Krugman: Why people like 'the Incredible Shrinking President' don't like Social Security
by Gaius Publius on 12/04/2010 06:11:00 PM
With a nice nod to Digby, Paul Krugman makes an essential cultural point about Beltway opposition to Social Security - it's all about class (my emphasis throughout):
[A] fair number of “centrist” Democrats - probably including the Incredible Shrinking President - seem willing, even eager, to join up with Republicans in cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age. ... The question you have to ask is, why are Democrats such suckers on this issue?
And why Social Security particularly, and not Medicare? For Krugman, the reason is revealing: When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.
Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs [Very Serious People] and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.
So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious - but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know.
I'm calling this a cultural analysis because he's talking about people who pick their targets based on their starting point. For example, some people want skate-boarders banned because they have brittle bones; others want the government to murder Julian Assange because they're government-hating Teabagging freedom-lovers. It's a function of your starting point.
The political analysis is equally simple, but it uses power as the dynamic - If you're in the predator group, you get to eat the prey. It's just a matter of feeding; no ill will intended.
GP
("The Incredible Shrinking President"? Well, that one's gonna stick.)