Who Shot Down a 70-Year-Old Attack on Social Security?

[boutons_deux]

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-10-14-58council.jpg

Heard the one about the Social Security Trust Fund that holds nothing but "IOUs"? That phony claim goes back to at least 1939, when a rabidly anti-Roosevelt journalist named John T. Flynn used a colorful analogy about a tin box in a drawer in order to argue that Social Security was a "monstrosity." But where Flynn was simply mistaken, many of those who repeat his arguments today have more cynical motives.

Flynn's essay, The Social Security "Reserve" Swindle, contains all the same arguments we hear today: The government's just writing IOUs to itself. Social Security is "an offense against younger workers" (who would be about ninety years old now) that will give older generations a free ride. "The best thing to do with this monstrous child," wrote Flynn, would be to slay it at once ..."

Years later a group of people came together to write a comprehensive rebuttal to the anti-Social Security arguments thrown around by John T. Flynn and the hundreds who came after him. They took on all of the myths one by one, demolishing them with a passion that was but thinly concealed by the dryness of their prose.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/cold-case-file-who-shot-d_b_762185.html?view=print

============

Destroy the bankrupt Social Security and give it all to Wall St is just another lie by the VRWC/Wall St to get their venal, grubby hands on citizens' money so they can rape and plunder it, too, just like the they rape and plunder everything else.

[Winehole23]

Branded as a Tory and a Reactionary

Foremost among the members of this new “right” was the muckraking journalist John T. Flynn. Unlike Mencken, whose radical views had always centered on a rugged brand of individualism, Flynn qualified as a progressive liberal until the New Deal drove him away. A graduate of Georgetown Law School, Flynn made his name in the 1920s and early 1930s as a left-leaning financial columnist and author whose books bore such titles as Graft in Business and Trusts Gone Wrong! He enjoyed identifying and exposing the dirty deeds of big business and, as biographer John Moser writes, “in particular he saw abuses in the banking system and the New York Stock Exchange, and as early as February 1929 he was predicting that the value of corporate securities was about to plummet.” Flynn’s work earned him a prominent perch at the New Republic, then as now one of the country’s leading left-liberal publications, where he wrote a weekly economics column from 1933 until he was dropped in 1940 for his increasingly harsh attacks on FDR’s policies.



But like Mencken, Flynn started out as a Roosevelt supporter, referring to the New Deal as a “promising experiment.” It took the National Recovery Administration to cure him of that. The centerpiece of FDR’s first 100 days, the NRA represented the nightmare of central planning made real. Enacted as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which FDR hailed as “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress,” the NRA sought to micromanage the economy through more than 500 wage-, hour-, and price-fixing “codes of fair competition,” mandating everything from the price of food to the cost of having a shirt hemmed. The NRA’s stated purpose was to increase efficiency via military-style organization, yet as historian Arthur Ekirch has pointed out: “Little attention was paid to the fact that it was industry itself that had largely prepared the regulations governing prices and production. Also ignored was the fact that the NRA meant the suspension of antitrust laws along with the whole theory of free competition and free enterprise.”



Flynn was among the few who noticed. As a member of the progressive movement, he had long worried about the growing power and influence of the big corporations. Now FDR and his so-called brain trust were climbing into bed with them! As Flynn put it, “Curiously, every American liberal who had fought monopoly, who had demanded the enforcement of the anti-trust laws, who had denied the right of organized business groups, combinations and trade associations to rule our economic life, was branded as a Tory and a reactionary if he continued to believe these things.” Thus Flynn found himself on the right.



Using the same muckraking approach that had made him a darling of the left, Flynn denounced the NRA as “probably the gravest attack upon the whole principle of the democratic society in our political history.” As for Roosevelt, Flynn argued that although the president proclaimed “his devotion to democracy, he adopted a plan borrowed from the corporative state of Italy and sold it to all the liberals as a great liberal revolutionary triumph.”



Nor did these scathing attacks go unnoticed. After reading an article of Flynn’s published by the Yale Review, FDR wrote privately to the editor, denouncing Flynn as “a destructive rather than a constructive force” who “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/16/the-new-deal-made-them-right

[Drachen]

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-10-14-58council.jpg

Heard the one about the Social Security Trust Fund that holds nothing but "IOUs"? That phony claim goes back to at least 1939, when a rabidly anti-Roosevelt journalist named John T. Flynn used a colorful analogy about a tin box in a drawer in order to argue that Social Security was a "monstrosity." But where Flynn was simply mistaken, many of those who repeat his arguments today have more cynical motives.

Flynn's essay, The Social Security "Reserve" Swindle, contains all the same arguments we hear today: The government's just writing IOUs to itself. Social Security is "an offense against younger workers" (who would be about ninety years old now) that will give older generations a free ride. "The best thing to do with this monstrous child," wrote Flynn, would be to slay it at once ..."

Years later a group of people came together to write a comprehensive rebuttal to the anti-Social Security arguments thrown around by John T. Flynn and the hundreds who came after him. They took on all of the myths one by one, demolishing them with a passion that was but thinly concealed by the dryness of their prose.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/cold-case-file-who-shot-d_b_762185.html?view=print

============

Destroy the bankrupt Social Security and give it all to Wall St is just another lie by the VRWC/Wall St to get their venal, grubby hands on citizens' money so they can rape and plunder it, too, just like the they rape and plunder everything else.

If you give them the citizens' money, hasn't it already been plundered, and wouldn't raping it possibly destroy some of it making some of your plundering work useless?

[101A]

Flynn sounds like a good guy.

Boutons looks like a Rube (or useful idiot).

[boutons_deux]

The point is that the VRWC has been drooling over shifting Social Security funds into Wall St's black hole since SS was created.

[Winehole23]

(Psst! VRWC ain't exactly a password to confidence. You might want to reconsider the phrasing.)

[101A]

The point is that the VRWC has been drooling over shifting Social Security funds into Wall St's black hole since SS was created.


There are no funds to shift - in just a couple of years ALL funds, and more from the general fund, I guess, will come in one door, and right back out another; in real time.

[boutons_deux]

VRWC is an excellent, accurate description for the American Class war, wealthy vs everybody else.

The VRWC has won, but keep living The American Dream, you have to be asleep to believe it.

[CosmicCowboy]

There are no funds to shift - in just a couple of years ALL funds, and more from the general fund, I guess, will come in one door, and right back out another; in real time.

100% of federal receipts now come in the front door and go right out the back door along with another trillion or so dollars every year thats borrowed or printed.

[101A]

100% of federal receipts now come in the front door and go right out the back door along with another trillion or so dollars every year thats borrowed or printed.


Speaking of SS dollars specifically, on paper that account is still in the black, I believe.

[coyotes_geek]

Speaking of SS dollars specifically, on paper that account is still in the black, I believe.

IIRC, it was going to be in the red this year and next, but back in the black as the economy recovers.

[CosmicCowboy]

:lmao @ the concept of a Social Security "account"

Funds have been co-mingled with the general fund forever.

When Social Security payments become higher than Social Security receipts the Federal Government is going to have to come up with TRILLIONS of REAL dollars to replace the trillions of dollars they have already borrowed from the "SS fund" and pissed off and spent.

[MannyIsGod]

(Psst! VRWC ain't exactly a password to confidence. You might want to reconsider the phrasing.) Fairly certain boutons doesn't care if anyone listens to him.

[TeyshaBlue]

VRWC is an excellent, accurate description for the American Class war, wealthy vs everybody else.

The VRWC has won, but keep living The American Dream, you have to be asleep to believe it.


At either end of the socio-economic spectrum, there lies a leisure class.

[MannyIsGod]

What an interesting quote. I've never heard it before but I like it.

[TeyshaBlue]

What an interesting quote. I've never heard it before but I like it.

He's a rock-climber, no less.:lol

[coyotes_geek]

When Social Security payments become higher than Social Security receipts the Federal Government is going to have to come up with TRILLIONS of REAL dollars to replace the trillions of dollars they have already borrowed from the "SS fund" and pissed off and spent.

Yep. Benefit cuts are inevitable. When the budget situation gets bad enough the government will basically bail itself out by having SS forfeit it's treasury holdings to reduce debt.

[Winehole23]

Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again.

[CosmicCowboy]

Yep. Benefit cuts are inevitable. When the budget situation gets bad enough the government will basically bail itself out by having SS forfeit it's treasury holdings to reduce debt.

That would be one tactic, would be too obvious and politically unpalatable. The more likely course would be to monetize (print money to cover) it's SS obligations while freezing CPI increases.

[Winehole23]

Fairly certain boutons doesn't care if anyone listens to him.He reads it anyway. Sometimes he replies or tries to.

[boutons_deux]

VRWC is a very accurate acronym, describing a real, multi-decade, and SUCCESSFUL activity.

In fact, the Class War of wealthy on everybody else is ancient. The "everybody else" in America lies to itself, believing the myths dictated to it by the wealthy, that Class War, and classes, don't exist in The Greatest Country Ever In The History Of The Universe.

PSST, GFY

[Winehole23]

On my own schedule, sure.

[Winehole23]

The vast right wing conspiracy is neither vast, nor is it right wing, nor is it a conspiracy.

It is a mutant outgrowth of liberalism, lodged in a media elite.

[Winehole23]

(Much like the left wing version, actually)

[boutons_deux]

Cutting SS, esp privatizing SS, is not the inherent fault of SS, but of govt violating the SS lockbox. SS isn't even a budget item, so it can't contribute to the deficit.

Privatizing SS is just handing 100s of $Bs to the the Wall St banksters to "lose", (sorry, that's how the free market rolls). Win or lose, Wall St will pocket 100 of $Bs in fees taken from the pocket of retirees.

And we have the current example of a life insurance company withholding dead veterans' in order to invest it. scumbags.

And you right-wingers want to subsidize the Wall St criminal scumbags with SS savings money.

[Winehole23]

Proleptic. SS hasn't been privatized yet.

[boutons_deux]

The Repugs are not running on privatization in their bullshit "pledge", because they know, from dubya's disastrous, ludicrous sales job, that it's extremely unpopular. But many of them have said in their campaigns that SS is huge problem better handled by Wall St.

[Winehole23]

We'll see. There's no need at all to have a big fantasy about it now, is there?

[boutons_deux]

It's not a fantasy, it's a Repug objective, was, is, and will be.

[Wild Cobra]

It's not a fantasy, it's a Repug objective, was, is, and will be.
I doubt all republicans share the idea and I'll bet some democrats do.

I would love to pay less or nothing in SS, and be able to apply it to my own retirement instead of SS, and opt out of SS.

What are you soul sucking liberals afraid of? It drying up for you?