Michael Hiltzik has another good column in today’s L.A. Times. This one addresses the constant barrage of plans to “fix” aka destroy Social Security and Medicare, and of course, how wrongheaded they are.
And as he dismantles the proposals with a little help from the L word. No, not that L word:
About the last thing you’d ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state. So it’s fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a “Leninist” strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today.
This is the notion, which is part of pretty much every proposal today to “fix” Social Security and Medicare, that benefits for the retired and near-retired should be guaranteed, while those for everyone else must be cut. [...]
The answer, they [Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, in their piece, "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy," which appeared in the Cato Institute's Cato Journal for fall 1983] concluded, was to “neutralize” elderly voters while continuing to undermine confidence in Social Security among the young. Their model was the Leninist movement’s “success in isolating and weakening its opponents.” … Ever since then, proposals for dramatic changes in Social Security and Medicare have reflected this divide-and-conquer strategy.
After going into some detail about how this kind of “reform” (reform is not necessarily synonymous with improvement) of Social Security and Medicare would not end at all well and would be “just plain foolish,” he concludes with this:
Some bargain. Lenin would be pleased.
I wish he’d go on the Tee Vee machine and get this message out. It’s easy to understand, it hits home, and it really does make those on the right sound “just plain foolish.”
Please read his entire analysis here.
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