> Paul Henry Rosenberg said:
>
> [re Social Security]
> But there's more: it was the conservatives who originally insisted that
> SS *NOT* be an investment vehicle. It's very important to make the
> point that it wasn't a liberal plan to set things up this way -- it was
> the result of negotiations in which liberals got the plan through, but
> not in the form they originally envisioned.
>
> Me:
> This is news to me. Do you mean during the negotiations in the 30s?
> Could you give me some pointers?
>From my webpage, The Conservative Attack on Social Security
(http://home1.gte.net/rad/ss_inf/ss_inf_1.htm):
Claim: Social Security is a liberal bureaucratic waste. We'd make much more money investing it in the stock market.
Truth: It was CONSERVATIVES who originally prevented Social Security funds from being invested in the stock market. This was part of their long-term efforts to undermine Social Security.
"Social Security has been a fixture for so long -- since 1935 -- that we take it for granted. But until the 1950s, it was hotly contested. In its early years, conservatives pursued two strategies to undermine it: They tried to limit who could benefit from it, and they opposed the accumulation of a vast government-managed pool of investment funds for Social Security."
"These early critics of Social Security claimed that aiding the least privileged of society was their top priority. They advocated minimal 'flat-rate' pensions for anyone in extreme need, while arguing that the nation could not 'afford' to pay for pensions calibrated to middle-class incomes. Why would conservatives want to help the poor first? Because it made political sense. The last thing Republicans and business leaders wanted was for middle-income Americans to gain a stake in a large, popular federal government program. Conservatives, then and now, know it's far easier to minimize -- or eliminate -- programs that benefit only the poor."
"Critics also campaigned hard against the government investing accumulated payroll taxes in interest-generating securities -- even though that would have been the most fiscally sound plan for the long run. Again, their political logic was paramount: They wanted to minimize government's role as much as possible."
"Conservatives largely prevailed on the matter of investments, but over the decades they lost the struggle to keep the middle class out of Social Security. By the late 1970s, most American families had a big stake in Social Security."
Theda Skocpol, "Déjà views: Attacks on Social Security are as old as the program Itself." Mother Jones, Nov-Dec 1996 (http://bsd.mojones.com/mother_jones/ND96/deja.html)
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"