Newt Gingrich Can’t Get With the Program

25 Jan 2012 at 09:16

Eric Laursen

Social Security

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Why is the Republican Party leadership so scared of Newt Gingrich? Putting aside his generally abrasive personality, his loud streak of megalomania, and his tendency to self-destruct – OK, that’s a lot! – it’s hard to think of much in the way of substantive policy matters that sets the former House speaker apart from the rest of the Republican presidential field.

Oh yes, there’s one thing.

Early last month, when it still seemed that Mitt Romney’s anointment as GOP nominee was a matter of course, the editors of the Wall Street Journal took Gingrich for his position on, of all things, Social Security. The Journal has been pushing for Social Security privatization for decades, but strangely, Continue reading →

People’s Pension – the Book – Available Soon

09 Jan 2012 at 08:32

Eric Laursen

AK Press, Medicare, Social insurance, Social Security, The People's Pension

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It’s been a long time in the works, but The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan will be available from booksellers by approximately mid-March. The worthy folks at AK Press are bringing out my book, which traces the 30-year war against Social Security and the struggle to defend it. You can find out more about the book here. The People’s Pension is the only book that covers this crucial slice of U.S. history, from the beginning of the war under Reagan right up to the present.

I’ll be posting more news about the launch of People’s Pension: The Book (to those of you who’ve been reading this off-and-on blog for some time) as it’s available. Possibly even more exciting is the kick-off of my tour to promote Continue reading →

Who’s Going to Defend Social Security?

12 Aug 2011 at 11:56

Eric Laursen

Social Security

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Strangely enough, it’ll probably be the Republican right. Once again.

Congressional Republican and Democratic leaders have chosen the members of the “Super Congress” that will determine round two of the spending cuts – and, possibly, tax increases – under the Budget Control Act of 2011. As expected, the GOP members are all hardliners on taxes – so much so that they all received the blessing of Citizens for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist. (I mentioned tax increases above because the joint deficit committee has the right to include them in its legislation, not because there’s much chance it will.)

Most of the attention, therefore, has focused on the Democratic members. Continue reading →

Times’s Leonhardt misrepresents Social Security, Medicare

22 Jun 2011 at 10:49

Eric Laursen

Medicare, Social insurance, Social Security

1 Comment

David Leonhardt, along with Matt Bai, is part of the New York Times’ center-right Washington tag team. So it’s no surprise when he mourns Congress’s failure to “rein in” entitlements. But every so often he goes a bit too far.

In today’s column, he makes the legitimate point that cutting discretionary spending as part of what’s become a bipartisan drive to reduce the deficit, isn’t such a good idea.

Discretionary spending let the Defense Department build the Internet. It let the National Institutes of Health finance life-saving research. It has helped make possible the semiconductor, the broadband network, the highway system and airports.

True enough. The private sector has never been the fount of creativity that free-marketeers would have us believe. But Leonhardt goes too far when he lumps in defenders of Social Security and Medicare with Republican foot-in-the-door opponents of tax hikes. Continue reading →

The Truth Behind “Managed Decline”

09 Jun 2011 at 13:44

Eric Laursen

Economics, Social insurance, Social Security, Uncategorized

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“Managed decline” is one of the favorite catchphrases of the American right. Briefly, it’s an accusation that Democratic politicians and the Obama administration – i.e., the “extreme left” – have decided to let the U.S. decline economically and militarily, with government “managing” that process to protect special interests like unions and public employees.

This argument is now heard everywhere on the right, from radio talk-show hosts to semi-respectable academics to the text of Rep. Paul Ryan’s House budget resolution. Stripped to its specific public-policy recommendations, it’s an appeal to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other social spending and shift those resources to the military.

Let’s tale a closer look at the rhetoric. Because I’m going to make the case that there is some reality behind the notion of managed decline – just not the one most often fed to us. Continue reading →

How Much Do We Care About the Elderly?

15 Mar 2011 at 14:03

Eric Laursen

Economics, Health care, Medicare, Mutual aid, Retirement, Social insurance, Social Security

3 Comments

That’s the real issue behind the Social Security debate – and the deficit fight as well. But it’s almost impossible to have a constructive public discussion about the elderly and the share of the economy they occupy so long as deficit hysteria continues.

Don’t go to Pete Peterson’s Fiscal Times for balanced reporting on Social Security and the federal fisc. That would be like asking Col. Qadaffi for news and analysis on Middle Eastern populism. But every now and then, the miscreants raise an important issue. Perhaps inadvertently, but there it is.

Eric Schurenberg, who purveys politically palatable news to the business community as head of BNET and CBSMoneyWatch.com, published an op-ed in the Fiscal Times last week that purported to demolish the “myths” bolstering “that fiscal fun-house mirror, the Social Security trust fund.” The piece is full of misconceptions that are nicely demolished elsewhere.

But Schurenberg raises an issue that’s been almost entirely left out of the current debate about reducing the deficit and “reforming” entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. “The most destructive myth of all,” Schurenberg writes, Continue reading →

Fixing Social Security: Ted Nugent Speaks Truth to Power

21 Feb 2011 at 15:42

Eric Laursen

Social Security

3 Comments

Ted Nugent, the “Motor City Madman” of ’70s hard rock, has a plan to fix Social Security: Eliminate it. And make workers under 45 pay to wind it up. With enemies like this, does Social Security even need friends?

At this point in his demented career, The Nuge – Tedly, Uncle Ted, what have you – is an American institution, a living, breathing parody of contemporary rugged individualism that Glenn Beck and the Tea Party would have to invent if he wasn’t already roaming the Upper Midwest.

As occasional readers of our right-wing op-ed pages know, he’s also a political scientist of sorts.  This month, he’s challenging the Republican Party to put its money where its mouth is on Social Continue reading →

Social Security: It’s All in the Adjectives

14 Feb 2011 at 00:47

Eric Laursen

Social Security

1 Comment

People who want to cut Social Security benefits to lower future budget deficits are “reasonable” and “serious.” Moreover, economists have reached a “consensus” that this should be done. People who oppose balancing the budget on the back of Social Security recipients are “denialists” whose views are “maddening,” “crackpot,” “strident.”

The cartoonist R. Crumb once advised a young protege that to be good at the craft, he needed to draw his subject accurately – but then exaggerate it just a little bit. In polemical writing, adjectives are that little bit of exaggeration. Sprinkled sparingly through an otherwise competently argued piece, they create a slightly distorted view of the writer’s opponents without making the writer sound too angry or confrontational. The cumulative effect is stark: those on the same side as the writer are intelligent and reasonable. Those on the other side are not.

The adjectives applied to defenders of Social Security, quoted above, aren’t from Fox News, the Cato Institute, or a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. They are drawn from Continue reading →

Social Security: What’s In It for Wall Street?

28 Jan 2011 at 17:29

Eric Laursen

Retirement, Social Security

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What do Wall Street financial advisers tell their clients about Social Security? That they shouldn’t count on it. In fact, ex it out of your planning altogether. But behind the scenes, brokers and advisers eagerly use Social Security as a marketing opportunity – even bringing in experts from the Social Security Administration itself to educate them on the ins and outs of the program.

On Wall Street is an online magazine for Wall Street brokers and financial advisors. A feature in the January issue offers a fascinating look at the Street’s convoluted but always opportunistic thinking about Social Security.  Author Matthew Leung notes, Continue reading →

Paul Ryan’s Hammock

27 Jan 2011 at 12:58

Eric Laursen

Recession, Social insurance, Social Security

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How stands the Social Security discussion in Washington following State-of-the-Union night? More or less where it was before. Which, for defenders of the program is mostly not good.

President Obama honored his pledge to congressional Democrats over the previous weekend not to endorse cuts to the program. In fact, he went a bit farther, rejecting any plan that would include “slashing benefits for future generations.”

There’s more to say about that. But first, what about Paul Ryan and that Michele Bachmann? Continue reading →

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