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.