This is getting tiresome. I have been stocking up on numbers for years just waiting to get down and dirty in the trenches with privatizers. But this is getting more and more like the "Phony War" of October 1939 to April 1940.
http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/phonywar.htm
Privatizers declared war, and keep threatening to unleash their heavy guns, they claim that any moment now they are going to unleash blitzkrieg, but somehow there never seems to be the right time to launch the assault using live ammunition, i.e. numbers.

Could it be that they didn't keep their powder dry?

I don't think its that the press doesn't 'dare' call them on it - I think its that the press either isn't paying enough attention, or doesn't know enough to call them on it. Its as much ignorance and laziness as it is cowardice.

flory wrote, "Its as much ignorance and laziness as it is cowardice."

Those are the three attributes that best characterize the elite part of the press corps:
* ignorant
* lazy
* cowardly

I don't believe that they will take price indexing off the table.

What's their alternate plan for improving the current program, other than to move the age bar?

CATO's is dancing, though. Funny.

Re: alternate plans...

One of the suggestions one always hears is raising the retirement age further. Rejections usually are attached to worries about people who do physical labor, either unskilled or skilled (carpenters and the like). But then, even with the age set at 65-67, that's an issue. I've been wondering how difficult it would be to set up a system by which SS would keep track of how many credits a person has earned while working a physically-intensive job, and allow them to start receiving (maybe only partial) benefits early. It might be prone to abuse, and it would add another datum for the system to track, so it's potentially expensive. But it would make it easier to raise the retirement age a few years for mental-skills jobs like mine.

You wrote: "the administration will need to cut benefits"

No, dude! Don't give in the shits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/politics/21social.html?

A New Target for Advisers to Swift Vets
By GLEN JUSTICE

WASHINGTON - Taking its cues from the success of last year's Swift boat veterans' campaign in the presidential race, a conservative lobbying organization has hired some of the same consultants to orchestrate attacks on one of President Bush's toughest opponents in the battle to overhaul Social Security.

The lobbying group, USA Next, which has poured millions of dollars into Republican policy battles, now says it plans to spend as much as $10 million on commercials and other tactics assailing AARP, the powerhouse lobby opposing the private investment accounts at the center of Mr. Bush's plan.

"They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts," said Charlie Jarvis, president of USA Next and former deputy under secretary of the interior in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. "We will be the dynamite that removes them."

Though it is not clear how much money USA Next has in hand for the campaign - Mr. Jarvis will not say, and the group, which claims 1.5 million members, does not have to disclose its donors - officials say that the group's annual budget was more than $28 million last year. The group, a membership organization with no age requirements for joining, has also spent millions in recent years vigorously supporting Bush proposals on tax cuts, energy and the Medicare prescription drug plan.

So far, the groups dueling over Social Security have been relatively tame, but the plans by USA Next foreshadow what could be a steep escalation in the war to sway public opinion and members of Congress in the days ahead.

Already, AARP is holding dozens of forums on the issue, has sent mailings to its 35 million members and has spent roughly $5 million on print advertisements in major newspapers opposing private accounts. "If we feel like gambling," some advertisements said, "we'll play the slots." ...

Charlie Jarvis, president, USA Next: "We will be the dynamite that removes them[ AARP]."

How, by spending millions on false advertisements? That hasn't worked so far.

Auros
As far as shifting to a less physically demanding job goes, my brother switched from construction to retail. He works at a Home Depot now. What's interesting is that his coworkers are sixty five year old plus retirees whose wives want them out of the house.
That's the retirement plan of most of America. Social Security and retail. We put the wives to work in the seventies and eighties, and we will put the older people to work in the teens and twenties.

There is already an anti-AARP ad from USANext up on the American Spectator website (spectator.org).

It says: "The REAL AARP Agenda".

I guarantee that you would never guess what that "REAL" agenda is.

http://www.dailykos.com/images/user/3/aarp.gif

Yep. According to USANext, the AARP's real agenda is to do in American soldiers and to promote gay marriage.

Evidence offored for this? Don't be silly.

Why do they lie all the time, about everything? Because if they only lied some of the time it would be news. Every newspaper would put that news on the front page of if they only lied some of the time.
So they lie all the time because while one lie gets negative publicity, 100 lies are just the background noise.

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