Attack Wall Street, Not Social Security:

Suppose our top generals described the growing threat from a hostile Middle East power. The country has tens of billions of oil dollars, a growing army, chemical and biological weapons, and is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. After carefully describing the risks posed by this country, our generals suggested an immediate attack on Canada. They explain that combating this Middle East country would be difficult, but defeating Canada is easy.

This is essentially the story of the latest attack on social security. Everyone who looks at the projections agrees; the scary budget stories being hyped in the media and by the Wall Street crew are driven almost entirely by projections of exploding health care costs. But instead of proposing ways to fix the health care system, these deficit hawks want to attack social security. They tell us that fixing health care is hard. By contrast they think that cutting money from social security will be relatively easy.

The facts on this are straightforward and known by everyone involved in the budget debate. The US health care system is broken. We pay more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries. [...]

Logic would dictate that our top priority should be getting our health care costs under control. But fixing health care is difficult because, as we saw in the health care debate, this means confronting the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical supply industry, highly paid medical specialists and other powerful lobbies.

The deficit hawks don't want to fight this fight. Defeating these powerful interest groups would be a hard fight. And for the deficit hawks it would likely be an especially painful fight since these are their friends.

By contrast, the Wall Street deficit hawks don't have friends who depend on social security for their income. Wall Street investment bankers like Peter Peterson and Robert Rubin are unlikely to associate with such people. This is why they see attacking social security as easy. Read on...

As Digby noted, David Walker and the Peterson Foundation have been out on a tour which she calls the Pete Peterson Austerity Pimp Revue where they're trying to convince all of us that we need to be more worried about our national debt than getting our economy back on track.

These people really are shameless. They'll do anything to keep low information voters thinking that we have a crisis on our hands and that all of us must suffer because we can't dare to ask the rich to pay their fair share in taxes. That and they want that Social Security fund handed over to Wall Street so badly they can taste it. They're hoping they can get it done under a Democratic administration.

I've got news for them. If they think privatizing Social Security is going to go over any better now than when Bush tried to do it, they're deluding themselves. The public will not stand for it. I know I sure as hell won't. If Walker thinks the public is going to sit idly by while they send our Social Security money over to the thieves on Wall Street and use the deficit as an excuse to do it, he's got another thing coming.

Lift the cap and let the rich pay their share.