Despite evidence to the contrary, the president insists that the late-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) would embrace privatization of Social Security, a claim intended to show bi-partisan support for his scheme since he can’t find living Dems who’ll sign on to his approach. Among the voices speaking out to criticize this tack is Moynihan’s own daughter, Maura Moynihan.
My friend Phil alerted me to the fact that Maura was on The Al Franken Show yesterday, explaining why she’s angry about Bush using her father’s name to advance a misguided privatization scheme.
“My mother and I are both very confused that the one Democrat whose name is constantly being invoked as being supportive of the President’s plan to privatize, to repeal Social Security, what have you, is dead and cannot defend himself…. Dad’s idea about using the ‘magic of compound interest’ to create personal accounts that add on to the existing Social Security Trust Fund — those ideas were put forth when we had a $3 trillion surplus and there was no war in Iraq. So for the president to invoke Dad’s work and say that Sen. Moynihan supports the Bush plan is erroneous.”
FDR’s grandson, James Roosevelt Jr., a lawyer and former associate commissioner of Social Security, is equally unhappy about the misuse of his grandfather’s name and image in conservative advertisements.
The implication that FDR would support privatization of America’s greatest national program is an attempt to deceive the American people and an outrage.
President Roosevelt founded Social Security for very basic but important reasons. He believed that the only enemy that could ever defeat the United States was fear itself. He and my grandmother, Eleanor, looked at America and found fear of want — particularly after retirement or loss of a parent. Today, thanks in large part to Social Security, the number of older Americans below the poverty line has dropped from almost 50 percent to only 8 percent.
FDR believed that Social Security should be simple, guaranteed, fair, earned, and available to all Americans. President Roosevelt was adamant that Social Security was an insurance program to provide basic needs in retirement.
As a former Wall Street lawyer, my grandfather fully supported the opportunity of every American to have fair investment opportunities. But Social Security was — and is — something different. It was — and is — the guaranteed basis of a secure retirement. The risk is that future retired Americans will lose that assurance if the guaranteed benefit is eliminated. Drastic changes that divert the payroll tax to privatization will almost certainly eliminate that guaranteed benefit by crippling the ability to pay benefits, imposing trillions of dollars of new costs on the government and creating massive federal debt. Privatization threatens to bring about the collapse of the entire Social Security system.