Bush plan a train wreck for kids

BOSTON – There are few phrases in the book of parenting that raise more suspicions among the young than the pronouncement that “I am doing this for your own good.” It comes in a close second only to the declaration, “This is going to hurt me more than it will you.”

In this spirit of skepticism, I have been stalking President Bush’s remarks about Social Security. I have in my possession a list of the presidential promises that he has nothing but the best interests of the younger generation at heart.

My list starts with the State of the Union address, when Bush exhorted us to “do what Americans have always done and build a better world for our children and our grandchildren.”

It goes on to the remark that “Our children’s retirement security is more important than partisan politics.”

It concludes with his recent words in Indiana: “If I were a younger American, I’d be asking loud and clear ‘What are you going to do about this train wreck that is headed my way?’ “

Well, I still have trouble acknowledging George Bush as the pater of my familias. For openers, the Bush tax cuts of today are the tax burdens of tomorrow. That doesn’t sound like a “better world for our children and our grandchildren.”

The federal deficit this year is $394 billion and climbing – before you include the costs of war. But the conductor of this White House train wants to extend the tax cuts for first class and pass the debt to the youngest passengers in coach.

As for our children being more important than partisan politics, one American child in six lives in poverty but the 2005 budget already has kid-unfriendly cuts in programs such as subsidized day care, and the Republican Congress is looking at cutting off food stamps for 300,000 people in working families.

If the president’s Social Security concerns are about our children’s retirement, what about their childhood? There’s been astonishingly little said about what privatizing would mean for the children – 5 million of them today – who get dependents’ benefits because their parents are dead or disabled or retired. Little more has been said about the transitional costs of the privatizing scheme. Trillions to be paid by the tots.

These matters alone disqualify the president as the builder of “a better world for our children.” But for my money – not to mention my grandchildren’s money – the Bush legacy as a man who planned for the kids’ legacy falls apart when you look at the issue of estate taxes.

The “death tax,” as it is now slandered, was first written into law in 1916 during the Gilded Age. Americans were uneasy about inequality and an inherited aristocracy.

Fast forward to our new gilded age. In a telling way, the Social Security debate has now dovetailed with an estate-tax debate.

Congress voted a couple of years ago to gradually raise the tax exemption so that by 2010, the estate tax will apply only to estates worth more than $3.5 million. That’s just five out of 1,000 estates every year.

On one side, the Bush administration wants to partially privatize Social Security and totally eliminate the estate tax. On the other side, there is a proposal by former Social Security Commissioner Robert Ball and seconded by Wisconsin’s Rep. David Obey to use the estate tax to fix the shortfall.

Ball figures we can make up the funding gaps for the coming boomers by raising the wage cap on Social Security taxes to include workers who earn more than $90,000 and by rejiggering the cost-of-living adjustments. But the moral heart of the plan is to designate the tax on estates over $3.5 million to Social Security. It would target some of the inheritance of the richest sector of society for the security of the entire next generation.

We have here two very different stories about doing what’s best for the children. Two different stories about the kind of country we want our kids to inhabit. In one, we are only obligated to the children in our gene pool. In the other, we are connected as members of a community. In one we are all privatized and atomized. In the other we are bound together.

The debate about Social Security is intense precisely because it’s about alternative visions. It’s personal because it raises questions about what we owe our children, indeed, how we define “our children.” By DNA? ZIP code? Class? Or country.

On my list of presidential quotes, there is a recurrent phrase Bush uses to describe Social Security as “a symbol of trust between the generations.” But what we are seeing is an unrelenting attempt to bust this trust. That’s the real train wreck.