A commitment to aiding the poor and the elderly

Laura Vandersomething, wrote a column in USA Today yesterday (commenting on a lot of day-old bread today, since Blogger was bloggedly wretched yesterday) that was so full of misdirection and faulty reasoning as to be almost unintelligalbe (her main point seemed to be that twenty-somethings would gladly pay off the transition costs to kill of Social Security, just as long as they could have private accounts in place ten years from now...right).

But my favorite bit was this. She complains that Social Security is a "pyramid scheme" (are there no editors at USA Today who can weed out patent untruths such as that one?), that survives only because guvmint bribes "wealthy retirees" with benefits that will bankrupt the system before she and her ilk...er...generation sees a dime. Her solution, in addition to private accounts for younguns like herself?

So, sometime in my lifetime, Social Security will explode in the form of tax hikes or borrowing, all because of an attempt to alleviate elderly poverty in a way that makes no sense. It is true that one-third of Social Security recipients rely on it for 90% of their income. But we can aid the elderly poor who can't work or rely on family without propping up a pyramid scheme that pays off wealthy retirees to buy support for the system [emphasis added].

How we're to aid these people she doesn't go into. Maybe she's on to something, though. After all, there's nothing Americans and their lawmakers like more these days than funding government programs to aid the poor.

...the Senate Finance Committee is instructed to cut $15 billion over five years in programs over which it has jurisdiction. The Medicaid program is likely to account for nearly all, if not all, of the cuts by the Finance Committee[2]. Thus, the Medicaid cuts may be far larger than the savings that would be achieved by enacting the Medicaid proposals in the President’s budget that have drawn sharp criticism from the nation’s governors; the Medicaid changes the President proposed would save $7.6 billion over five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. These Medicaid cuts are likely to push hard-pressed states to eliminate coverage for a substantial number of low-income people, increasing the ranks of the uninsured and the underinsured.

FDR's genius was in making Social Security not a program simply to bail out the poor, but as an insurance program available to all. That's why most Americans are opposed to preznit's vague plans. Preznit can't understand why Americans 55 or older are so fiercely opposed to privatization even though he repeatedly reassures him that their benefits won't be touched. Bush thinks it's because they've been brainwashed by Democrats into thinking that he's trying to kill their monthly checks. It's not. Older Americans are opposed to privatization because they are fiercely loyal to Social Security. They know how much it's meant to them and they want it there for their grandkids. Even if their grandkid is Laura Vanderkam.