Rep. John Boozman (R-AR), who has his party’s nomination for the Senate, has been taking some flack from Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) for being an enthusiastic supporter of privatizing Social Security. The Boozman camp is pushing back, claiming that Boozman does not support privatizing Social Security, but merely the creation of private Social Security accounts, according to Arkansas Republican Party spokeswoman Alice Stewart:

He supports a plan to allow young workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into personal investment accounts, these would be safe investments.

If that sounds a lot like privatization, that’s because it is. Like former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Boozeman is trying to relabel privatization with something that sounds more appealing: “personal investment.” But make no mistake: proponents of privatization didn’t change their plan, they just stopped calling it privatization when they realized that the word freaks people out. “The right discovered that ‘privatization’ polled badly. And suddenly, the term was a liberal plot,” Paul Krugman noted.

And Boozman has been an unabashed supporter of privatization. In 2001, he said that “the future of Social Security is dependent on creating a vehicle for private investment.” “I believe we must implement President Bush’s proposal to provide younger workers with the opportunity to invest part of their Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts,” he added. Boozman has also at least entertained the notion of supporting Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future, which would create privatized Social Security accounts.

Perhaps the most insidious part of Boozman’s plan is the assertion that only “safe investments” will be part of privatized accounts. As the Cunning Realist pointed out, proponents of privatization held up companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Citigroup — the poster-children of the economic collapse — as fail-safe bets for retirement accounts:

Would the government have allowed the Bear Stearns and Lehman outcomes had the Social Security system been chock full of those stocks? Remember, both were former blue chips, the sort of companies that proponents of private accounts insisted any new system would be limited to. The same for Citi, AIG, Fannie Mae, and others. How much pressure would the Fed and Treasury have felt — and what more would have been done — to keep those afloat and/or out of penny stock land?

Remember, even if we do nothing to Social Security at all, it can pay full benefits until 2037 and 75 percent of benefits for decades after that, which is very close to current benefit levels when adjusted for inflation. There is no Social Security crisis, and those pushing for privatization are using the public’s fear of deficits to push for a policy prescription they’ve desired for years.

This week, President Obama rolled out a plan to invest $50 billion in infrastructure as a way of boosting job creation, which will be (at least partially) paid for by cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies. Republicans immediately criticized the proposal, with even Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who typically jumps at the chance to approve infrastructure spending, saying he wouldn’t vote for it.

But many Republicans, at the same time that they are claiming that a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, are pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. At $830 billion, the price tag for extending that sliver of the Bush cuts is more than 16 times the cost of Obama’s infrastructure proposal:

Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI): Miller “said the Obama administration’s proposal amounts to a second, costly stimulus plan…Instead, she said, the president should quickly support an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all income groups.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): We don’t need more government ’stimulus’ spending. We need to end Washington Democrats’ out-of-control spending spree, [and] stop their tax hikes.

GOP Senate nominee Pat Toomey (PA): “Pat opposes more deficit spending and will fight for fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit in the Senate,” said Toomey spokesperson Nachama Soloveichik.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): After the administration pledged that a trillion dollars in borrowed stimulus money would create 4 million jobs and keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent, their latest plan for another stimulus should be met with justifiable skepticism…The administration wants to do it again — this time with higher taxes for even more new spending.

These Republicans all support extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans as a means of boosting the economy. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, investing in infrastructure provides far more bang for the buck than extending the Bush tax cuts.

In fact, extending the Bush tax cuts provides just 10 to 40 cents in economic activity for every dollar spent, compared with up to $1.20 for a dollar spent on infrastructure. As CBO said, “a permanent extension [of the Bush tax cuts] would entail large revenue losses after the recovery is over, so its effects on output and employment in the next few years per dollar of total budgetary cost would be much lower.”

Now, we shouldn’t pretend that Obama’s infrastructure plan is a silver bullet for job creation. Not only is it too small, infrastructure projects take some time to get up and running, so even if the measure does pass, the effects won’t be noticeable for quite a while. But if $50 billion (that will be at least partially paid for) is too expensive, then extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is definitely unaffordable as well.