Any truth to Ted Rall's cartoon?

[AllegroRondo]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/uclickcomics/20041216/cx_tr_uc/tr20041216&e=3

In the last panel, he says that when Bush ran for Congress in 1978, he said Social Security would be bankrupt in 10 years without privitization.
It certainly SOUNDS like something Bush would say. Do we have any confirmation? Can we alert the media and get this out?

[fryguy]

1. i tihink i heard some mention of the comment on NPR

it was yesterday or the day before, but i couldn't tell if they were talking about bush, sr. saying something about it when he was in the white house or if it was dubya's comment. (i was too busy "white-knucking" in the snow to pay 100% attention....)

[JHB]

2. According to the Texas Observer...

...and their Bushfiles:

The seventies saw major changes in the way campaigns were conducted across the country. In its 1978 elections roundup, Time magazine would assert, “Money, computers, polls, and image makers continued to change the face of American politics into something that would have been unrecognizable to the candidates even a few years ago.” With O’Neill as his finance chairman, Bush would raise just shy of $435,000 (compared to Hance’s $314,000, and Mahon’s $124,000 in the previous race against Reese), and both candidates used computer-assisted poll analysis to fine-tune their strategies. Still, the art of running for Congress was not yet as media-driven as it is today, and Bush “was a tireless campaigner,” recalls Mike Weiss, a Lubbock resident who volunteered to work for Bush after meeting the candidate in a shopping center. “He would do breakfast in one town, lunch in another, gatherings in the evening.” He knocked on doors and attended coffees, barbecues, living-room receptions.

According to Gary Ott, who was then a reporter for the Plainview Daily Herald, Bush stopped by the paper’s little office “maybe five or six times. He’d sit down at my desk; he was a fun guy. He was very outgoing, very friendly, and we would argue politics since I was a liberal. We’d argue over Carter policies.” Bush criticized energy policy, federal land use policy, subsidized housing, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“a misuse of power,” he said), and he warned that Social Security would go bust in ten years unless people were given a chance to invest the money themselves. None of this really distinguished him from Hance, though, so in the end Bush simply argued that a Republican could better represent the district: “If you want a chance in the way Congress has been run, send someone who will be independent from those who will run the Congress.”

http://www.bushfiles.com/bushfiles/midland.html

[Killarney]

3. Great find! We need to blast this.

[wicket]

4. I agree!!!!

Excellent find, off to blast the media!!!!!

[SheepyMcSheepster]

5. kick.

this info need to get out. thanks for posting.

[wicket]

6. kick

:kick:

[hfojvt]

7. trouble is, he was probably right

much as I hate to say such a thing. He was campaigning in 1978, in 1983 or so there was a Greenspan-inspired huge increase in social security taxes, and also millions of people working for the Federal Government were switched from a separate retirement system onto Social Security.
Thus was created the huge surpluses of the 1990s, by something which was anathema to George W. Bush - a tax increase. But it was okay because it was mostly a tax increase on low-income people who work for a living.

[dpibel]

8. Ya got me baffled

Fixing SS by a FICA increase makes Boosh right exactly how. In Post #2, the statement is: "he warned that Social Security would go bust in ten years unless people were given a chance to invest the money themselves."

So. 1988 has come and gone. There was no privatization. And I don't believe anyone was saying in 1983 that the system was going broke in five years. Thus he was right in what way?

[hfojvt]

9. okay, half right

He was correct that the system was going to cost more than the taxes it raised unless something was done. His preference was for privatization. Rather than commit political suicide by dismantling social security, Greenspan, Congress and Reagan chose to increase taxes and increase the ceiling.
I do not remember what they were saying about when the system was going to go broke, only that they did pass some fairly hefty tax increases.
The thing that really irks me is that Bush keeps saying that Social Security was created in a different era and needs to be updated, when it was amended in 1939, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1977, 1980-84, 1986, and 1988-89 according to my 1994 Almanac.

[0007]

10. It should be rammed down junior's throat and be known to

America what this thug is up too!