Almost exactly five years ago, a senior member of the United States Senate took the
          floor to deliver an impassioned denunciation of the landmark “welfare-reform” bill
          passed by Congress that summer and signed by President Bill Clinton. As a noted
          scholar and historian of the nation’s social-insurance systems, the distinguished legislator
          went beyond detailing his complaints against various aspects of the welfare measure to
          place the issue in context—and to alert the American people to its ominous meaning.

          “It is the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the
          United States since at least the 1930’s,” roared Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat
          of New York and prophet of doom. “Do not doubt that Social Security itself, which is
          to say insured retirement benefits, will be next. The bill will be called
          ‘The Individual Retirement Account Insurance Act.’ Something such.”

          Something such, as he so disdainfully put it, will soon be thrust upon us, courtesy of
          President Bush’s Commission on Social Security. Stacked exclusively with
          proponents of privatization, that outfit’s avowed purpose is to push through the kind
          of legislation foreseen by Mr. Moynihan back in 1996.

          Overpraised though he was during and after his years in the Senate, which ended
          when he retired last January, Mr. Moynihan’s vision was often acute. What he
          understandably failed to predict when he made that famously foreboding Senate
          speech was his own gradual transformation into a “bipartisan” instrument for the
          same destructive scheme.

          Certainly that’s the part being played by the white-maned sage these days. Scarcely
          a month after its first meeting, which Mr. Moynihan co-chaired, the Bush
          commission is promoting a scary scenario of Social Security bankruptcy that lends
          official credence to a similar scare campaign long promoted by Wall Street interests.
          With Mr. Moynihan’s connivance, they now suggest that the system which has
          functioned so admirably for the past seven decades will hover at the edge of
          insolvency by 2016.

          The rescue plan evidently being prepared by the former Senator and his colleagues
          is to turn over a glittering chunk of Social Security revenues to the private sector.
          The most outstanding among the many defects in this “solution” is the absence of a
          real problem to be solved.

          Using actuarially conservative methodology, most experts believe that Social
          Security will be adequately financed until 2038. That analysis is based on
          expectations about national economic performance considerably more modest than
          those used by George W. Bush and his minions to justify their enormous,
          wealth-squandering tax cut. Those projections also happen to be far more realistic
          than the irrational exuberance encouraged by privatization advocates, who advertise
          their plan as a way for wage-earners to get rich.

          In other words, Mr. Bush and, by extension, his pliant friend Mr. Moynihan are
          mounting a kind of fraud. Under one shell is Social Security, supposedly going
          bankrupt according to one set of macroeconomic forecasts; under another shell is
          the tax cut, supposedly prudent and affordable according to another, virtually
          opposite set of numbers. Simply put, both cannot be true.

          Moreover, as economists including Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have pointed
          out, the Bush-Moynihan commission’s alarms are phony in yet another respect. The
          commission claims that the trillions being accumulated by the Social Security trust
          fund are fictitious because those assets are invested in U.S. Treasury bonds. Those
          bonds are deemed to be the safest investments in the world when they appear in the
          portfolios of private investors and pension funds, but are now alleged to be
          worthless when held by the government in trust for American workers. It’s a
          transparently fake argument that must provoke quiet laughter among the billionaires
          whose fortunes are made and safeguarded in those same government securities.

          One study after another has demonstrated that Social Security can continue to cover
          all its obligations well beyond 2038, despite the longer average life span of a
          shrinking work force. What may be required are adjustments of taxation, benefits
          and coverage, although nothing so disruptive and dangerous as the privatizers
          pretend will be necessary.

          That optimistic outlook was still shared by Mr. Moynihan less than two years ago,
          when he accepted a personal award from the Social Security Administration for his
          “untiring support” of the agency and its mission. While his remarks noted that the
          system faces long-term financing problems—meaning sometime around 2075—he
          also said that “four simple steps” would solve them, such as phasing in coverage of
          state and local government employees and adjusting the Consumer Price Index to
          accurately reflect prices.

          “A few other small changes and no problems,” Mr. Moynihan assured his admiring
          audience in October 1999. Right he was, and nothing that has occurred since ought
          to have altered his learned assessment. Nothing, that is, except the precipitous
          decline in stock values, which demonstrated how perilous “something such” as
          privatization could prove to America’s future.