Vicious Ideologue Renews Attack on Social Security [View All]

[Joanne98]

by Dean Baker
Billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson is back on the warpath. He just established a new foundation with a $1 billion endowment, the main purpose of which is to cut back spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These programs, which provide an essential safety net to virtually the entire country, are hugely popular and will be politically difficult to cut. Nonetheless, $1 billion is a lot of money. Therefore, Peterson’s campaign deserves to be taken seriously.

Peterson has long been an ardent foe of these programs. He first rose to national prominence as commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. He then returned to the private sector and became a partner in the Blackstone Group, a very successful private equity fund.

Mr. Peterson is fond of telling his audiences that he doesn’t need his Social Security. Of course, as a manager in a private equity fund, Mr. Peterson was allowed to take advantage of the fund manager tax subsidy - a provision of the tax code that allows some of the richest people in the country to pay much lower tax rates than ordinary workers.

With his enormous wealth, Mr. Peterson was probably given more than 1,000 times as much money through this tax subsidy as the typical worker can expect to see on her Social Security. Needless to say, if the rest of us had been beneficiaries of the government’s largesse to the same extent as Mr. Peterson, we would not need our Social Security either.

Mr. Peterson’s public crusading against Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid began in 1992 when he formed the Concord Coalition. This organization crusades for cuts in these programs under the pretext of fiscal responsibility.

Mr. Peterson has also written several books calling for cuts in these programs with ominous titles like “Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America,” which warns that the country will be bankrupted by the retirement of the baby boomers. He uses his power and wealth to publicize these diatribes and get them reviewed in top outlets, such as the New York Times Book Review.

While Peterson’s efforts appeal largely to Republicans, he generally pulls enough Democrats on board that he can pass off his attacks on the country’s key social programs as bipartisan. In fact, the media often treat Peterson’s assault on the social safety net as being above the political fray, allowing him to spout his views unanswered on major national talk shows.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/22/10523/