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17th January 2012

Link with 2 notes

For three decades, conservatives' proposals for dramatic changes to the programs have reflected a divide-and-conquer strategy inspired by the Leninist movement. →

The usual rationale given for distinguishing among generations is that it’s unfair to renege on a promise people have counted on for their entire working lives. But the real rationale is political. If you understand that, you might see almost all current proposals aimed at reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare — whether they involve cutting benefits for most people across the board, raising eligibility ages, or means-testing the programs to cut or deny benefits to wealthier retirees — in a new light.

Let’s go back to the original strategy brief by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. Their piece, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy,” appeared in the Cato Institute’s Cato Journal for fall 1983. Anguished over President Reagan’s failure to exploit Social Security’s 1982 fiscal crisis to privatize the program, they concluded that the reason was the program’s strong support among the powerful voting bloc of seniors.

The answer, they concluded, was to “neutralize” elderly voters while continuing to undermine confidence in Social Security among the young. Their model was the Leninist movement’s “success in isolating and weakening its opponents.”

Any plan to change Social Security, they wrote, “must therefore be neutral or (better still) clearly advantageous to senior citizens … the most powerful element of the coalition that opposes structural reform.”

The young, by contrast, were not organized to support privatization, and uninformed about its virtues. The task of filling the knowledge gap, they argued, could best be performed by “the business community and financial institutions in particular … both through their commercial advertising and through public relations.”

I wonder if the new big lie that says Social Security is a Ponzi scheme originated from someone with strong ties to a conservative think tank.

Tagged: one of many problems with conservatives and the GOP