It's that cut-and-dried. Finally someone in the media has gone out and done his job and actually reported on this plan to drastically curtail seniors' benefits. Kudos to The Times' Edmund L. Andrews for his piece "Most G.O.P. Plans to Remake Social Security Involve Deep Cuts to Tomorrow's Retirees", in which he writes as such:

As President Bush gears up for a major public push to overhaul Social Security, he has focused almost all his rhetorical energy on the need to let people divert some of their taxes to private retirement accounts.

But nearly every leading Republican proposal on Capitol Hill acknowledges that private accounts by themselves do little to solve the system's projected shortfall of at least $3.5 trillion. Instead, those proposals rely on deep cuts in benefits to future retirees.

That uncomfortable political truth was driven home on Monday by the head of the investigative arm of Congress.

"The creation of private accounts for Social Security will not deal with the solvency and sustainability of the Social Security fund," that official, David M. Walker, comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, said in a speech on Monday.

Or, as Thomas Saving, a Republican-appointed trustee to the Social Security trust fund put it last week: "Fundamentally, if you don't reduce the benefits, you don't reduce the debt."

This Republican claim is fundamentally untrue. Firstly, if the government stopped stealing from Social Security and Medicare to finance its deficit, both entitlements would be significantly more solvent in the coming years. On an even more important point, if taxes were increased to their pre-Bush levels--which were low compared to what they were in the preceding six decades since the New Deal--and if payroll taxes were made less regressive, the system would be made sound for decades to come.

The fact is that the Republicans have been trying to get rid of Social Security since the 1930s and they think that privatization is their best shot at killing the program. Reporting like this will help dispell any myth that the GOP plans are anything but a poison pill for the New Deal program, but the Democrats will need to be focused and on message to prohibit the Republicans from ridding America of the social net that has helped it thrive for nearly three quarters of a century.