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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (2997)	7/1/2003 1:37:03 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793895

Michael, I agree with your statement, somewhere in the post to which I'm responding that we are at much different political points. To me you seem to be simply restating much discredited right wing claims; no doubt you feel the same about my posts. Nonetheless, let me try just a few more things. Most attempts to recount the history of assistance of the elderly from the 30s forward, give credit to social security and then later medicaid and medicare as providing meager but workable income and support floors that saved lives and made possible passable retirement years. Perhaps they could have been done in other ways but I doubt it. Whatever the alternative possibilities, we now have such and all proposed attempts to change the fundamental structure make it much, much less acceptable. In my view, they don't address the issue of trying to alleviate poverty, improve health, etc.; rather they stem from ideological attempts to change the functions of the state or from the sheer individualistic selfishness of the rich. Social security, as some of us warned long ago, faced total disaster in 1983. I agree, that was the talk at the time. And Bob Dole and Pat Moynihan saved it. That was also the talk. I've seen material since then that suggests the problem was not as severe as claimed and that the claim was used to provide a political space for a solution. I have no idea about the accuracy of those claims. As for the tax increase at the time, I did not see it as large at the time and don't now. I think the term "large" as used to describe it is in general a flag that the user doesn't subscribe to the goal. It is one of the more regressive taxes we have. As a way of addressing part of the structural issues, I favor dropping the income limits. Everyone pays a certain percentage. At the moment, that's not the case. But the selfishness and political clout of the rich make my solution politically difficult, at best. The bottom line is these programs have been massive failures . . . We are, of course, in complete disagreement here. These programs, despite the meager resources allocated to them, have been successes far beyond what their originators could have imagined. The problem with your analysis is it doesn't seem to have learned from the lessons of history. Depends completely on the history you choose to use, Michael. Capitalism may well be the best way to organize an economy. It certainly looks that way in this immediate historical period. But it has always thrown off, as tekboy offered the other day, it's human refuse that needs to be picked up and cared for. In an odd way, that's all of us who don't make the roles of the rich. And if the state doesn't do it, everyone suffers. If the elderly don't get proper health care, diseases which have disappeard, reappear; costs to individual families soar, as we can see with families in which breadwinners lose jobs and thus health insurance. The list goes on and it's long. As for your stepfather and your mother, something is wrong. It doesn't go to the system issue but to something more narrowly construed. It's my understanding that your mother should get ss. My father died in the middle 90s; a portion of the money my mother now lives on comes from social security she gets because she was his wife. Your system, 401ks and the like, would take care, at best, of only those who have well paying jobs. The remainder, a huge proportion of the population, which capitalism not only generates but needs to generate, are left to fend for themselves. You and I are talking across a huge divide and have been doing so ever since we first started posting to one another. I keep the conversation going, as I suspect you do, because we find it possible to talk with one another without flaming the other. But I genuinely see no way to find common assumptions to then work from. I start with the need to address the poverty that is with us, the need to address the health care needs of folk who cannot afford them and I see the state as the only reliable way to do that. I also see us all as sharing in these responsibilties for one another and the state as the agency which supplies the structure to make that sharing possible. You start somewhere else. I'll leave it up to you to characterize it.