WASHINGTON -- February 14 -- The Campaign for America’s Future responded in detail today to the RNC’s Friday night attack on the group’s analysis of the impact of President Bush’s campaign to privatize Social Security. The RNC issued a press release and statement late on Friday night that distorts the truth and attacks the Campaign for America’s Future even as the American public and policymakers from both parties express increasing skepticism of the president’s plan to privatize Social Security.

Campaign for America’s Future Co-director Roger Hickey said that the RNC campaign of name-calling is a sign of their weakness.

“We stand by our analysis of the president’s privatization plan,” said Hickey. “The RNC’s distortions of Campaign for America’s Future and other privatization critics only signals political desperation and an unwillingness to come clean with the facts. Privatization will cut benefits for every working American.”

The Campaign for America’s Future reports attacked by the RNC show that a typical 20-year-old worker would lose $152,000 in guaranteed Social Security benefits if the president’s plan to privatize Social Security is implemented.

The RNC’s attack came as the Campaign for America’s Future promotes the efforts of more than 20 organizations critical of the president’s privatization plan--including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Alliance for Retired Americans, USAction and others. The groups unleashed a broad assault on the president’s privatization plan, joining with local leaders in every city the president visited following his State of the Union address to launch daily news conferences, rallies and advertisements.

Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-director and Economist Dean Baker, Ph.D., whose data was cited in the Campaign for America’s Future’s reports, immediately responded to the substantive flaws in the RNC’s attack.

Baker said that the president has no evidence that privatization would boost guaranteed benefits, citing that the president’s Social Security Commission refuses to provide evidence that a set of dividend and capital gains could add up to the 6.5 percent rate of return they claim is possible with private accounts.

“The president, and now the RNC, are playing games with the numbers in describing the impact of their Social Security privatization proposal,” said Baker. “If the president wants an honest debate on the merits of his proposal, he should allow the SSA’s actuaries to rigorously derive a set of projections of stock returns from the profit growth projections used in its analysis of the Social Security programs.”

Hickey noted that the president has not proposed a real, detailed legislative proposal to improve the long-term solvency of Social Security or explain how he would pay for the massive cost of private accounts.

“The president’s actual plan is a blank sheet of paper. It’s hard for the RNC to push their distortion campaign when there is nothing behind it,” said Hickey. “If the RNC wants to correct us, they should tell the American people the real details of what the president plans to do to the guaranteed benefits we’ve paid for.”

The Campaign for America’s Future examined Model 2 of the president’s 2001 Social Security Commission to produce the analysis, the only detailed plan released by the Bush administration.

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