I'm trying to understand why a prominant Democrat has not mentioned Gore's lockbox. I would like to suggest that since Social Security is the most successful program ever created by the United States government, the only reform we need is to actually implement the lock box that Presidential candidates Gore and Bush both promised the American people.

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The Social Security crisis is phony on many levels, but two big holes in the theory are Bush's insistence on continuing to cut taxes while privatizing Social Security and the Bush administration's cynical use of the Social Security surplus to mask historically high deficits.

In 1982 Alan Greenspan signed on to legislation that was designed to correct the unfunded liability problem that Social Security had developed.

The only problem with the Social Security trust fund is that President Bush and the Republican Congress have refused to honor candidate Bush's promise to protect the retirement assets of the America people with a lock box. Since 1994, the estimated date when the Social Security Trust Fund begins running a deficit has actually increased from thirty five years out to thirty eight years out. Horror stories of Social Security not being able to pay full benefits are based on forty year economic projections. There is universal agreement that economic forecasts about the budget and the U.S. deficit are extremely unreliable more than ten years out. Look at what has happened to deficit forecasts in the last four years. Why is the media punditocracy so blindly accepting of economic forecasts of doom forty years out?

The only reform that Social Security needs is a lock box to keep the grubby hands of politicians out of the trust fund. The shell game politicians play with the trust fund to finance deficits, is that they give the trust fund I.O.U.'s in the form of Treasury Bonds. Stopping this duplicitous practice is the only reform Social Security requires.

I am completely baffled why Democrats have not raised hari kari over Republican deficits and pork barrel spending. We all know that there were over 3,000 earmarks in the deficit busting budget bill Republicans just passed. Did you hear  a single Democrat complain or play Senator Proxmire? Remember the Golden Fleece Award? Proxmire got fantastic free press with this simple gimmick and one single Democrat could easily reprise The Golden Fleece Award. Democrats should demand that Bush and the Republican party stop raiding the Social Security trust fund. Democrats should demand a Social Security lock box as a substitute for Republican plans to dismantle Social Security.