Daily Archives: February 15, 2005

What Social Security Is For (and Not For)

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A teacher in my youth often railed against social security, so I asked an older friend why the program was so controversial. He had worked for the WPA during the depression, and recounted for me with teary eyes the long soup lines and the desperation of good people who couldn’t find work because of national economic failures. He told me that FDR had done a good thing, and that the real reason behind social security legislation was to insure that the richest country in the world would never leave old people to die in the streets, a tragic situation which might also foment revolution.

 

And indeed, a national or global crisis could plausibly occur again soon, arising from a number of contemporary as well as timeless scenarios, including disasters arising from war, terrorism, plague, economic uncertainties, and nature’s unpredictable catastrophes. During such events, many American citizens will be unable to provide for themselves. Without a reliable and universal social security program, our government will once again be forced to choose between stepping up and doling out additional taxpayer money to feed, house, and clothe the destitute–or to do the unthinkable and abandon their own, as capitalism’s collateral damage.

 

Social security has changed America’s face; today we see smiling seniors enjoying one another’s company for hours over McDonald’s coffee, where yesterday we saw gaunt haunted faces staring bleakly out of dirty windows.

 

Americans do not yet embrace FDR’s fourth freedom: freedom from want. Until we do, social security must simply insure that any American who someday ends up with too little money to survive will at least be able to get by. No one plans to be poor in old age; some of us are smarter, have more opportunities, more education, better values, are harder-working, bolder, more responsible, more talented, or luckier than some others. Social Security was never designed to give even greater success to those who already enjoy the rewards their own gifts and their country’s have provided. If the American people want to give everyone an opportunity to save, we should insist on thoughtful policies assuring a living wage for those who work hard and play by the rules.

What Are We Getting For Our Pentagon Dollars?

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We have a huge Pentagon budget which pays for neither the costs of wars nor for protecting our homeland. So what do they do with all that money? To be sure, someone still needs to have the financial wherewithal necessary to protect and defend America’s economic and strategic interests abroad, as well as (on occasion) our heedless or haplessly wandering citizenry.

 

But America’s global economic and strategic interests could be far better attended to by a well-funded Commerce and State Department. Our citizens should stay out of countries where they’re not wanted, and behave as polite guests where they are invited. And if they find themselves innocently threatened? Well, that’s what the marines are for. Keep on paying them.

 

If America redirected just half the amount of funding we give to the Department of Defense to Commerce and State, we would all reap the rewards of wise, mutually advantageous longterm trade deals and proactive diplomatic dialogues. We’d be far less likely to feel any need to throw our unrecognizable, camouflaged firstborns into the maw of all those foreign hellholes we ourselves created by having a military budget so huge it dwarfs any other country’s tenfold. America’s primary diplomatic tool is a hammer. No wonder foreign countries all look like nails.

 

Which leaves us still with the necessity of defending our homeland. If our foreign policies precluded pushing smaller countries around to suit our pride and greed, if we refrained from occupying other lands with hundreds of farflung military outposts, not to mention callous and inequitable trade policies, then perhaps we’d have fewer terrorists angry at us because our governments underwrote their despots, our tycoons pillaged their resources, and our national interests left their families in danger, economic slavery, and without rights. I don’t see any terrorists threatening Canada, or Norway, or Sweden, and they top most lists of being the so-called envied lands of the rich and free. Now why is that?

 

It is our present policy to give great unaccountable gobs of money to a Department of Defense that cannot keep us safe from terrorists, cannot win unwinnable wars, and can only add terror and injustice to the terror and injustice already caused by others.

 

Our beloved America can do better, must do better if we are to live up to our wonderful traditions and ideals. I hope Americans soon decide to spend our taxes more wisely, for our own sake, and for the sakes of so many others.