Found this in the NYTimes letters page today:
I think that entitlements like Social Security
create a dependency on government that is more harmful than the ills they try to alleviate.
Since its inception, Social Security has done much to remove familial responsibilities that in the past were the bulwark of a stable and culturally sound society.
Quick quiz: can anyone tell me what economic class this guy calls home? When I read shit like this it truly makes me want to put my fist in the air and take back the means of production.
Only a soulless filthy rich child of privelge who never came within his yacht's lenght of even knowing a poor person could say that the "dependency" created by Social Security, the last line of defense keeping poor elderly people from having to eat dog food, is
worse than poor old folks having to eat dog food.
But I'm sure this is the next line to come out of the White House, or something like it, and they've set it up pretty well by painting Social Security as some sort of retirement account, as though we should all be able to buy a second home in the Keys and play tennis all day on our government checks. Anyone who's had the misfortune of having to live on a Social Security check alone knows this is utter bullshit, but of course these people are not who Bush needs to convince. It's the rest of us, who have grown up in a country that has by and large managed to eradicate the kind of abject poverty that was the norm during the early 1900's, before Social Security came along and changed it.
But according to this fuckhead Social Security is no longer to be thought of as a last lifeline to spare people from poverty in old age--which is what it was, is and has always been intended to be--but rather it's another incentive for people to be "lazy," the usual canard of the Steve "booga booga" Forbes/flat tax/Grover Norquist coalition of ruthless capitalists.
If enough people are convinced that Social Security is supposed to be a "retirement" account instead of a basic allowance for elderly people who otherwise would be eating dog food or living on the street--as they did in America before Social Security was enacted--then we will have lost an important battle in the frame wars. To most people like this asshole above, the very idea that poverty on that scale could exist in America is simply unthinkable. We need to find a way to remind people that that type of poverty doesn't exist anymore precisely because of the guaranteed nature of Social Security.
It seems to me that encouraging people to plan for their own retirement, either through more tax breaks on long term savings or other incentives, would be an effective countermeasure to this spin. This, coupled with a realistic reframing of the purpose of Social Security--literally, as a last line of defense stopping elderly people from having to eat dog food in the worst case, and a supplement to your own retirement in the best case--has to be done if we are going to win this debate in the public mind.