Four Lies About Social Security

A CBS News poll taken in August 2001 found that a majority of Americans do not believe that Social Security will be able to pay their retirement benefits. A similar majority believe that investing part of our Social Security funds in the stock market is a good idea.

That speaks to the success of a brilliant, multi-year public relations campaign engineered by rich Wall Street firms, in conjunction with their friends in conservative Washington think tanks. Their goal: to convince the public to consider dumping Social Security in favor of private accounts. It's a campaign built on misinformation, distortion, and outright lies.

What's Wall Street's stake in all this? They want to get their hands on the one trillion dollars currently sitting in the Social Security trust fund -- probably the largest single stash of dough ever amassed in human history. If Social Security were privatized, that giant trust fund would be sliced up into individual retirement accounts, managed by the banks, one account for every man, woman and child in America. Each one of those accounts would generate management fees for the banks, a never-ending Niagara Falls of fees, cascading forever into the coffers of Wall Street.
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