Social Security

Dan here…Via the LA Times and LA Times and Common Dreams comes information on the first day of the new Congress on Social Security. Old ideas re-emerge in the variety of coverage in media.  Here is an excerpt on the issue.

According to:

Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, authors of the book Social Security Works! and members of the advocacy group of the same name, what would otherwise have been the “dry, mundane exercise” of adopting new rules in the House was “turned into a stealth attack on America’s working families.”

Like previous “stealth attacks” on Social Security, write Altman and Kingson, the small rule change shows “the groundwork is being laid in advance” for a larger attack on the program as a whole and described the tactics of Republicans determined to destroy the program, regardless of the costs, as “hostage-taking.” In their analysis, the GOP ploy involves playing disparate groups within the system off one another with the ultimate goal of drastically reducing the program for everyone—current and future beneficiaries alike. They write:

One of the strengths of Social Security is its universality.  It is based on the principle that we are stronger together.  It is an old tactic of the program’s opponents to seek to divide and conquer.  They seek to turn young against old by falsely claiming that too much is being spent on the old.  They seek to turn African Americans against whites with the preposterous claim that Social Security is unfair to blacks.  (We document and refute these and many other claims in our new book). This time they seek to drive a wedge between retired workers and disabled workers by claiming that reallocation helps the disabled at the expense of the old – another preposterous claim.  All of these divide-and-conquer strategies are intended to turn Americans against each other so that all of their benefits can be cut.