Cato Did It!
I've always wondered why folks have for years been down on Social Security. Everyone who slams the Depression-era social backstop seems to ignore that it only had to exist because the traditional market-based systems failed so dramatically. What gave them the idea that market-based solutions would work after this spectacular fail?
Turns out this has all been an elaborate long-term marketing campaign by the Cato Institute:
In the Summer of 1983, smarting under what they called the "fiasco of the last 18 months", i.e. the Greenspan Commission and subsequent 1983 Reform, the Cato Institute convened a conference in Washington DC and subsequently published the papers in their Fall 1983 Cato Journal under the title Social Security: Continuing Crisis or Real Reform. One of those articles had the intriguing title of Social Security Reform: Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy. In that article was laid out the long term plan alluded to in my comment quoted above, which plan focused in large part on convincing younger workers that Social Security just wouldn't be there for them. Cato not only accepted that plan it institutionalized it in what was then known as the Project on Social Security Privatization but now known as the Project on Social Security Choice. (Note the domain name: http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/index.html - they have staked a claim to Social Security itself)
(Emphasis from the article.)
It's going to be hard to reverse the active marketing work -- read, propaganda -- done quietly over a quarter decade, but that's the only way to fix SS's funding problems without throwing the program out with the bathwater. Otherwise the bastards win. On the evil propagated by Cato, the author well notes: "Even paranoids have real enemies."
Turns out this has all been an elaborate long-term marketing campaign by the Cato Institute:
In the Summer of 1983, smarting under what they called the "fiasco of the last 18 months", i.e. the Greenspan Commission and subsequent 1983 Reform, the Cato Institute convened a conference in Washington DC and subsequently published the papers in their Fall 1983 Cato Journal under the title Social Security: Continuing Crisis or Real Reform. One of those articles had the intriguing title of Social Security Reform: Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy. In that article was laid out the long term plan alluded to in my comment quoted above, which plan focused in large part on convincing younger workers that Social Security just wouldn't be there for them. Cato not only accepted that plan it institutionalized it in what was then known as the Project on Social Security Privatization but now known as the Project on Social Security Choice. (Note the domain name: http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/index.html - they have staked a claim to Social Security itself)
(Emphasis from the article.)
It's going to be hard to reverse the active marketing work -- read, propaganda -- done quietly over a quarter decade, but that's the only way to fix SS's funding problems without throwing the program out with the bathwater. Otherwise the bastards win. On the evil propagated by Cato, the author well notes: "Even paranoids have real enemies."