Kim Gandy is president of the National Organization for Women .

Using a combination of shell-game math and "the sky is falling" rhetoric, proponents of Social Security privatization are trying to frighten us into giving up the only guaranteed family safety and retirement insurance that this country provides, while wooing our support for private accounts with visions of big bucks from playing the stock market.

This well-orchestrated media extravaganza has all the bells and whistles of a political rock concert, complete with a 60-day campaign tour by George W. Bush. The president wraps himself in the flag and packs arenas with audiences of the faithful-by invitation only, natch-cheering the carefully scripted stories from "real people." But those rose-colored glasses just make me see red.

Make no mistake, privatizing Social Security will be financially devastating for women. Without this essential social insurance program, more than half of women over 65 would be living in poverty. Social Security provides a guaranteed monthly income to retired workers, to workers who become disabled and to survivors of deceased workers. It is time-tested, extremely cost efficient and-most importantly-it works. Fortunately, the public is becoming more skeptical, not less. 

We must debunk the myths and tell the whole truth, so that everyone with an interest in this fight understands how the system works and what is at stake. As always, knowledge truly is power.

What Are Privatizers Selling?

They are selling panic and trying to create a sense of crisis to convince people to do something that they wouldn't do if they had full information and knew the true consequences of their actions. 

In selling a vaguely defined "plan," President Bush and other administration representatives gloss over their own fiscally irresponsible decisions, like the Medicare prescription drug boondoggle and the administration's tax-cuts, not to mention the Iraq war, and how those decisions have helped run up the largest deficit in history. Then they want to use the very deficit they've created as an excuse to undermine Social Security.

Bush's rather fuzzy plan, which is difficult to separate from the spin, seems to be based on these ideas:

. Drastically cut Social Security's promised benefits for workers under age 55-cuts of 30 percent by 2045, 45 percent by 2065-and trust that workers will be able to make up the difference by putting a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts to be invested in Wall Street. 

. When a worker retires, she or he will be required to pay back the government some portion of that money, and use the rest to purchase a private annuity with a monthly payout-hopefully enough to supplement the reduced Social Security check if the market hasn't crashed lately.
. Those under age 55 who choose not to participate will still have their Social Security benefits cut-so the "opt out" is really not a choice at all.

. Bush's most recent proposal includes reducing benefits to workers making $25,000 or more a year in 2012 dollars ($20,000 in today's dollars). Workers earning below that would receive the same level of benefits promised under the current system-not an increase, as has been reported.