Social Security turns 70 today, but it’s not enjoying its golden
years.
Social Security turns 70 today, but it’s not enjoying its golden years.
Today, on the anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act, our modest national retirement system is at war with economic Darwinians, who want to kill it.
If you were born on August 12, 1935, you grew up in an America that has always had a retirement safety net. Your parents may have danced through the Roaring 20s, but they probably struggled to feed you during the Depression 30s. Saving for retirement was a distant dream to them.
By the time they were ready to retire they may have been much better off, but not everyone was. Social Security promised a modicum of dignity in old age. Your parents knew from experience that the Social Security system was a just and humane idea whose time had come.
Now the economic Darwinians want to take that system away, to replace the government’s guarantee of a minimum income when you are no longer able to work with private accounts that have no guarantees at all. They want to return the United States to August 11, 1935, because they believe that government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy. What they don’t tell you is that they want a system that guarantees both.
That’s what this debate has been about – not the health of the system.
Various plans have been floated based on the premise that the system is in crisis. It isn’t. We’ve been using the Social Security surplus to mask the real size of the budget deficit for years, but that surplus, along with ongoing payroll taxes, make the system good until at least 2042 – or longer, depending on whose numbers you believe. After that benefits may have to be cut, but a modest increase in the payroll tax now would fix that.
Increased taxes a problem for you? It’s cheaper than borrowing the $2 trillion that the economic Darwinians will need to privatize the system. But no matter. It’s a small price to pay, they believe, for driving a stake through the heart of FDR’s signature program.
The very idea of social security offends the economic Darwinians’ idea of the natural order. They try to stigmatize any suggestion that Americans should use government to create such a system by labeling it creeping socialism. They are class warriors from the top who believe that big disparities in wealth are a sign of a robust economy.
Economic despair is the visible evidence that they won and others have lost, and that’s just as important as the bling-bling that gives their lives meaning, along with the yachts and fancy cars. They view Social security as a sop the government has tossed at your feet, and even that offends them.
Economic Darwinians have been at war with Franklin Roosevelt’s America since they day it became law – and with George Bush in the White House, they have come as close as ever to turning back the clock to August 11, 1935. The administration likes to call his brave new world an “ownership society,” but to Warren Buffet, no slouch when it comes to economic success, it looks more like, in his words, a “sharecroppers society,” where average Americans toil not for their own success, but for someone else’s.
The signs of the growing economic disparities are not hard to find.
According to a recent in-depth series in the New York Times on class in America, the average income for the top .1 percent has increased from $1.2 million to $3 million since 1980. Their share of the nation’s income doubled, while the share of the bottom 90 percent fell. Bush’s tax cuts have only widened these gaps.
Forty-plus million American have no health care, private pension plans are going bust, and a new bankruptcy law – a law most Americans used not because they spent irresponsibly, but because tragedies like medical emergency made it necessary – now protects credit card companies instead of you.
Despite all that, the economic Darwinians want to undermine a program that doesn’t promise comfort in old age, it only guarantees that you won’t starve – which is something a lot of Americans did before August 12, 1935.
