I first blogged this Bush scam to help the rich and feed money to companies in the financial services industry in August. That started like this:

Scam Alert: Watch Out For "Ownership Society" And "Investor Class"

Both terms are warning signals of this administration's new push to sell the privatization of health care and social security.

Before you buy into it, ask yourself: "Who benefits?"

The answer is: "Those who have more money than they need already."

Privatization of health care and social security gives them more places to stash the cash without paying any taxes. This plan also gets more money out of the U.S. Treasury and into the coffers of private financial institutions.

And will require a tax increase or cuts in benefits.[The complete post , opens in new window]

At the time, I got reactions that ranged from understanding to posts that threw around words like "marxist fantasy" (referring to the Federal Reserve, no less), "neverland" and other weirdnesses.

But it's even more of a scam than I thought.

This month, we have a new report from the Chicago Business School that has specifics on just how big the payoff to Republican campaign contributors will be:

Creating individual accounts in the social security system would lead to a massive increase in payments of financial fees to private financial management companies ... the net present value of such payments would be $940 billion.

Rather than using the money to close the social security gap, the plan would transfer this money to private financial managers and mutual fund companies.

The fees would be the largest windfall gain in American financial history.

For a worker at the average income level, the fees in privately managed accounts are likely to reduce the ultimate retirement value of their individual accounts by 20 percent for the intermediate case.

[PDF file: The Fees of Private Accounts and the Impact of Social Security Privatization on Financial Managers Austan Goolsbee/University of Chicago, G.S.B./September 2004]

On top of which, as I said in the first piece, the Bush plan will require another $2 trillion to cover the shortfall in payments to present social security recipients.

Clearly the Bush plan for an "ownership society" is a plan designed to give those who already own most of this society even more by taking it away from American workers.

For background, a study from the U. S. Federal Reserve (not a marxist organization) gives us a great perspective on the current distribution of wealth. This chart shows the percentage of all the assets owned by different tiers of net worth:

How to read: "The top 50% of households based on net worth own 98.6% of all stocks, including direct ownership and mutual funds, and 94.4% of all stocks and housing in the U.S. The bottom 50% of U. S. households own only 5.6% of stocks and housing."