Wednesday, August 13, 2003
(6:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Saving Social Security
Damn blogger -- it ate my post. Now I need to write it over again.
Here goes: I always enjoy reading posts from Fred Clark, a. k. a. the Slacktivist, for the following reasons:
- His site is uglier than mine.
- He is a lefty Christian, like the present writer.
- He consistently does more than the standard political blog formula of "link with snarky comment."
Today's post on Social Security is no exception. In it, he voices the very plausible theory that the whole point behind the record deficits is to force the government into bankrupcy so as to cut social programs, most notably Social Security. Here is a key paragraph on the fallacy of privatization plans:
(Frankly, anybody entertaining the idea of "privatizing" Social Security is either an idiot or an asshole. Either they mistakenly think of Social Security as some kind of government-run, mandated collection of IRAs, or else they think it is acceptable to steal from entire generations of working Americans. The former would make them an idiot, blathering about a program they do not even begin to understand. If they do understand the program, and they want to break this trust anyway then, well, they're an asshole.)
Many people do mistakenly believe that Social Security is some kind of savings account that you cash in on later in life, and in fact many politically attuned people insist that that was what it was "intended" to be and thus that privatization is in the spirit of the original idea. They are incorrect: Social Security is much more socialistic than that -- just read the post to understand why this program goes against a lot of the individualistic and capitalist propaganda on which our nation was founded. That is the reason that conservatives are usually so opposed to it, and that is the reason that it must be preserved. Every decade or so, another crisis comes up, and every decade or so, another solution is found. Daniel Patrick Moynihan engineered the "salvation" of Social Security, and Bill Clinton, prompted by the deficit-obsessed Republicans, was able to put our nation on a path that would have financed Social Security easily for the next forty years, giving us plenty of time to come up with solutions to fit the financial circumstances of the coming decades.
It will not fail inevitably -- the failure of Social Security is a choice. Democrats need to learn how to say that, or if they can't, then someone else does, so that the Democrats can rip that someone else off.
