BERRY GETS IT. The president is stopping by Little Rock today as he continues his Social Security tour. The Democratic congressional delegation from Arkansas just held a teleconference on the eve of his visit. Here’s what Marion Berry, dedicated Blue Dog Democrat and no one’s idea of a lefty, had to say:
It’s fitting and proper that we would have this great debate about Social Security -- one of the most successful senior citizen income programs that has ever been known in the history of mankind. And it is still successful and will continue to be successful. The debate is not about whether or not the system is potentially going to have gigantic financial problems; the debate is about whether we’re going to have Social Security or not. This is the avenue that the Bush administration and their supporters have chosen to try to destroy Social Security. That’s what this debate is really about.
Later, a reporter asked him a follow-up question: Why does the president want to destroy Social Security?
If you find out the answer to that, I sure would like to know it, because it is an absolute mystery to me. The fact is that there are any number of public statements by people on Bush’s side, like Grover Norquist, that absolutely lay out, ‘This is how we’re going to do it, what we intend to do is starve the beast, we intend to bankrupt the government to the point where they can basically only have the function of collecting taxes to run a national defense system.' This has been their declared intent for a long, long time. That sounds like a grand conspiracy but the fact is that they’ve been very successful in four short years in getting a lot of these things done. You look at the public statements of many of them, and that’s the way it turns out. I take this very seriously as an attempt to destroy the Social Security system.
Good to know that someone like Berry understands the stakes. Also note that others might want to pick up on his description of Social Security as one of the most successful programs that has ever been known in the history of mankind. It’s catchy!
--Sam Rosenfeld
prospect.org |
