For a few years now, a lot of young people have been clamoring to either eliminate Social Security, or vastly modify it. More recently, many of the right-wing Tea Party branch of the Republican party have also been in favor of vastly reduced social welfare plans such as Social Security and the state-run SSI programs.
Social Security was signed into law in August of 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt. Our country was in the depths of the depression, and the elderly of the time had seen both their job and their savings washed away.
Before Social Security, most older Americans had a small state or private pension, but the 1930 census also shows that 58% of men over the age of 65 still worked every day. In 2002, only 18% of men over 65 had full-time jobs.
The elderly also relied heavily on their families. Children, friends, relatives, churches – all of these carried the burden of providing for the aged in some manner. Once the Depression began, there were no jobs, savings were wiped out, and it became impossible for people to continue. Social Security was the political answer to a large social problem.
Charles Dickens was famous for writing books that portrayed the squalid and poverty-stricken underclass of society in the mid-1800’s. Books such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, were made into movies and to this day we see them as perennial favorites, giving no thought to the fact that the conditions portrayed were real and true and representative of how large parts of society lived their lives in a world before public welfare and Social Security.
Before the 1930’s, the only federal programs for the support of the disabled or poor were for veterans. Support of the poor, disabled or elderly was undertaken by private philanthropy and a network of extended family.
We all have visions of how bad the program has gotten. We all have heard horror stories of welfare moms with a half-dozen children, each by a different father, all supported on the public taxpayer dime. Or the “disabled”, who live on public funds and never contribute to their own support, even if they could in some manner.
As bad as these excesses can be, none of us want to walk by someones grandmother on the sidewalk, who has been reduced to begging for whatever she can get. While living in Venezuela, I saw images like these dozens of times, and was thankful that in my home country, we were civilized enough that we did not let our elderly suffer the indignity of begging in the streets.
It is a gargantuan task. How do we review the programs that are paid for by taxpayers, and make it what it was supposed to be in the first place? Yes, we need to tell people who are capable that they need to get off their couches and support themselves. But we also need to be compassionate enough to protect the sick or elderly who cannot provide for themselves.
We need to convince our young people that Social Security is a valuable program, that does real good. Everyone needs to contribute to the program for it to work.
We need to convince our politicians to keep their grimy hands out of the Social Security trust funds. You cannot borrow from Peter to pay Paul.
We need to get back to basics. Yes, in todays modern world where families are scattered to the four corners of the globe, it is more difficult to be a cohesive unit, responsible for each other, but where it is possible, we need to look out for one another.
Everyone is eager to upset the current democratic administration because they have made government too big, and are threatening certain basic freedoms that are ours by right.
I do not disagree that we need to shrink our government, shrink our costs, reduce the burden on our taxpayers. We should stop being the worlds policemen, and we should spend our aid dollars at home before we look overseas. As with a family, we should take care of our own first.
I do caution though, be careful what you ask for, you may get more than you thought you wanted. Slashing our social programs with a machete will cause untold grief and harm, and may create more problems than it solves. Take a long hard look at what your favorite politician actually is proposing, and make sure that you are truly willing to share in the burden of what might go missing when that machete starts to flash around cutting “waste” in our federal budgets.
Instead of clamoring about our internal social spending, we should insist our politicians first take a long hard look at what we are spending beyond our borders. Bring that money home first, and we might be surprised at how much easier everything else becomes.
Brilliant!
JB