Social Security Bounces Back in Debate

February 17th, 2014

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Prof. Eric Kingson asked in class recently, “Has anyone in this room ever received Social Security benefits?”

He raised his hand because his father died when he was young. But he intended it, in part, as a rhetorical question, to which his answer was: “Every one of you has received something from Social Security from the day you were born.” The teacher of social work at Syracuse University said that each had gotten the gift of insurance.

“People largely take it for granted,” said Kingson, a cofounder and director of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “We assume it’s there. It’s seamless. It’s like the court systems, the highway systems. It functions. You can’t really imagine life without it.” But some have imagined and plotted a future without it, often with well-funded campaigns to cut the program.

Kingson said that in recent times, however, the supporters of the government-run insurance system have seen the debate tilt in their favor.

Shifting Debate

“You go back four  years, three years and  the policy discussion  on Social Security was: Do we cut it a lot, do we eviscerate it in the name of ‘strengthening’ it or do we just cut it a little? Those were the only two frames that were out there,” he said.

“The polarity has really shifted. Though there is a momentum still for those want to see some sort of a cut, the discussion now is much more about expanding benefits,” Kingson said.

“A funny thing happened on the way to the chained-CPI,” he said, referring to the plan to substitute a new way of adjusting Social Security’s annual cost of living increase for inflation.

“It was a Republican idea, but the [Obama] Administration proposed it as a way to gain Republican support for tax increases,” Kingson said.

“The press over time has picked up that it isn’t just a technical change. It’s a way to cut benefits,” he added. “I think that realization has sunk in.

“Many Democrats came out against some proposals, one of them being the chained-CPI,” he added. And the reasons for the shift in the debate over time? “Persistence and knowledge,” he said. -Experts like Kingson have had to counter well-funded efforts that argue for drastic cuts to Social Security, as well as to Medicare and Medicaid. Billionaire and former Nixon cabinet member Peter G. Peterson alone has spent in excess of $400 million in an attempt to link these programs to the issue of the national debt.

Such campaigns have had the greatest impact on media pundits and politicians from both parties in Washington, but not so much, if at all, among voters, in Kingson’s view.

A poll in mid-November taken in 10 states that will face competitive Senate races showed that up to three-quarters of voters said they would punish any candidate who voted for cuts in Social Security, while two-thirds supported an increase in benefits.

Fighting Bad Proposals

“All of the emphasis has been on fighting bad proposals” from both parties and the Administration, said Kingson, “but we’re at the cusp in a change of the politics.”

Social Security Works sponsored a conference at the end of October in the Hart Senate Office Building about the use of Social Security to address the retirement-income crisis. It was attended by several leading members of Congress, some of who have developed proposals for extending the almost 80- year-old program in key ways.

“Many Americans aren’t going to be positioned to maintain anything near their standard of living when they get old. And the reality that the one system that provides the solution is Social Security,” Kingson said, which is only “a partial solution.” From its passage in 1935, Social Security was to be one leg of the retirement income stool, along with savings and private pensions. Both of those legs, though, have fallen short for most older Americans.

Social Security Works frames its detailed policy positions against the backdrop of the “extraordinary” growth in income inequality over the last three decades or so.

“Who are the big winners in terms of the tax giveaways in the past 10 or 14 years,” its cofounder asked?

As the policy advisor to two presidential commissions on Social Security–one during the Reagan era, in 1982-3, and the other in 1994 under the Clinton presidency–Kingson has long been familiar with the various “red herrings” used in the debate.

One tactic has been to pit younger adults against older age groups. These days, it’s suggested that the baby boomers will use up resources that should be put aside for future generations. Thirty years ago, the refrain was that those then entering the retired population were stealing from the baby boomers.

None of it makes sense, according to Kingson. “It’s disingenuous politics,” he said.

Human Dignity

The professor has described Social Security as a “uniquely American institution.” Comparing it to another feature of national life, the native New Yorker said, “When you have a pothole, you don’t say: ‘Rip up the interstate high- way system!’”

He wrote recently with his Social Security Works cofounder Nancy Altman, a former legislative aide to former Republican Senator John C. Danforth, “As powerful and effective as private enterprise is, there are certain tasks that are performed better collectively and cooperatively through government. One of those tasks is the economic security provided by Social Security when wages are lost as the result of disability, death or old age.”

For Kingson, who previously taught at Boston College, one aspect of Jesuit theology gets to the heart of the issue: “This notion that human dignity is very important, that we are on this Earth and we have an obligation to each other and maintaining dignity is critical. = “It’s a difficult sell in a Madison Avenue world. We’re such a cynical society. The ’80s invited us to be very selfish and to really not think about others,” he added.

Still, there have been signs of a tectonic shift, he noted, Pope Francis I being one of them.“I found myself in class the other day saying ‘our pope,’” said Kingson, who is Jewish. “Many of us have taken ownership of this seemingly spiritual human being. The man seems to live what he believes. And he’s also communicating it. That’s good. That’s an unambiguous good.”

On social justice issues, the Syracuse professor can switch with ease to the political and the national. The attack on Social Security, he said, is part of the “assault on government and on the idea of the commonweal. I think it’s dangerous.”

Kingson continued, “Some things hold us together as families, as society. This is one of the institutions. It’s critical in holding the nation together,” Kingson said, “enabling people to help themselves, but also expressing the best parts of this country.”

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