Thursday, June 16, 2005

Imagine What FDR Would Say about Bush's Social Security "Reforms"

Imagine What FDR Would Say about Bush's Social Security "Reforms." This is an interesting but politically skewed look at how FDR would have thought of President Bush's attempts to make changes to Social Security.

From the site:

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked in 1935 to defend payroll contributions to Social Security, he said that he wanted "to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and benefits." "With those taxes in there," he tartly asserted, "no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

Seventy years later, President George W. Bush is making a destructive effort to do just that. Insisting that the Social Security system is in danger of bankruptcy and that the only way to avoid the crisis is privatization, Bush is attempting to dismantle the centerpiece of Roosevelt's New Deal. Social Security is the old-age insurance system that was created in 1935 in response to the widespread suffering caused by the Great Depression.

Funding for the pensions of those who reached the age of 65 was to be raised entirely through taxes on employers and employees, not subsidized by general public revenues as in other countries. The size of individual pensions would reflect the amount of the worker's contributions. Thus, the higher one's earnings, the higher one's pension.

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