Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) made news early in his presidential campaign for declaring Social Security, one of the federal government’s most popular and successful programs, unconstitutional. He hit the headlines again just two weeks later when, during a campaign stop in Iowa, he called it a “Ponzi scheme.”

But now, as part of a million dollar ad buy meant to resuscitate his campaign before the Iowa caucuses, Perry is attempting to pitch himself as a defender of Social Security. Decrying Washington’s “political correctness,” Perry claims he isn’t allowed to say that “Washington insiders are bankrupting Social Security,” an interesting claim given his apparent desire to fully dismantle it:

PERRY: Washington is the capital of political correctness, where double speak reigns and truth is frowned upon. You can’t say that congressmen becoming lobbyists is a form of legal corruption or that we give aid money to countries that oppose America. Or that Washington insiders are bankrupting Social Security. You and I know it’s true, but not politically correct. I’m Rick Perry, an outsider who will overhaul Washington and tell you the truth.

Watch it:

Perry first declared Social Security unconstitutional in August, telling The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano that the Founding Fathers weren’t “thinking about a federally operated program of pensions” when they drafted the Constitution. He then made the infamous Ponzi scheme remark two weeks later. He’s also offered support for a privatization plan that has been a proven failure.

Perry isn’t the only Republican who has targeted Social Security in the past, but is trying to paint himself as a defender of the program now. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) also called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, yet claimed (inaccurately) that Democrats were bankrupting the program last week. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R), a proponent of privatization, made the same false claim.

Perry and his Republican friends continue to ignore basic facts about Social Security and its future. Despite Perry’s claims, Social Security not going bankrupt — it has a $2.6 trillion surplus and is fully solvent for at least another 25 years — and it’s long-term viability isn’t hard to fix. The problem is, Perry and his GOP colleagues continue to willingly ignore the easiest way to ensure Social Security’s solvency for the next three-quarters of a century.

As some Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA), are growing worried that opposing a payroll tax cut extension will undercut their message as anti-tax zealots, other Republicans have opposed the extension at every turn. Despite their staunch opposition to raising taxes on millionaires, these Republicans have cycled through the reasons to avoid providing a tax cut to the middle class that would allow the average family to pocket an extra $1,000 a year.

The latest argument to emerge from the GOP has been that extending the payroll tax cut would undermine Social Security, since payroll tax revenue goes directly into the Social Security Trust Fund. Multiple Congressional Republicans have adopted that theory of late, including South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R), who put it to use on CNBC last night:

DEMINT: Republicans are always ready to cut taxes, as you know. We don’t think it’s a good idea to do it by raiding Social Security.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) made the same argument on Fox News earlier in the day:

PAUL: Well, you know, Social Security is $6 trillion short of money. So the president is advocating reducing the amount of funding to Social Security when they’re already $6 trillion short. So it doesn’t really make any sense and it really argues that he’s going to bankrupt Social Security even quicker by reducing it’s funding.

Watch a compilation:

That argument, which has been adopted by members of both parties and perpetuated by news outlets like NPR, has one problem: it’s not true. Each of the plans under consideration is fully paid for, replacing revenue the Social Security Trust Fund would have lost from lower payroll tax receipts with money made up from either alternative revenue sources or spending cuts. The earlier payroll tax holiday, set to expire this month, was also fully-funded, and the program has thus far “been held harmless” from the holiday, as Reuters noted today.

And while the opposition from Republicans may seem like an impassioned defense of a vital and popular program, a look at their history with the program shows it is not. DeMint has supported privatizing the program while Paul is a proponent of means testing — “solutions” that are both bad policy and unnecessary. Despite Paul’s $6 trillion assertion, Social Security actually has a $2.6 trillion surplus and is solvent through at least 2037.

And if Republicans truly want to use the payroll tax to shore up its long-term viability, there is an easy way to do that. The payroll tax is currently collected only on the first $106,800 in income; raising or eliminating that cap would make the program fully solvent for the next 75 years.

If Republicans have a cogent reason for opposing a tax cut for the middle class that is meant to stimulate the economy, they should provide it, because their current line — that such a tax cut will weaken a program many of them have sought to undermine for years — simply isn’t true.

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich today released his latest big idea: a return to Bush-style Social Security privatization. Gingrich has been quite vocal in his support for privatized Social Security accounts, but today marked the first time that he laid out specifics as to how he would gut one of the most successful programs in American history.

First, Gingrich explains that he would let workers opt into private accounts, just like Bush’s suggested system. Gingrich points to two models that inspired him to suggest this approach: privatized retirement accounts in both Chile and Galveston, Texas. He added the caveat that, should private accounts fail to deliver the same return as minimum Social Security benefits, the government would step in and make investors whole again:

The government guarantees that all workers with personal accounts will receive at least as much in retirement as they would under the current Social Security system. If someone with a personal account retires with benefits lower than those offered by the current system, the Treasury will send them a check to make up the difference. Thus, there is a legal government obligation that in a worst case scenario a retiree will be able to enjoy benefits at least as good as they would under th e traditional Social Security system.

Watch him explain the idea at a campaign event today:

As we pointed out when Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) suggested a similar idea, promising to make investors whole again sets up a huge moral hazard problem. If investors know full well that the government is going to provide them with a minimum benefit, no matter what they do, then the incentive is to make risky investments and hope for a big payoff. After all, why not take the risk if the government has guaranteed that you can’t lose money? Investors have every incentive to bet big in the hopes of a large payout, because if they go bust, the government will bail them out.

Add to this the fact that the privatized systems in Chile and Galveston aren’t as wonderful as Gingrich makes out. In fact, while they work quite well for the wealthy, middle- and lower-income participants wind up worse off. Regarding the Galveston system, Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University, explained that “for most people, it’s somewhere between ‘very bad’ and ‘not very good.’ ” Chile’s system, meanwhile, has “left millions without savings for their retirement.” According to estimates by Chile’s undersecretary for pensions, “in 2007, only 60 percent of Chilean workers had some kind of pension coverage, down from 86 percent in the 1970s.”

Gingrich’s plan would also cause the deficit to explode, as money meant for Social Security would have to be diverted into the creation and administration of private accounts. Social Security kept 14 million seniors out of poverty last year, but Gingrich would enact a scheme to privatize the system, while hoisting the costs of failure onto the federal government.

Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail have spent much of the year trying to gut social safety net programs vital to the livelihood of America’s poor and elderly citizens. From House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-ending budget plan to multiple proposals from the GOP’s presidential candidates, conservatives have sought to extract massive cuts from important programs, even while supplying the wealthiest Americans with massive tax cuts.

But Americans continue to rely heavily on safety net programs to stay afloat, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). Without the permanent safety net programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and various assistance programs) and temporary programs included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (which Republicans have falsely claimed didn’t work), more than a quarter of the country’s population would have fallen beneath the poverty line in 2010, CBPP says:

Our report also shows that if the government safety net as a whole — these temporary initiatives (all were featured in the 2009 Recovery Act) plus safety-net policies already in place when the recession hit — hadn’t existed in 2010, the poverty rate would have been 28.6 percent, nearly twice the actual 15.5 percent.

CBPP’s report comes on the heels of newly-refined poverty measures from the Census Bureau that painted an even bleaker picture of American poverty. According to the new measure, 16 percent of the population, or approximately 49.1 million Americans, lived in poverty in 2010, up from 46.2 million found in the official report released in September. The bulk of that difference comes from seniors, the very people who rely most on social safety net programs. Because the alternative measure takes out-of-pocket medical expenses into account, it found that nearly 16 percent of those over age 65 lived in poverty in 2010, up from 9 percent in the September report.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) views on Social Security have been well-chronicled since he jumped into the Republican presidential primary in July. In the past, Perry has called Social Security unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme, and in his first debate appearance, he called it a “monstrous lie.” Perry’s assertions were obviously incorrect, and he drew the ire of fellow candidates like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and GOP strategists like Karl Rove, who called Perry’s extreme views “toxic” for the Republican Party.

At other points, Perry mentioned that Social Security should be returned to the states, a “solution” that is economically impossible. Today, however, Perry walked all of that back, choosing instead to join his GOP colleagues in their support of privatizing Social Security. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining his new economic plan, Perry touted the benefits of “personal” accounts, the GOP’s buzzword for privatization:

Cut, Balance and Grow also gives younger workers the option to own their Social Security contributions through personal retirement accounts that Washington politicians can never raid. Because young workers will own their contributions, they will be free to seek a market rate of return if they choose, and to leave their retirement savings to their dependents when they die.

Unfortunately for Perry, this move amounts to dropping support for a plan so toxic it couldn’t even garner consideration in favor of a plan that, while slightly less toxic, has already been rejected by the American people. Republican attempts to privatize Social Security went down in flames in 2005, and even now, with the GOP telling Americans the system is broken and ignoring the easiest way to shore up its long-term solvency, voters continue to reject the idea of privatizing one of the government’s most popular programs.

Perhaps that’s because the American people know just how dangerous private Social Security accounts could be. According to a Center for American Progress study, an October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in a private Social Security account due to the financial crisis, and that analysis was done before the market hit its floor in the spring of 2009. When millions of senior citizens lost nearly all of their retirement savings in their own private investment accounts, Social Security was the only income they had left. As a result, the program kept 14 million seniors out of poverty in 2010.

While Perry has apparently ditched his Ponzi scheme talk, the idea that his plan for Social Security is as safe as the current program is its own monstrous lie. If that wasn’t bad enough, Perry also supports raising the age at which retirees would become eligible for Social Security, another incredibly regressive idea.