As I believe I’ve written before, I have a pretty strong belief in maintaining a strong social security program. My family depended on Social Security survivors benefits, along with other socialistic stuff like worker’s compensation, to survive after my father died. Right now I represent a lot of social security claimants, and I see how important the system is for so many people.
George Bush failed to destroy social security when he made a more or less frontal assault on the program in 2005. Given the fact he’d lost so the trust of so many, he wasn’t able to pull the con job of persuading people that “privatization” was a harmless little word.
But the right wing is nothing if not persistent. If they can’t take a position by direct assault, they’ll try a sneak attack. At the moment their trying to sell cuts in Social Security and Medicare as a necessity to balance the budget. Social Security is an off budget program that pays for itself, so the argument makes no sense from an economic standpoint, but that makes no difference.
Obama has promised not to let the Republicans privatize the program, but as Dean Baker notes here, this tells us nothing about his real intentions, because privatization is not where the action is: the Republicans have moved on to stealth benefit cuts:
President Obama is telling us that he will stand up against Republican plans to privatize Social Security.
That is nice to hear, but it really is beside the point. President Bush did try to privatize Social Security in 2005 and, no doubt, many Republicans would still like to do so today, but privatization is not currently on the agenda of their leadership. The immediate threat to Social Security is plans to cut benefits by either changing the benefit formula and/or raising the retirement age.
This threat comes not just from the Republican Party, but from the top levels of the Democratic Party as well. Rep. Steny Hoyer, the majority leader in the House, explicitly called for raising the retirement age to 70 in a speech earlier this summer. Erskine Bowles, the co-chairman of the deficit commission appointed by President Obama, also explicitly said that cuts to Social Security would be on the agenda of the deficit commission. Of course, former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, the Republican that President Obama appointed as the other co-chair of the commission, never misses an opportunity to say that he wants to cut Social Security.
It has become quite fashionable in elite policy circles to call for Social Security cuts like raising the retirement age. In fact, support for cutting Social Security is almost a requirement for being accepted as a serious person in places like The Washington Post opinion pages and other centers of elite opinion.
The entire article is worth reading. If Obama buys into cutting social security benefits, or even concedes that the program has fundamental problems (which he has hinted on occasion) then he will be a reverse Nixon. Just as only a Republican could go to China, only a Democrat can destroy social security, which is the ultimate objective of all of these plans. The “fix” for social security is obvious: raise the amount of earnings subject to the social security tax. Problem solved, and for once, the more affluent have to share some of the burden. We do have the right to know where Obama, and the rest of the candidates, Republican and Democrats, stand on this issue. But of course, we have more important things to talk about, like whether some Muslims should be able to have a prayer room in their community center.
The irony is, as always, that the deficit hawks on social security are the same folks who are anxious to, as Paul Krugman writes, “cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country“.
In a rational world we would be amazed that anyone would want to destroy a program that works so well and so efficiently. But the fact is, the Republicans, and some like minded Democrats, don’t want to destroy Social Security despite the fact that it works so well. They want to destroy it because it works so well. After all, if people see one government program working, they might get the idea that other government programs could also improve their lives.
