There is no better testimony to the power of conservative ideology than the persistent talk about privatizing Social Security. Social Security privatization seems immune to news that should have long since derailed this misguided idea. The Social Security fund’s trustees continually push back the day of reckoning for the current program. The stock market undergoes near melt down. Yet however solid the public fund and however volatile private markets, the privatizers march steadily along.

A presidential commission, stacked with advocates of privatization, will fill in the details, but there is little doubt about their goals. The role of the Democrats in Congress is less sure. Without a push from grass-roots progressives, many may waffle and allow potentially dangerous changes to the current system.

Maine, with a highly cyclical economy, an older than average population, and a heavy concentration of workers in physically challenging occupations, has an immense stake in this debate.

Social Security debates illustrate one truth of the media age. If you repeat a line often enough, it becomes incontrovertible fact. We are told ad nauseam that the current Social Security system is approaching fiscal insolvency. A larger percentage of Americans are managing to live longer lives and will place an inordinate strain on the limited resources of the system.

For starters, one might ask: What else is new? That more of us live longer is good news, all else being equal. From the inception of Social Security, Americans have seen their life spans increase, and the system has managed to handle such good fortune rather well. Under current projections, both Social Security and Medicare are scheduled to take about 1.9 percent more of gross domestic product in the next 20 years. This rate of increase is substantial but is still less than the increase of 2.5 percent over the 1970 to 1990 period, demands that were handled even amidst the relatively sluggish economic growth of the era.

Dean Baker, a close student of Social Security points out, “both programs are currently far better prepared to deal with the projected increases in spending than they have been through most of their history. Under current projections, the Social Security program will be able to pay all scheduled benefits for the next 37 years with no changes whatsoever. At no point in the decades of the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s or ’70s would this have been true.”

In addition, the projections for economic growth on which the trustees base their revenue projections are absurdly pessimistic. In each of their last five reports, they have already been forced to postpone further the date of reckoning. Were they to embrace even the cautious Congressional Budget Office numbers, Social Security “bankruptcy” would be postponed three more years, until 2041.

In a worst case scenario, three decades from now Congress could still enable full benefits though a payroll tax increase of about one percent on workers who will be making about 40 percent more in real terms than today. Faced with far greater challenges to the system at other critical junctures, Congress has always responded to save a justly popular program. Even if Congress failed to act, the fund would still be able to pay retirees benefits that in real, inflation adjusted terms, are higher than beneficiaries receive today.

To supplement a system that might under absurdly pessimistic political and economic premises fail to deliver full benefits, we are asked to resort to speculation in the stock market. To call such a message ill-timed is the most favorable assessment one can offer. With declines of about 10 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 20 percent for the S & P, and nearly 60 percent for the NASDAQ, household wealth suffered the largest loss in relative terms in twenty-five years. Those losses were largely confined to the most affluent in our population.

If a Bush privatization scheme had been implemented in the late nineties, millions of working-class families would now be forced to postpone retirement in order to recoup their losses. As Economic Policy Institute economist Christian Weller points out, when families at other historical junctures have suffered comparable stock market losses, it has often taken decades to catch up again.

For the true believers of course, there is never a wrong time for markets. Big tumbles provide just the right time to get in near the bottom. Yet the faith that one can determine a bottom is just the sort of casino- like mentality that shouldn’t guide social policy. Even after the recent crash, the price earnings ratio for the typical stock remains far higher than historical averages.

Social Security is a form of social insurance against poverty, not a get rich quick scheme. In any case, it defies both logic and all previous historical experience to suggest that if our economy is going to perform as poorly as Social Security doomsayers assume, its major corporations, and stock in those companies, will thrive.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.