Security system just as our baby-boom
generation retires. The White House won't deny that imposing higher
taxes on American workers is "on the table" to deal with the expected
shortfall.
The Bush totalization plan would lure even more Mexicans into
the United States illegally in the hope of amnesty and eligibility for
Social Security benefits for themselves, as well as for their spouses
and dependents who may never have lived in the United States.
Totalization is part and parcel of the Council on Foreign
Relations five-year plan for the "establishment by 2010 of a North
American economic and security community" with a common "outer security
perimeter." The 59-page CFR document (which can claim Bush Administration approval because it is posted on a U.S. State Department website) demands that we "implement the Social Security Totalization Agreement negotiated between the United States and Mexico."
Americans should raise a mighty clamor to demand that President Bush
NOT sign this billion-dollar ripoff of American taxpayers and senior
citizens. Meanwhile, tell your Members of Congress to hurry up and pass
the Ensign bill.
Further reading: Social Security Benefits for Noncitizens: Current Policy and Legislation, CRS Report RL32004, updated 7-22-04 and 5-11-05.