Social Security
The JVCDC unanimously adopted the following document on May 23, 2005
Position Paper on Social Security
Social Security is the program which carries out the agreement between Americans that most of us, present and future, are entitled to a modest income in our senior years, guaranteed by the US government, which enables us to live with adequate dignity.
The Bush attack on Social Security involves a large variety of frauds.
Any claim that 'I could have done better investing the money myself' or that we need to shift to an 'ownership society' involves an attempt to bamboozle the American people into forgetting what Social Security is. It is not a plan to enable some of us to do better than others of us - it is an insurance plan protecting us, as individuals and families, from the odd and unfortunate accidents of life.
The Bush claim that the US government cannot guarantee such an outcome, that there is no pile of money which is the Trust Fund, is breath-taking in its dishonesty. Social Security is backed by the strength of the US government and the American economy.
Just as the Bush administration conned us into invading Iraq on the ground that there is a crisis, that weapons of mass destruction would soon pass into Al Quada hands and threaten us, they have now manufactured a phony crisis concerning social security, a claim that unless we act now, Social Security will be bankrupt and insolvent.
There is no crisis. Bush' claims that there is are entirely fabricated to push us into dismantling Social Security.
The Bush plan to 'save' Social Security is not intended to save it but to emasculate it. By siphoning future tax money from Social Security into private accounts Social Security would go broke. That is the plan. What is presented as a solution is in fact and in intent a death-sentence.
Social Security has been a highly successful program for the past 75 years. Bush, his policy makers and current Republican leaders are ideologically opposed to using governmental means to secure social justice. Hence Social Security, the most obviously successful of such programs, must go. And so too justice.
It is not, then, an unintended consequence of proposal to privatize Social Security that social security be replaced by social insecurity. It is their very aim.
None of these truths are incompatible with the recognition that someday modifications will have to be made to the program, as they have in the past, in light of changed economic and demographic conditions. To consider them now, however, would be to play into Bush's fraud.
Consequently the Jerry Voorhis Claremont Democrat Club urges Democrats and right-thinking Republicans to hold the line, to resist the radical Bush attack.
What is at issue is what kind of society we want to live in.
Conflict Between Democrats over Social Security
Merrill Ring
Progressive Democrats are united in opposing the Republican attempt to 'hollow out' Social Security, i.e. to set up private accounts with money siphoned off Social Security taxes. To oppose that plan is a no-brainer.
However, Democrats are divided into two distinct groups concerning whether or not we should support, at present, minor adjustments to the system, leaving it a thorough social insurance program. One party wants only to resist the Bush agenda - the other party thinks it necessary to make, now, some small adjustments in order to save the program.
Just that division exists within the Voorhis Club.
We are interested in influencing both elected public officials and the media as well as in educating further our own membership and whatever other people we can reach, The Issues Committee of the club in trying to satisfy those interests, especially that of influencing officials and the media, found it necessary to produce a short, succinct resolution which could be whole-heartedly agreed on by all members of the club and widely disseminated.
The Committee also produced a short but somewhat more lengthy defense of Social Security, one which arguably tends more to the 'resistance' wing of the club and the party, but which is sufficiently general, though sharp in tone, to generate acceptance by the members of the club. It too was of a length which would enable wide distribution in connection with the official resolution.
However, in the process of sorting these issues out, the Committee produced a number of analytic papers, longish and short, about Social Security. We have come to think that our membership, and possibly other people and organizations, would profit from having those discussions also made available although they are not official expressions of the club.
They are collected here.
The papers and notes cover a large variety of issues relevant to the current discussions concerning Social Security - though far from all the issues. They were written by members of the Issues Committee, some of them amended by intra-committee discussions. They represent different points of view: both views within the Democratic Party and within the club are represented. And parts of the papers have found their way into our official documents.
Read the entire set of articles
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Social Security and Iraq
By Merrill Ring, January 23, 2005
Left to its own devices, the JVCDC would not have chosen to start its intellectual and informational activities with the topic of Social Security.
The Bush administration, however, has chosen to make Social Security the flagship topic of its second term. We, thus, have to respond immediately even if in the real world there is no reason to do so.
For this is a crisis wholly manufactured by Bush and his Republican friends. That bears repeating: there is no crisis in Social Security and claims to the contrary are entirely fabricated by Republicans surrounding Bush.Read the entire article.
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