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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (507)	3/1/2005 1:01:56 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

GUEST OPINION: Liberals and Social Security Reform: More Denials, Contradictions and Misjudgements Monday, February 28, 2005 - Patrick M. Garry "The only response of liberal Democrats to President Bush’s warning about Social Security was to gather at the statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as if proclaiming that no matter what problems arise in the present they will always revert to what FDR did in response to the Great Depression," writes South Dakota University law professor Patrick Garry. OPINION - Liberals are supposed to be the believers in change, the people whose sights are fixed on the future. But in reality, they’re stuck in a past to which most Americans would never want to return -- the 1930s, the years of the greatest economic cataclysm the world has ever known. It is an odd criticism to make of liberals, that they are glued to the past. Most of the time, they are denigrating it: casting suspicion on the motives of America’s founders, and ridiculing the political and religious beliefs that have shaped America’s history. But when it comes to issues like Social Security reform, the only move liberals can make is backward - sixty years backward. The problem is not with the past. The problem is that liberals are too narrow in the past in which they have remained mired. For liberals, the past starts in 1932 and ends in 1980. Liberals also claim to be open-minded. They claim to be the creators of new solutions. They claim to be flexible thinkers, able to change their minds and admit when they’re wrong. But that too is an image that has long passed into the fictional. The only response of liberal Democrats to President Bush’s warning about Social Security was to gather at the statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as if proclaiming that no matter what problems arise in the present they will always revert to what FDR did in response to the Great Depression. They not only refuse to change, they claim there is no reason to change. They argue that there is no crisis with Social Security. But just as everyone always knew smoking was bad for their health, no matter what the tobacco companies said, everyone knows that Social Security is going bust, no matter what the Democrats say. Maybe it’s not surprising that Democrats are in such rigid denial about Social Security. Maybe they can’t let themselves see the truth, because to do so would be to face all the misjudgements and contradictions they have perpetrated over the years. Democrats celebrate the New Deal’s creation of Social Security, but it was a serious lack of vision that locked the retirement age at 65. Six decades of medical advances have enabled people to live well past the age to which they lived in the 1930s. Moreover, the after-65 years are the expensive years, in terms of health care. But the Democrats never planned for that. They never foresaw that developments in medical science would prolong lives, while at the same time making health care more expensive. Since Democrats are unyielding in their opposition to any benefit cuts in Social Security, one would think they would be doing everything possible to increase the number of younger workers who could support all the retirees. One would think they would oppose abortion, if no other reason than to increase the pool of young workers. One would think they would want to make the youth as productive as possible, by making them as educated as possible; one would think they would demand accountability from teachers and give students the power to attend whatever school they wanted, including private schools. One would think that Democrats would favor capital gains tax cuts, so as to give people the opportunity to build more wealth for their retirement years. One would think that Democrats would want to prepare for an increasingly threatened social security system by discouraging citizen dependency on government. One would think they wouldn’t further strain that system by wanting to extend its benefits to illegal aliens. One would think that a party pandering to young voters by putting on rock concerts wouldn’t be so willing to saddle the youth with the burden to paying for the retirements of increasing numbers of elderly people. Of course Democrats would retreat to the statue of FDR in the face of the current crisis with Social Security. They are helpless to act in the present. Their position on Social Security, and on all related issues, is a house of cards just waiting to blow over should a window be opened. All the special-interest promises that Democrats have made over the years, stacked one on top of the other, have created the equivalent of a huge pyramid scheme heading for collapse. Whereas during the 1930s sixteen tax-paying workers supported one Social Security recipient, today that ratio has declined to three-to-one. It’s not at all unusual that Democrats can’t admit to their misjudgements on Social Security. They have never admitted to misjudgements. Although they constantly call for conservatives to apologize for past mistakes on civil rights, Democrats have yet to even acknowledge that their Great Society programs of high-rise, urban housing served as breeding pens for violence, drug addiction and family break-up. They have yet to apologize to all the people whose lives were ruined by a hopeless dependency on government welfare -- a dependency that President Clinton implicitly condemned when he signed the Welfare Reform Act. Democrats have never apologized for prolonging the Cold War by their defeatism in Vietnam and their opposition to President Reagan’s anti-Soviet crusade. They have never apologized for all the poverty and unemployment caused by the high taxes and suffocating bureaucratic regulations of the 1960s and 1970s. It would be nice to think that all the Democratic denials and contradictions involved with Social Security are something new, but in fact they’re just more of the same old story. © 2005 IllinoisLeader.com -- all rights reserved illinoisleader.com