Progressive Opinion

epi.org — Tuesday, David Brooks channeled a deeply flawed presentation by the Third Way to argue that while the federal government used to spend money on things that improved national “dynamism” it now just spends on “entitlements.” You’d have to look hard to find a bigger fan of public investments than me. But, the economic benefits of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are absolutely enormous. They provide a service (insurance against risk, and people value insurance quite highly) much more efficiently than do private-sector providers. In the case of Social Security, this efficiency is mainly in low administrative costs and the government’s ability to provide actuarially fair insurance without needing the compensation that private-sector insurance providers would demand.

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latimes.com — Ghosts have nothing on some of the ideas that come out of Washington when it comes to rattling chains and knocking pictures off the wall to terrify the common people. Case in point: the privatization of Social Security. One would have thought that this proposal was done in by two major stock market crashes since 2000, not to mention the generally noisome odor arising from almost everything that Wall Street has touched in recent years. Yet ever so stealthily it's creeping back into the public debate via the presidential campaign. Both members of the Republican ticket, Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), have expressed great enthusiasm for the idea in the past; in 2004, Ryan even sponsored a bill in Congress that was so reliant on private accounts that it was rejected by the Bush White House as too extreme.

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policyshop.net — Social Security turned 77 today. Unfortunately, it's not a happy day for the historic program: new data compiled by the U.S. Treasury Department for Smart Money reports: "From January through August 6, the government reduced the size of roughly 115,000 retirees' Social Security checks on those grounds. That's nearly double the pace of the department's enforcement in 2011; it's up from around 60,000 cases in all of 2007 and just 6 cases in 2000." So, we're garnishing Social Security checks. This development can't be blamed on poor personal finance and bad life choices. Most of these retirees took on this debt later in life to help others (mainly family members) pay for increasingly expensive and necessary higher ed degrees.

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nextnewdeal.net — A growing number of pundits and policymakers talk about Social Security almost exclusively as a luxury for greedy seniors. But as I learned when my father passed away a week before my high school graduation, Social Security is much more than just a retirement fund (though that is an extremely important function and has rescued millions of seniors from poverty). Through its survivors benefits, it provides some guarantee of security to families of all ages and creates a safety net that many never expect to need. Survivors benefits were established four years after the original Social Security Act was passed, but today they are an integral part of the program.These benefits help families to pick up the pieces when tragedy strikes, allowing them to pay the rent, put food on the table, and afford other necessities despite losing a breadwinner.

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nextnewdeal.net — If Franklin D. Roosevelt rejoined the living tomorrow, he probably wouldn't recognize Social Security, his greatest domestic legacy. That might sound like something a critic or skeptic of the program would say, as if it had broken faith with Roosevelt's vision or expanded far beyond its original intent. But, in fact, what Roosevelt would see would be Social Security's greatest virtue: its adaptability to changing circumstances. Social Security has survived, thrived, and continued to provide a base level of economic security not only through big macroeconomic shifts (such as the inflation of the 1970s) but also the transformations and uncertainties in our individual and family lives. That adaptability and continuous reexamination and improvement is the quality most in keeping with the experimental, pragmatic nature of the New Deal.

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thedailybeast.com — Too many analysts are focusing on Romney's weakness among conservatives. That's not the problem. Republicans have the greatest tool in history for motivating conservatives to vote Republican in November: Barack Obama. So, yes, the right will sigh, shrug, and settle for Mitt. And no, their hearts won't be in it — until they see the first Obama rally. The sight of our president standing before 50,000 cheering Democrats, looking like a cross between JFK and Al Green, will send them running, not walking, to the polls. No, Romney's problem isn’t ideology; it's demography. And so all his desperate and pathetic pandering to the kook right has solved a problem he never really had — and created a problem he may not be able to cure: Women. Latinos. Seniors. The moves Romney made in the primary season put him in a deep hole with these three key constituencies.

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huffingtonpost.com — Mitt Romney, tribune of the people, still doesn't seem to get a simple concept: Social Security is popular. With everybody. And particularly with older tea-party-supporting white voters who can often be counted on to be conservative on numerous other issues, and turn out in elections in key swing states. It's pretty simple, really. It is perhaps the most successful government program ever, is the largest insurance program for children, and seniors benefiting from their earned benefits during their golden years are rather hesitant to lay it down on the altar of Mitt's very own Golden Calf -- Wall Street. Quelle surprise, as Mitt would have said during his tour as a Mormon missionary in France.

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politics.salon.com — One benefit of the prolonged campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been the revelation that most of the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives live in a fantasy world. In their imaginations, Barack Obama, a centrist Democrat with roots in Eisenhower Republicanism rather than Rooseveltian liberalism, is a radical figure trying to take America down the path of “European socialism.” The signature healthcare reform of Obama and the Democratic Congress, modeled on Mitt Romney’s insurance-friendly Massachusetts healthcare program and closely resembling a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is described as “statist,” “socialist” or “fascist” (as though Hitler came to power with the goal of providing subsidies to private health insurance companies). How can otherwise sane people believe such lunacy? The answer is that members of the right-wing counterculture are brainwashed — that is the only appropriate term — by the apocalyptic propaganda ground out constantly by the conservative media establishment.

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