The Attack on Social Security

Walter Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

I watched him interviewed on television.

He started off by saying that the richest segment of our population is the group over 65 years of age--they have the greatest "Net Worth," mainly because so many of them have paid off their mortgages.

And he asks, why should we ask 25 year olds who are struggling to raise their young children to pay into social security to support those rich old people?

At least, this is a new tact for the government is bad and has never had a good idea crowd.

Of course, "Net Worth," is something of an illusion. As so many people discovered recently, the "worth" of your house, and the worth of so many of your holdings (even your annuities) is something of a phantom--your house isn't worth a dollar, until you sell it. It's worth quite a lot in non dollar terms, because you need a place to live, but when you attach a dollar sign to your house and you start adding things up in a column, well, you can't spend your net worth at the grocery store, or at the gas pump.

Used to be, we talked about people over 65 somewhat pityingly, as "pensioners" or people living on "fixed incomes." And we were concerned about how many of them were losing their homes because they couldn't afford local property taxes.

Now, we have quasi T party types, like Professor Williams, trying to re-image this graying crowd as one percenters, the rich, living off the labor of poor younger people, who are under the lash of big government, making them pay their hard earned money into a government run program of welfare for the undeserving rich.

The complaint about Social Security from the right, from the Paul Ryan Republicans and from George Bush and the get the government off my back crowd of all stripes used to be that if you'd just let me invest the money you take out of my paycheck, I could do so much better than what I get back in Social Security.

Of course, that argument totally missed the point of Social Security which is that is was never intended to build wealth; it intended to provide security. And security for the over 65 crowd directly benefits not just the gray headed, but it benefits the 25 year old trying to raise his family because it means he doesn't have to pay his parents' rent right now.

Social Security came in as a result of the depression, to provide that famous safety net so people wouldn't starve and clog up the sidewalks waiting on food lines.

Like so many of the other Depression era safeguards which the Republicans have been trying to dismantle, it has worked so well we take it for granted and we forget what life was like before it was in place.

So, Republicans, fulfilling that old adage, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Republicans repealed all those safeguards which kept banking from doing really stupid, greedy things like packaging mortgages as stocks and they brought us to the brink of another Depression.

Republicants would repeal penicillin, polio vaccine and antisepsis if you gave them a chance.

For your information, Professor Williams, the greatest concentration of poverty in this country is among the over 65 crowd. Poverty among the elderly is 30% higher than it is among the 25-45 year old segment of the population.

I know that for sure because, like Professor Williams, I just now made those numbers up.