Per the Times, there's a new Greatest Generation

In a Sunday Week-in-Review piece for the Times about Social Security, John Tierney says:

"As they now take on Social Security, Republicans are counting on a more independent group of Americans, who are comfortable with placing their savings in the financial markets."

Yes, obviously prior generations of Americans were simply weak-hearted and overly dependent on the government teat. You know, those lily-livered generations that weathered the Great Depression, defeated facism and communism and built the greatest military and economic power the world has ever known. And now suddenly they're all, "Oh, I'm scared. Oh, I don't want to risk homelessness by handing my entire life's savings over to Wall Street!" Pussies.

Tierney goes on to write:

"President Bush is careful not to sound that menacing. In his inaugural speech, he promised that the new ownership society would make 'every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny,' but quickly explained that this would provide 'greater freedom from want and fear' - a purposeful echo of the same guarantees that Roosevelt made for the New Deal."

He "explained" that. He "explained" that taking your life's savings to the blackjack table gives you "greater freedom from want and fear." Thanks for clearing that up.

And of course Tierney goes to the usual well for the usual quotes from the usual drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub crowd:

"'Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state,' said Stephen Moore, the former president of Club for Growth, an antitax group. 'If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.'"

You know, I don't think journalists quote this guy or Grover Norquist enough. I think one or both of these guys should be featured in every article about Social Security and tax reform ever written. If I didn't know better, I'd swear they were being paid by George Soros to make sure Republicans never get their fondest wishes, by scaring the living shit out of anybody who reads their quotes. "Jab a spear through that," indeed. Hell, I want to send Steve a check.

Tierney lists some typical poll responses on Social Security:

"Americans are wary of change. Some polls have found that allowing private Social Security accounts is favored by a majority of Americans, with support especially high among young people, but the support drops when pollsters mention that private accounts could be risky. If asked to choose between a system with private accounts and a system with guaranteed benefits, people tend to prefer the guaranteed payments.

"But then, people also repeatedly tell pollsters they're not sure they can count on guaranteed payments from Social Security. In the New York Times/CBS News poll conducted from Jan. 14 to Jan. 18, only a quarter of the respondents said that Social Security could be fixed with minor changes, while half said it needed fundamental changes and a quarter said it needed to be completely redone."

He doesn't bother to mention any of the facts about Social Security. It's an analysis piece, mainly about process, so perhaps it's not necessary. But it's sort of a glaring omission not to mention that Americans are woefully misinformed -- after all, that's part of the process, and it's something the White House will try to take advantage of, as Andrew Kohut suggests:

"'There's so much softness in response to questions on Social Security because the public hasn't really made up its mind,' said Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center. 'There are a lot of conflicting sentiments, and which strain of thinking comes out on top depends on the struggle for public opinion this year.'"

There may be "conflicting sentiments," but there's also just plain old ignorance, on which Bush will try to capitalize, and of which Tierney doesn't take note.

Tierney also focuses a lot on something we already know: that Bush is going to push privatization as a way of reducing the government's role in people's lives:

"Edward H. Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, said the way for Mr. Bush to win that fight is to emulate Ronald Reagan.

"'Reagan tapped into a basic American sentiment that frightens the establishment figures, who assumed everyone wants the government to run their lives,' said Mr. Crane, who has been promoting private Social Security accounts for more than two decades. 'That New Deal was a sharp departure from the traditional American respect for the individual. If Bush plays this correctly - and Karl Rove is a very smart guy who's looked at the same polls we have - he can win simply by arguing that a private account gives you control over your retirement instead of making you dependent on 535 politicians.'"

OK, first of all, a government providing retirement security for its citizens is an entirely different animal than a government "running people's lives." In our system, the government invests a small amount of people's money for them in a secure way and then guarantees to return it to them in such a way that enables them to eat and have shelter in their declining years. Some obviously argue that the government temporarily holding and investing a small amount of their money for them is an abhorrent intrusion, but the alternative could be far, far worse, both for the state and for the individuals in it. In other words, if we have armies of old people dying on the streets, how does that benefit either the state or the rugged individualists in it? It'd be like everybody funding their own fire and police protection. Killing Social Security is an extreme libertarian idea that simply isn't practical.

What's more, "respect for the individual" is the basis of, not the antithesis of, Social Security. Every person deserves to have a modest safety net after a lifetime of hard work, even those many of us who are too stupid to figure out how to make money in the stock market, such as myself.