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IN YOUR PRIME
Social Security: Reform, or Dismantle?
Q. I’ve read thousands of self-serving words on Social Security and the alleged “crisis” but I’ve yet to learn how you feel about this partisan public debate. What gives?
A. In the interest of doing my homework, I drove to nearby Warm Springs, Georgia to spend time around the Little White House, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of Social Security, lived and worked for a time.
Here, wife Jan and I immersed ourselves in the history, and lore, of our only four-term president, a man of wealth and education who came to understand the simple life, and hard times, of the working poor among his Georgia neighbors.
When this man with iron braces on his legs first arrived, few of these mountain people had electricity or running water and the nation was failing, held down by the Great Depression. Roosevelt, a patrician from New York, was crippled by incurable polio, yet gave little quarter to his handicap.
Out of this unlikely confluence between the striving, complex and innovative Roosevelt, rubbing up against hard-scrabble rural families, the future president learned to be empathetic…even as Georgians came to know a politician whom they might believe, and trust.
I suggest this history is relevant to the understanding of the Social Security program: its intent, its purpose and what it has accomplished since 1935. Many current recipients express similar sentiments:
“I am a widow, 75 years old, and well educated,” begins Barbara A. Hail, of Rhode Island. “If the Social Security trust funds were respected as a ‘trust’ by the government, there would be no (alleged) crisis.
“One has to surmise that President Bush’s desire is to dismantle the system because he does not believe in its underlying principle, that government is obligated to supply a safety net for its people—for sickness, disability, and old age…”
This woman alone continues, saying she was widowed with three small children, not yet 35 years old, when her first check arrived. “Had it not been for Social Security, I would not have been able to send all three to college; I would have had to leave them to go to work much earlier than I did.
“It is for these unexpected life events the safety net has been created, and it needs to stay in place.”
Barbara Hail suggests George W. Bush “believes in upwardly mobile achievers, not in those who cannot help themselves.” Of course, the president is not alone with his convictions, and this is part of what troubles me about our current administration. I am reminded the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, sometimes called the greatest preacher of our time, writes: “We don’t have to be ‘successful,’ only valuable. We don’t have to make money, only a difference, and particularly in the lives society counts least, and puts last.”
Now, it profits us to look at the record: the federal deficit for 2004 was a record-setting, and dismaying, $412 billion. Moreover, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that, following Mr. Bush’s 2005 budget, our deficit will stay at $200 billion for the next 10 years! Is this then the man to lead us into some untested, poorly explained economic experiment, all cloaked in the neat language of “a reform”?
Sorry, Mister President, I stand with AARP on Social Security. I rise to the message of Executive Director William Novelli, who states: “Transforming the health care system may well be the most important thing we can do to improve the quality of life for everyone, deliver care more rationally and cost-effectively and make Medicare and Medicaid sustainable for the long run.” This is what Franklin Roosevelt might say, too---first things first!
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Outrageous Associations
