Harry Reid: “soon after President Bush won reelection last November, he made it clear that the top priority of his second term would…”

“soon after President Bush won reelection last November, he made it clear that the top priority of his second term would be the privatization of Social Security. This is something the President had thought of long before his second term. In fact, when he ran for Congress in the late seventies from Texas, he talked then about the Social Security plan going broke and that it should be privatized. So this is something he has thought of a long time. But since he was elected the second time, he and other members of his administration have organized a massive campaign, given countless speeches, and crisscrossed the country all in an effort to sell the American people privatization. It has been a tough sell, though. The polls show that people have accepted this whole Social Security agenda about 25 percent. When he started it was in the 70s. Now it is down to 25 percent. It has been a tough sell because the President's privatization proposal is flawed in many ways. It would require deep benefit cuts, even for workers who don't choose to privatize accounts. It would require massive borrowing from countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, where we borrow about 40 percent of the money we borrow for this year's deficit, which will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, probably closer to half a trillion than not. It would turn Social Security from a guarantee into a gamble. And his privatized accounts would not strengthen Social Security's finances at all.…”