So What’s Cockeyed George Bush Really Up to With Social Security

I live in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Portland, OR that has long been inhabited by the families of corporate titans, hard-bitten entrepreneurs, doctors, and the lawyers who service them. This neighborhood, called “Portland Heights,” was founded in the late 1800s by wealthy east coast transplants and nouveau riche lumbermen.

Legend has it that in those early days, efforts to consolidate power and wealth among a close-knit group of lumber families resulted in a fair amount of inbreeding. So much so that by the middle 1930s some of their progeny had developed an inherited Portland Heights trait, characterized by droopy ears and one eye slightly lower than the other—somewhat akin to the Hapsburg chin. Actually it looks kind of cute in the children.

We’re well into the sixth generation of those Portland Heights founding fathers, and most of their offspring have long ago pissed away the their inherited lumber fortunes. But on occasion, while shopping at the 100-year-old local grocery store called Stroheckers, you will catch sight of person, often dressed in disheveled preppy clothes, who is noticeably cockeyed and droopy eared. They’re not all gone.

Which brings me to the subject of this blog entry: What is our cockeyed president really up to with his proposed Social Security reforms?

Bush won the election (this time somewhat fair and somewhat square). He’s got his much vaunted “political capital” burning a hole in his pocket. And what does he decide to spend this capital on—a major overhaul of the Social Security system—the fabled third rail of politics. He has two years to make his mark, and he chooses not only a near impossible task, but one that most people are ambivalent about.

Have he and the man behind the curtain made a terrible blunder or is there more to this than meets the eye?

I say the latter. Bush is dead serious and we had better watch out. I believe he and his chief advisor Carl Rove are out to do to the American social welfare state what bin Laden did to the World Trade Center. This includes not only Social Security, but all the new deal/great society programs that are still intact. They’re doing this because as neo-con ideologues, they believe that these remnants of liberal excesses are wasteful government spending that impedes the accumulation of wealth by the privileged. They’re also doing this because somehow in their demented minds they have convinced themselves that smaller government and an “ownership society” will ultimately be more beneficial to the poor and underprivileged.

They’re going after Social Security in particular both because it is one of the centerpieces of the social welfare safety net and because they can attack it without incurring the wrath that they would if they tried to do away with welfare or food stamps. And their attack is clever: appeal to the young with the idea of converting Social Security from an insurance program to an investment program. Everyone understands that. Get rid of the corporate pension system and put everyone in 401Ks and Roth IRAs, which are transportable and can be willed to your heirs. At the same time, appeal to the liberals by suggesting means testing of benefits for middle-class and affluent pensioners. That kind of looks like you are taxing the rich and giving to the poor. The liberals should love that.

It sounds good, but … To pay for Social Security savings accounts, we’ll have to do some combination of raising the FICA tax, raiding the Social Security reserve fund, and tinkering with ages of eligibility. None of these things are going to be very palatable to anyone over 40. And if you put too sever a means test on the middle-class, they’ll rebel against Social Security with or without personal savings plans.

Bush's plan seem crazy to me, but the “red staters” may buy it. Even if Bush gets only a fraction of the Social Security reforms he’s asking for by the mid-term elections, I think he and Rove believe that major democratic opposition to his plan may be enough to bring the conservatives (traditional or neo-cons) to the polls en mass and swing the balance of power in Congress even further to the right. Then, even though he will be well into the lame duck part of his last term, he might have enough power to wreak havoc in his last two years. God only knows what he could do with his court appointments, Roe vs. Wade, and wholesale overhauls of social programs if he had 60 Republican senators.

Bush is not going to be out of Iraq by the end of his term, his foreign policy initiatives seem to be going nowhere, and he’s not likely to get a further tax reduction for the rich. He’s chosen to make Social Security reform and a take over of the country by the red staters his big shot at greatness. And he seems pleased with his choice.

Can’t you just see him, standing in front of a Ferrari dealership in his cowboy hat and slightly disheveled preppy clothes, all cockeyed and droopy eared as he studies the shinny new cars, his annual trust fund check burnin’ a hole in his pocket. He knows what he is doing. Sure he does.

George Will's Exercise in Liberal Baiting

Yesterday on ABC's This Week, George Will made the statement [paraphrased] "Liberals have long known that the only way to create a program that benefits the poor is to create the program that benefits the middle class, then let the benefits trickle down to the poor."

Apparently President Bush has a corollary to this theory. The only way to create a program that benefits the middle class is to create a program that benefits the super rich then try to convince the middle class that those benefits will trickle down to them. God help they should trickle down to the poor as well.

Will made his comment in the context of a discussion of Bush's proposed Social Security reforms. At first I thought his comment was quite cogent: Social Security is funded largely by the affluent and the middle class with all economic classes benefiting. Then I started thinking about the other government programs for the poor—food stamps, aid to dependent children (welfare) and Medicaid being the most prominent. None of these programs originated to benefit the middle class. These were new deal/great society programs that were designed specifically to help the poor.

Take the case of food stamps for example. It was designed by then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (who later became Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt). It was instituted not to benefit the middle class, but to help starving farmers and their families and some believe to prevent a peasant revolt. ADS and Medicaid were great society programs, introduced during the Johnson administration. They were never intended to benefit the middle class, other than again to stave off class warfare.

This is not completely fair. Certainly, the populists and liberals who authored these programs were at least on one level genuinely trying to relive the plight of the poor. The conservatives who didn't approve of but tolerated these programs more likely saw them as the lesser of two evils: throw the poor a bone to avoid being bit on the ankle.

But back to the George Will statement. What he was really doing trying to do was entice the liberals to negotiate with the President on a purely neo-con driven initiative. This initiative being to cut the pins out from under the current Social Security system in the name of "much needed reform." Then create a new Social Security system that really only benefits the middle class and the affluent, and try to convince everyone that those benefits will also trickle down to the poor.

The liberals, rightfully so, are not taking this bait. But unfortunately, this neo-con pipe dream might have legs. Never discount Bush and the guy behind the curtain (Carl Rove).

I have many friends and acquaintances who for whatever reasons entered retirement with little or no savings and no pension. Without their social security checks, which often support only bare subsistence, their lives would be dismal, perhaps not worth living. (Of course in Oregon, we have a solution for that, but that's another story.)

People my age and older are not likely to be affected much by George Bush's tinkering with Social Security. But 50 years from now, when all we have to remember Bush by is a presidential library full of propaganda about this presidency, there may be many unfortunate senior citizens who find that there ain't much trickling down from what's left of the Social Security program.