Social Security is the new centerpiece of national political discourse, and — surprise surprise — is being sold as another gloom-and-doom “crisis.”

But what does the public really know about the state of Social Security? Privatization supporters claim that the system will go bankrupt while offering few specifics as to why this would actually occur.

These pesky details are left out because the equation comes straight from the Enron playbook. In order for Social Security to dry up four decades from now, the economy would have to grow at a rate of about one-half of its actual growth rate in the last century. This is, needless to say, an unlikely scenario.

In other words, there is no “crisis” in Social Security. Claims of such amount simply to uninformed scare tactics. This is nothing new. According to the Texas Observer, George W. Bush was claiming in 1978 that if Social Security wasn’t privatized, it would go bankrupt in a decade. Well, it didn’t. And if we are to believe Social Security today is much healthier than it was in 1978, then we can again only conclude that there is nothing to worry about.

There are, however, real problems in the safety net. The state of Medicare, for example, warrants all the gloom and doom rhetoric misdirected at Social Security. The 2003 Medicare prescription drug package is a disaster waiting to happen.

When the White House originally campaigned for the Medicare bill, it was withholding its own report indicating that the prescription drug package would cost $534 billion in its first 10 years — $134 billion more than it had claimed. Why the Bush administration hid that information — which should obviously have been made up-front and public in a democratic society — one can only guess.

Continuing in this theme, the Medicare vote itself was also rife with irregularities and criminal behavior. Nick Smith, a Republican and former congressman from Michigan, wrote that he was financially bribed and politically intimidated into voting “yes” on the Medicare bill.

In this context of deceit and extortion, it is not surprising that the 2003 Medicare passage is expected to balloon in cost and create problems. The end result will provide the context for more “reform” — and it will probably be offered by the same Republican Party that engineered the situation in the first place.

Social Security, as opposed to Medicare, is fine — so leave it alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There are bigger fish to fry.