John Kerry and the Democrats running for Congress, have been handed a golden opportunity by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to actually demonstrate whether they are really standing for the working person, as they like to claim during election seasons, or are just corporate shills like their Republican opponents.

The litmus test offered by Greenspan is Social Security.

Greenspan, this past week, made the outrageous statement that politicians need to tell the Baby Boomer generation (of which I am a charter member at 55) that we aren’t going to get the benefits we were promised and that we worked for all these past three to four decades. He says that to “save” Social Security, our generation’s benefits need to be cut.

Now first of all, let me point out—as Kerry an d Democratic candidates everywhere should be doing, but aren’t because Greenspan is held in reverence by everyone in Washington—that this proposal to knife Baby Boomers in the back is coming from a guy who is already pulling down the maximum Social Security benefit of 00 a month, even as he earns 0,000 a year at his day job, and who will be collecting an additional ,000 every month from his federal pension when he finally steps down and moves to a retirement villa in Palm Springs or Beverly Hills with his TV-producer wife.

But beyond the fact that this Marie Antoinette-like central banker has been given a pass by Kerry and the Democrats, his threat to Boomer Social Security benefits is also based on a grotesque lie—a lie that both our corporate media and the supposed party of working people is seemingly afraid to challenge.

The truth: there is no Social Security crisis.

If you call the Social Security Administration and talk to the agency’s actuarial people—the civil service guys who just work with the numbers—they’ll tell you that all it would take even at this late date with the first Baby Boomers just a decade away from retirement to shore up the Trust Fund with enough cash to cover the entire flood of retires from the Boomer crunch would be to eliminate the cap on income that is subject to the Social Security tax.

Right now, that cap is set at a little over ,000. If someone makes 0,000, or 0,000 (like Mr. Greenspan), then ,000, or in Greenspan’s case $0,000 of that income is not taxed at all for the purposes of Social Security.

Tax that extra income of the upper strata of society (and remember, we’re not talking about joint family incomes of ,000 here, we’re talking about individual payroll income) at the same rate as lower incomes are taxed, and the Social Security shortfall vanishes completely.

You’d think that this would be a no-brainer for Democrats like Kerry.

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