Attacks on Social Security, Medicare borrow a strategy from Lenin [View all]

[Zorro]

About the last thing you'd ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state. So it's fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a "Leninist" strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today.

This is the notion, which is part of pretty much every proposal today to "fix" Social Security and Medicare, that benefits for the retired and near-retired should be guaranteed, while those for everyone else must be cut.

The usual rationale given for distinguishing among generations is that it's unfair to renege on a promise people have counted on for their entire working lives. But the real rationale is political. If you understand that, you might see almost all current proposals aimed at reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare — whether they involve cutting benefits for most people across the board, raising eligibility ages, or means-testing the programs to cut or deny benefits to wealthier retirees — in a new light.

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.

More at: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120113,0,442443.column