Don't Forget About Us

The push to privatize Social Security is the right wing's single most important gift to the future of progressive politics. But our so-called representatives in the halls of power are throwing this gift away.

They are so busy playing defense and talking to themselves that they're missing a critical opportunity to organize the constituency with the most potential to save this country: young people.

People under 30, who technically have the most at stake in this debate, have been conspicuously absent from the discourse emanating from the Democratic leadership and the activist groups that have sprung up to fight privatization.

Instead, the Democrats have focused on the AARP, soccer moms, opinion polls, districts with vulnerable Republicans and whether or not Harry Reid can hold on to the coalition.

These short-sighted tactics come at a moment when reaching young people on Social Security is critical to our own long-term objectives. No generation has more invested in the future of Social Security. No generation better understands the impossibility of relying on the market to fund the American Dream. No generation is more important to engage in the debate about the role of the government in our lives.

Some think that we're unlikely to mobilize significant numbers of young people around Social Security. They say that the issue is a non-starter for those who think of retirement as an abstraction. I learned how faulty this assumption was in the late 1990s, when I ran a campaign to engage college students in a conversation about the program's future.

We visited campuses all across the country, including Hawaii, Florida, Appalachia and the Bronx, speaking with thousands of students. We found a population that knew dangerously little about Social Security but that was hungry to know more. Their own apathy is not the reason for excluding young people from this conversation.

How can anyone know if young people care about Social Security if no one has bothered to ask? I learned by talking to those college students that we won't move anybody but the usual suspects if we talk about Social Security in a vacuum, asking for a yay or nay vote, or attendance at a rally, or the placement of a bumper sticker on a fender.

We need to tap into the hopes of young Americans and not just their fears. We need to put this conversation in context. And the context is the reality of their lives. We need to be asking young people, what has the market done for you lately?

People are entering adulthood burdened with enormous debt. For the nearly two-thirds of college students with student loans, they owe $19,000 on average. Plus, the typical college student leaves school with another $3,000 on the cards, with interest rates climbing as fast as they can. And that's if we can afford college, an increasingly unlikely proposition as tuition skyrockets--up 14 percent for public college tuition in 2003 alone.

Despite our best efforts, this is our economic reality and our economic future, and it's not going to change until we start talking about it. Reid and the AARP should be spending as much airtime on the disproportionately high number of young Americans who are under-employed or unemployed and who have still not recovered from the last recession as they do on the dangers of Social Security privatization.

They should be tackling head-on the impact of the lack of affordable housing, as rents outpace the growth of wages, and six in ten recent college graduates consider moving back in with their parents.

And don't talk to me about public opinion polls, which seem to be driving the Social Security strategy. Polls take temperatures. Did last year's poll showing that young people support privatization mean that young people wanted to do away with Social Security? No. Those polls showed only what young people value, that we want to take ownership over our own economic futures.