TROUBLE IN RIVER CITY BUSH PLAYING 'MUSIC MAN' ROLE WITH SOCIAL SECURITY CON.

Byline: Marcy Rothenberg Local View

TIMING is everything. Just ask this one-year-less-than-baby boomer.

Maybe it's because I was born in Hollywood. Maybe it's the fact that being married to a cinemaphile for 31 years has taught me to seek the escapist haven of a movie theater whenever I'm confronted with one of life's inevitable challenges. Whatever the reason, the minute I heard the specifics of President Bush's proposal to ``save'' Social Security, I remembered ``Chinatown.''

More specifically, the seemingly contradictory, yet ultimately understandable, responses from Faye Dunaway's character to Gittes' insistent questioning about Evelyn: ``My sister.'' Slap! ``My daughter.'' Slap! ``My sister-''

My mantra, which seems every bit as confusing on first hearing, goes something like this: ``Ready to retire.'' Slap! ``Younger worker.'' Slap! ``Ready to retire.'' Slap! ``Younger worker-''

The president's proposal hit me just as hard as if Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes had strolled up the sidewalk to my house, knocked on the door and grinned that puckish grin before hauling off and sending me reeling. Bush's timing couldn't be much worse.

Because timing - on birth dates and retirement investments alike - is, as they say, everything.

First, I all too inconveniently turned 50 just before the stock market tanked early in the new millennium. Massive chunks of the nest egg my husband and I had taken great pains to squirrel away started evaporating. We pulled our funds from the market in time to save a decent piece for our retirement, but then that pesky timing thing struck once more. When it seemed as if the market would drop no further, we put our funds back in - only to watch the bottom drop out again in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.

Almost simultaneously, it seems, I started getting those friendly missives from the Social Security Administration - you know, the annual update sent to ``pre-retirees,'' telling us about the benefits we'll receive at retirement. It was so reassuring. So comforting. Phew! Just as I could look forward to senior discounts at the local multiplex, I could count on my government to provide what it had promised in exchange for my dutiful contributions through the years. All I had to worry about was rebuilding the personal nest egg that had fallen from its perch.

Until the State of the Union address last week. That was when I suddenly was transformed from ``pre-retirement age'' to ``younger worker.'' Doggone my parents' lousy timing, anyway. I'd been born a year too late.

For you wheezing geezers out there who were born in 1949, there's no problem. Whatever benefit your love letter from Social Security promised last year, it's yours. But for us young whippersnappers whose gestation ended even a minute into 1950, all bets are off.

If Bush gets his way, my Social Security benefits may be slashed as much as 40 percent. I can try to replace that lost income, he tells me, by putting some of my Social Security allocation into a ``personal account.'' But, as always, the devil's in the details. I won't be allowed to contribute more than 4 percent of my wages to that personal account each year - and some of that will get eaten up in fees paid to the investment firms authorized to manage my money. (Social Security, I might remind you, is a fee-free proposition.) And I won't be allowed to open my personal account until 2009 - a scant seven years before I am eligible for ``full'' Social Security benefits.

I never was a fan of word problems in math class - a trait I evidently share with the president - but I can figure this one out even if he can't. I'll be given all of seven years to sock away 4 percent of my annual wage income into a low-risk, low-return ``personal account,'' while the government keeps taking my full contribution every year until that account is established in 2009. And, when I retire, the government will likely deliver only 60 percent of my Social Insecurity benefits just calculated last year.

That, my friends and fellow we're-never-gonna-be-able-to-retirees, is voodoo math. The kind of scam that only a fellow like Professor Harold Hill would appreciate. Or his latter-day counterpart, George ``Bait and Switch'' Bush, who seems to be rewriting ``The Music Man'' in his own image.

As Professor Hill - er, Bush - sets off across America, selling his bill of goods to the nation's workers, I'm left feeling like a cruelly jilted Marian. Only this time, I doubt that the honest women of America will be able to reform the nation's newest snake-oil salesman. After all, he claimed the heart of his librarian long ago - so he doesn't give a hoot about breaking ours.