Social Security debate reeks of propaganda.

Byline: GUEST VIEWOPOINT By Edward Fadeley For The Register-Guard

The Bible commands, `Honor thy father and thy mother.' For 65 years this country has honored the retired generation by instituting and expanding Social Security for the elderly and support for the disabled and orphaned children.

Now our national government says this retired and retiring generation should be the last to be so honored and assisted. The reason for the about-face in national principles is at this point merely propaganda, not facts.

But let's start with the facts.

Norman Thomas polled a respectable percentage of the vote for president in 1932 as an advocate for old age pensions. By 1935, Franklin Roosevelt engineered congressional adoption of a Social Security program that included both old age retirement `insurance' and the unemployment compensation system.

FDR and this country followed the lead of Germany, where compulsory old age pensions were created in 1889; of Great Britain, where a pension system was instituted in 1911; and of the Soviet Union, which gained a universal pension system in 1922. France and New York, under FDR's governorship, added pension systems in 1928.

Now, President Bush wants to throw future old age pension entitlements overboard and bring what is called "privatization" to the pension system. The idea is to let all citizens sink or swim on their future investments.

The exact degree of government withdrawal is not clear. Indeed, hearings have just now started in Congress on nothing more than the slogan `privatization.' There is no specific language, no written proposal or bill. Without specifics, the slogan is propaganda, not fact.

To obscure the demise of the old age pension insurance program, an abstract and inaccurate word is used to describe the goal of ending Social Security. It is now called `restructuring.' In a similar vein, an amputation above the knee could be called `restructuring' your leg.

Last week, the president suggested a specific way to "restructure" Social Security: Those who have paid in more would get back less. That policy is calculated to erode support for the program, and to make it look more like welfare than a pension earned by workers over their working lives.

The impetus to dump pensions for the elderly is the claim that the Social Security trust fund will, 20 to 40 years from now, be short of covering the need by $400 billion or so.

Let us look at that in two ways: First, the significance of that sum, and second, the probability that a governmental estimate so far into the future is accurate.

The amount of the predicted shortfall is about the same as the trade deficit between China and the U.S. for the next five years, based on last year's actual export-import balance. It is less than three years of our trade imbalance worldwide. That loss has not provoked a Chicken Little reaction. Yet the claim in regard to Social Security, based on a prediction 20 to 40 years out, is generating cries that the sky is falling.

While the predicted shortfall is cause for anxiety, we as people may wonder what is real and what is manipulative propaganda.

How accurate are those predictions? What is the government's track record? A example comes to mind here in the Pacific Northwest. Twenty-five to 30 years ago, the government predicted that the region's hydroelectric system would soon be woefully inadequate to the need.

At first, the prediction was that 20 new nuclear plants would be needed. This was soon scaled back to 10 plants, one of which was to be at Dexter Reservoir. Three plants were started. After about $5 billion was wasted, two plants were terminated before they were finished and only one plant, at Hanford, was actually built and placed in service. That government prediction was at best a 900 percent error.

Other government promises about the nuclear program were equally inaccurate. The government promised that the nuclear fuel rods would be re-energized at a facility in Kentucky or South Carolina, but no such plant is available or under realistic consideration. The government promised to have a `permanent' nuclear waste disposal site by 1982, or 1985 at the latest. It hasn't happened.

Those promises now look like propaganda. In hindsight, the predictions look ludicrous and proved very costly to the nation and our people.

With that kind of a track record, why should we dump a system used by much of the civilized world based on a government prediction of shortfalls coming 20 to 40 years from now? Will the sky really fall, or is it instead the prediction that will fall?

Are we, as a nation, to be taken in by the propaganda?

Edward Fadeley is a former president of the Oregon Senate and a former justice of the Oregon Supreme Court.