The 1983 Strategy Behind Today's Social Security Attacks

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/48974/the-1983-strategy-behind-todays-social-security-attacks

The 1983 Strategy Behind Today's Social Security Attacks
by Dave Johnson | April 9, 2013 - 9:12am

Suppose you’re in a bar and you overhear a couple of guys in the next booth talking about a plan to steal from people’s houses. As you eavesdrop the plan unfolds: one will come to the front door pretending to be from the gas company warning the homeowner about a gas leak down the street. While he distracts the homeowner at the front door, the other one will sneak in the back door and take stuff.

So the next day the doorbell rings, and there’s a guy saying he is from the gas company. He says he wants to talk a while to warn you about a gas leak down the street…

This is what is happening with this constant drumbeat of attacks on Social Security. The attack on Social Security never goes away, it only escalates. As we go into this next round of attacks — this time it is even coming from the President* — it is more than useful to understand the background of this campaign against the program.

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[NYC_SKP]

1. Done and done. K/R (nt)

[hedda_foil]

2. The LA Times broke the story on where the attack on SS and Medicare originated 30 years ago.

It's incredibly important for DUers to know this information if we're to have any chance of stopping them. It's linked in the piece above but it deserves to be referenced on its own.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/13/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120113

Let's go back to the original strategy brief by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. Their piece, "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy," appeared in the Cato Institute's Cato Journal for fall 1983. Anguished over President Reagan's failure to exploit Social Security's 1982 fiscal crisis to privatize the program, they concluded that the reason was the program's strong support among the powerful voting bloc of seniors.

The answer, they concluded, was to "neutralize" elderly voters while continuing to undermine confidence in Social Security among the young. Their model was the Leninist movement's "success in isolating and weakening its opponents."

Any plan to change Social Security, they wrote, "must therefore be neutral or (better still) clearly advantageous to senior citizens ... the most powerful element of the coalition that opposes structural reform."

The strategy paper referenced here is at: http://bit.ly/b7qR7K