Is Bush beginning to weaken on his idea for personal or ownership accounts for younger workers? Perhaps.

His echo chamber speeches in sixty cities are not getting the media attention needed in order to be successful. Playfully delivering the same canned speech over and over before a selected audience of supporters may have finally driven him to waving one of the Parkersburg Papers in the air and calling the “holdings” of the Social Security trust funds worthless. This last minute truthfulness may have been his final shot.

The Washington Post reports that Bush may now be thinking of turning the battle over to “a panel” of bipartisan politicians to come up with better solutions. It may even carry the issue into next year’s mid-term elections.

This is not a good sign.

It’s not good because it seriously diminishes the chance that the full scam the government has been pulling for ages will come completely out in the open. A scam that not only involves $1.7 trillion in current Social Security “holdings,” but a full $3.2 trillion in Enron style accounting within the fraudulent Intragovernmental Holdings portion of the national debt.

The democrats will have won their fight to hold on to the lucrative surpluses that have always poured into federal coffers from payroll taxes and it will give the pirates the opportunity to come up with schemes to steal even more of this “off budget” revenue supplied by America’s workers. The scam will continue unabated and even increase.

In the event that we do get into long and convoluted arguments about actuarial data and things like changing the age of retirement, cutting benefits, or raising the “cap” on salaries taxed, factors that each will increase the booty for politicians to spend elsewhere, there is one thing the general public needs to understand deeply and in detail.

That one fact is that the Social Security Administration has always been able to adjust its tax rate fairly and in terms of changing conditions no matter what those conditions might have been. It deals with actuarial realities, not greed and political fantasy.

Secondly, these adjustments can be made almost the day before any sort of disaster strikes. Payroll tax changes are immediate and as quick as the next paycheck. They come out of everyone’s next weekly, biweekly, or monthly paychecks. There is hardly a time lag between raising taxes and the new money rolling in.

In other words, there is no need to adjust these tax factors years ahead of time or years before they are needed. That is, there is no need other than to increase the loot for the pirates.

In its 68 years of taxing workers, payroll taxes have been adjusted no less than 49 times. Take this table and paste it by your television. Every line was an adjustment.