>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Seth Ackerman" <sethackerman1 at verizon.net>
>-The example you use disproves your argument. Bush failed to get rid of
>-Social Security because it was a big, comprehensive, universal program.
>-If it had only covered, say, workers at Wal-Mart, it would have been
>-easy to junk.
>
>Your answer is incoherent to the point I made.
>
>Of course, a radical goal is attaining universal coverage, partly because it
>is harder to reverse. And despite the idea that social security was
>attained in one big bang in the 1930s, the coverage of more employers and
>extent of benefits was expanded step-by-step over the decades. It was only
>in the 1950s that coverage was expanded beyond a limited number of jobs in
>commerce and industry, and only 1956 was disability insurance added.
>
>Similarly, minimum wage had relatively limited coverage in its initial
>version and only slowly was extended to most employees in the country.
>Both programs were expanded only incrementally from a limited number of
>employers to most employees in the economy. Specifically, minimum wage
>only applied to the largest employers in retail initially, much like the
>fair share bills, and slowly over the years was extended to smaller retail
>establishments.
>
>Universal programs are the goal but none in the United states were ever
>created wholecloth covering all workers in the economy. That was a hard
>incremental set of campaigns.
>
>Why people can have the ahistorical delusion that universal health care can
>ignore that pattern is beyond me? A campaign for single payer would defy
>all previous history around both social security and minimum wage laws that
>always required incremental campaigns to achive universality.
>
>Nathan Newman
>
>
>
Sorry, but the fact that a program was later expanded is hardly evidence that it wasn't universal at the beginning. Social Security and Medicare are the two programs that have proven most immune from right-wing attack. Medicare was born universal and Social Security was practically universal - i.e., it covered a solid cross-class majority from the start (everyone but farm and domestic workers - and yes, I know the sordid reasons behind that).
The fact that these programs covered a majority of workers at the start is precisely what provided the political support for their being subsequently expanded.
Programs that are consciously designed to be limited strictly to workers with the least political clout (e.g., Walmart employees) are sitting ducks.
Seth