Social Security: Why?

[SirNitram]

It's not a political discussion at all, because it ignores all politics, or you think it should. Now, I don't believe your telepathy is perfect, so it's entirely possible Surlethe will not agree with you in that this is a pie-in-the-sky, idealized crystal never to be sullied by reality. Regardless, if your further input to me on this will be this repeated over again, don't bother posting. I'll move it if Surlethe asks me to, and you don't really have any impact on such.

[Illuminatus Primus]

It's not a political discussion at all, because it ignores all politics, or you think it should.

Politics goes beyond questions of political practicality. Are there no politics among Christian dominionists because their political science is theocratic and based on physical impossibilities and political fantasy? Politics is the discussion of how to run society or government, among other things, so it certainly qualifies.

The American Heritage Dictionary calls "politics" "the art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its internal and external affairs" or "Political science" Also, it includes "The activities or affairs engaged in by a government, politician, or political party" or "The methods or tactics involved in managing a state or government." I have to go the fifth definition listed to find something consistent solely with your usage: "Political attitudes and positions." I am sorry that your education is so lax that you think "political millieu" or "political attitudes" or "political practicality" are the only things which quality as "politics" and not, well, political science.

Now, I don't believe your telepathy is perfect, so it's entirely possible Surlethe will not agree with you in that this is a pie-in-the-sky, idealized crystal never to be sullied by reality. Regardless, if your further input to me on this will be this repeated over again, don't bother posting. I'll move it if Surlethe asks me to, and you don't really have any impact on such.

I'm sorry my usage of debate is consistent with the OP, common discussions on this board, and the prime definitions of the word "politics." I'm not trying to influence you, I'm emphasizing (not demonstrating, because its obvious) that you're not very intelligent and not well-educated.

[Broomstick]

Were you reading anything he said? Why are we paying social security to Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett?

In order to retain their support in keeping SS available for your mom and dad.

I forgot that they and their class were such stalwarts of Social Security, and not turning into an investment source for the corporate class.

They're not "stalwarts of social security", that's WHY we have to bribe them by keeping them in the program, too.

[gtg947h]

I'm not going to get into whether having SS is a good idea or not... but the two things I really hate about it:

1. Your SSN is way overused in areas that have nothing to do with it. It should not be a de facto universal ID.

2. Die before retirement age, and you (or your kids/spouse) don't see a single fucking cent of the thousands you contributed over your lifetime. From this aspect, you'd be better off stashing money in a mattress, or a plain old savings account.

[starslayer]

2. Die before retirement age, and you (or your kids/spouse) don't see a single fucking cent of the thousands you contributed over your lifetime. From this aspect, you'd be better off stashing money in a mattress, or a plain old savings account.

Not quite true. I'm going to college on my Social Security survivor benefits from my dad's death. Those (and others like them) used to last until you got out of university (if you enrolled full-time); now they stop at 18 or end of high school, whichever comes last.

[Broomstick]

2. Die before retirement age, and you (or your kids/spouse) don't see a single fucking cent of the thousands you contributed over your lifetime.

Untrue. Spouses get survivor's benefits until they remarry. Underage children also receive benefits.

Again - the ignorance about this program is appalling.

[Illuminatus Primus]

In order to retain their support in keeping SS available for your mom and dad.

I forgot that they and their class were such stalwarts of Social Security, and not turning into an investment source for the corporate class.

They're not "stalwarts of social security", that's WHY we have to bribe them by keeping them in the program, too.

Yeah, that's working great. I'm sure its totally buying their loyalty and support.

[Patrick Degan]

And welfare and unemployment benefits (with restrictions and conditions somewhat relaxed for seniors) would accomplish the same. Were you reading anything he said? Why are we paying social security to Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffett? Furthermore, it seems to be perverse and retarded to retain Social Security on the off-chance of unexpected/emergency or onerous chronic medical expenses, that's an argument for national single-payer health care (and furthermore, this is what Medicare is for).

Oh I did read what Surlethe was saying. It's obvious, however, that you didn't even bother reading further down about the universality component to the programme being one of the main mechanisms which insulates it from political attack. The universality of the programme is also what insures fairness for every citizen, and whether or not you like the idea, Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan are citizens as well as Joe Sixpack. The very reasoning which backs the idea of universal healthcare also applies to universal social security —equal access and benefit for everyone. That's sort of what "universal" means.

And Medicare is not universal, as only retirees can access it. Everybody else has to rely on the private healthcare system which is not doing its job. You may also have noticed that the lack of universality has made it easier to attack Medicare and Medicaid politically.

He said, why not cover the poor (be they unemployed or working poor) with welfare both rich and old? Are you deliberately strawmanning the man?

And I, and Broomstick, and Nitram, said —which you also didn't bother to read either— that this would entail a drop into poverty in order to qualify for benefits.

It seems to make more sense to abolish transfer payments to retirees entirely, and instead focus on supporting poor people, old and young. This will effectively remove the retirement age, giving incentive to continue working and being productive far later in life, as well as to save more money for eventual retirement and thus reduce consumption. Moreover, a social safety net still exists if an old person should fall into poverty. This handily eliminates the problem of the increasing aged population straining government funds and opens up the possibility of decreasing social security taxes or replacing them outright with a different sort of tax in order to use that money (70% of government expenditures, IIRC?) elsewhere.

You do realise, don't you, that your proposal effectively opens a trap-door on millions of people who won't be poor enough to qualify for poverty assistance, who for one cause or another lose their nest-egg (or make poor financial planning decisions, because millions of ordinary people do so not out of carelessness or even bog-standard ignorance but in many cases because they have to devote their entire concentration upon their jobs, their families, and the immediate day-to-day struggle to keep up with the cost-of-living), on people who become disabled and unable to work —in a not-trivial percentage of cases reaching that state long before retirement age.

Where did Surlethe imply he would abolish Social Security and maintain strict standards on poverty assistance? If anything I think he is implying that welfare conditions should be relaxed on the elderly and used where their savings are insufficient and they are not suited to work, instead of paying Social Security out to both rich and poor old people, old people who're healthy and able to work and those who are not.

The whole bit about abolishing transfer payments is where he said that. Oh, and as for old people being healthy enough to keep working, exactly how do you define healthy, and what sort of work? And by what mechanism is the hiring of a retirement-age individual guaranteed instead of the way most businesses consider such decisions —which is to look at a 40+ year old and not even bother glancing a second time at the resume when he can get a 22 year old at a lower salary and a longer term employment without undue risk of losing that worker to a health crisis, never mind the 65+ year old? Really, what sort of jobs do you imagine 65 year olds can get?

Covering both the elderly and the young poor and young disabled under a single program would eliminate ridiculous redundancy in government bureaucracy and cut costs, and if thought as the new social security, it would strengthen the combined system. The new welfare state would be much more difficult to assail when it covered the "Greatest Generation" which had worked hard their whole lives and now need assistance and aid when they are unable to work and deserve retirement. Splitting up the system creates needless waste, needless redundancy, and plays into the political divide and conquer strategy by heartless rightists. The political support and clout for support for the elderly and pensioners will not evaporate magically simply because its no longer called Social Security and universal - it will instead make a new combined welfare state more robust and resistant to political assault. It seems to be backward to maintain an antiquated system rife with political-economic dishonesty (lockboxes, "savings" from Social Security taxes, regressive taxation in the form of Social Security taxes), with waste and inequity (a second welfare bureaucracy and payments to secure and able-bodied and even very wealthy elderly) simply because to do otherwise risks changing the political landscape. I see it as retreat and passivity in the face of right wing aggression, as opposed to confrontation and reform. This kind of hard-nosed defense of the welfare status quo in principle is one of the reasons for the left's electoral failure and political ineffectiveness. Initiative and the spirit of reform and progressiveness is ceded to the radical right without a fight. This kind of New Deal, old-Left politics has been demonstrated to be an utter failure. I'm with Surlethe, time for something new.

Nice theory. Pity it ignores so many realities that it's not even funny. One of them being that guaranteed access to Social Security for all citizens is what makes the programme difficult to assail in the first place, while creating a system which effectively extends only a partial social safety net for middle-class and poor people and disconnects the upper middle class to a large extent and the rich altogether would actually make it easier, not harder, to attack. Furthermore, the very lack of universal access is why Medicare not only is far more politically vulnerable but works like shit as a public healthcare programme.

And you engage in a False Cause Fallacy regarding "the old New Deal politics". The Democrats have not been losing elections because of the New Deal and the Great Society. They have been losing elections because at some point they fucking forgot how to fight a political battle and kept conceding ground year after year after year when challenged. That and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council machine which benefited more from losing elections since it discouraged activists and left the party organs firmly in their control.

To be clear, I am saying that payroll taxes and other regressive taxes should be abolished, that redundant welfare providers be eliminated (Social Security, normal welfare, unemployment benefits) and consolidated (in parallel, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA medical system should be similarly abolished and replaced with a consolidated single-payer public health care system). A combined welfare state and uniform single-payer public health care system should be created and be expanded from the existing coverage and benefits (financed with savings from redundancy elimination and streamlining, and by increasing marginal income and general wealth taxes). The new welfare system should be better and more extensive and the conditions relaxed for the elderly, therefore fully supplanting Social Security while eliminating waste on financially secure and deliberately working elderly and while also eliminating a regressive tax on workers and expanding coverage to those who may be unable to work or poor but currently just too young to quality for Social Security.

There is merit to the argument about folding Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA into a unified universal access programme, as well as the various welfare programmes into a single system. What you seem not to recognise is that Social Security also serves a very necessary function as part of a multilayered system of social insurance covering all the citizenry. SS guarantees a backup income for retirees, both to supplement pensions and investment nest-eggs as well as part-time income from continuing employment past retirement age, as well as ensuring survivors' benefits for the families if a workingman (or woman) dies before qualifying for benefits, and in those cases eases the financial shock of losing a provider and his/her salary. That the richest 1% of the population also qualify for benefits is no argument for scrapping the programme for the other 99%; the system can absorb that cost and has done for decades. The present problems with Social Security lie elsewhere, and they and the various proposed methods for adjusting them are part of the record of the several debate threads the late and unlamented Tharkun got ass-raped in each and every time he launched one of his anti-Social Security diatribes.

[SirNitram]

A small correction, Degan: You can get on Medicare without being a senior citizen if you are disabled. I know this mostly because they decided to switch me over without any real choice on my end. At least the prescription plan isn't a fucking gouger.

[Broomstick]

He said, why not cover the poor (be they unemployed or working poor) with welfare both rich and old? Are you deliberately strawmanning the man?

And I, and Broomstick, and Nitram, said —which you also didn't bother to read either— that this would entail a drop into poverty in order to qualify for benefits.

I wish to emphasize that it's not just a drop into poverty that qualifies one for welfare benefits but a drop into DIRE poverty.

For example, my household is now officially poor. My current income is definitely below the poverty line for two people. Despite that we do NOT qualify for food stamps, housing assistance, or any other financial assistance from either the state or Federal government. I did submit an application for Healthy Indiana Plan health insurance, which is specifically for people who can't get health insurance through work and who are under an income cap (which we are) - BUT, I nearly got a job with an employer who does offer health insurance with a (get this) annual benefit cap of $3,500! If I had been hired not only would I most likely STILL be below poverty AND I would not qualify for the state program which is real insurance and not the bullshit-we-only-pay-out-$3,500-per-year-no-matter-what piece of shit. Because of the way the system works there are a LOT of working poor locked into inferior employer-sponsored insurance instead of the state program - you don't have the option to refuse the employer insurance, if any health insurance is offered to you through your employer you can't get the state program even if you opt out of the employer's plan

Let's consider this for a moment: I have two paid-for vehicles, a Toyota Echo and a Ford Ranger. If we get so destitute I need to get rid of one to qualify for food stamps which do I sell? The truck, which costs more to run - oh, wait, since I'm currently painting houses for a living I need the truck to haul paint, tools, supplies, and ladders which simply do not fit in the car. Do I sell the car? Wait - it's newer, more efficient, and my disabled husband has much less trouble getting in and out of it. Oh, fuck, it's a dilemma.

OK, I'll also have to sell piano. That sucks. And there's this computer system - if it's considered a material asset then it has to go. Oh, wait - just about every employer these days wants you to apply on-line -- giving up the computer is going to make it harder to get a job. Sure, I can go to the public library - except no Sunday, few evening hours, Wednesday the computers are reserved for classes so no job hunting then, either, and, oh yes I need to fucking DRIVE there in my one remaining vehicle, consuming gas by doing so.

Then there's my current issue. The Feds want me to take an additional medical test before making a decision to employ me or not. I have been refused service by multiple doctors in this area because I have no medical insurance even though I am willing and able to pay cash - but ONLY because I have been able to retain savings which I would not be able to do on welfare (I did recently find a doc who is arranging for me to take the test). In other words, if there is a cost to getting a job - a class, a medical exam, a new suit for interviewing, whatever - if you're poor enough to be on welfare you are FUCKED because you will NOT have the money! You are not allowed to have savings or retain an asset. Why don't poor people bootstrap themselves up from poverty? Because the system keeps cutting off their bootlaces.

There are some people who do manage to climb out of poverty... my college roommate, for example, who went from being homeless and sleeping in a train station to being a surgeon. However, it took her over two decades to do that, when she was relatively young, when she was healthy enough to work, and at a time when the food stamp and welfare programs were far more generous. She is also extremely intelligent, far more so than average. In addition, her education was paid for in large part by the government, which she had to pay back not only with money but also in multi-year service in a remote part of the US with a doctor shortage. The average person will NOT have the mental and physical resources to pull this off.

If you're poor in America you are a second class citizen. If you're poor enough to qualify for welfare you are third class or worse. But social security is a safety net for everyone and it is that only because there is no means testing. If you apply means testing it will be diluted and degraded until it is no better than the other social welfare programs we have left since the "Reagan revolution".

[Guardsman Bass]

Out of curiousity - would the criterion for determining whether an old person receives transfer payments to compensate for their poverty in the new system depend on their total wealth or investment income? I'm slightly iffy on this; it seems like the kind of thing for which tons of loopholes based on where and how the investment income was earned will end up distorting the distribution, particularly with the political pressure from groups like the AARP.

[Surlethe]

Nest eggs can get wiped out by any one of a number of unexpected expenses impacting on a family. Say Dad or Junior gets cancer? That nest egg can get drained in short order by the effort to keep the family up and running and paying for Dad's or Junior's medical care. If that nest egg goes, what's the family got left to rely on? And suppose that nest egg doesn't quite measure up to the rate of inflation down the line?

That's why you've got Social Security. As a backup.

If the family hasn't got a nest egg because of inflation or because of emergencies draining them, then that's where I propose welfare ought to kick in. My objection is to giving handouts to people who don't need them, which I understand the current social security system does.

You understand wrong. The universal nature of Social Security is one of the mechanisms which insulates it from political attack, unlike welfare. Also, with Social Security in place to maintain a reasonable standard of living for retirees and the disabled without their having to lose everything and slide into poverty to qualify for welfare the overall economy is helped by not having millions of people suddenly drop in the value of their assets.

Now, if I understand you correctly, you object to this proposal for two reasons: because it would make Social Security more vulnerable to political attack, and because people who have money would have to lose some of that money to qualify for welfare. The first objection is, frankly, silly; the logic that "X is more politically vulnerable than Y, therefore X should not occur" could just as easily be used to oppose expanding welfare, changing Don't Ask Don't Tell, or even repealing Jim Crow laws. The second objection is answered by agreeing that the welfare system is broken, which simply means that this social security reform of the nature I propose cannot occur in a vacuum. Surely you would support an expanded welfare system, which would make my idea more feasible in reality?

See above. Another problem with your reasoning is that you seem to assume that contribution and benefit automatically have an immediate 1:1 correlation in all cases or must do.

A valid point, and I retract that contention.

This Catch-22 you've laid out is an artifact of poor welfare: it is an indictment of the poverty support system. In the sense that my idea relies on a decent social safety net which is not in place in the US, your objection is valid. But in principle, where things like decent welfare programs exist, your objections don't apply; your point is answered by coupling welfare reform to this social security idea.

No, this Catch-22 is the logical end of the scheme you propose, and which no serious industrial nation which does maintain a decent social safety net would implement for the very obvious reason of having millions lose the value of their assets, which doesn't make any economic sense on any level.

How does the proposed reform cause millions of people to lose the value of their assets? The Catch-22 you point out is the logical end of the scheme I propose in the OP only if you subscribe to the notion that US welfare should not be made to work.

This doesn't eliminate the problem, it only transfers it onto a far more politically-vulnerable programme which will fall under continuing attack from Rightards who see any form of government assistance and taxation as evil (and of course by the shills for Big Business).

You might as well say that welfare and health care shouldn't be reformed because raising the poverty line and creating comprehensive national health insurance will create more politically-vulnerable programs which will fall under attack from lolbertarians and businessmen. It is a pragmatic point, but not one which refutes the contention that they ought to, in principle, be reformed.

The problem is that your "reform" cuts out a major portion of social insurance and is based on a false assumption that all current conditions will remain static. They do not, and it is well to have a multilayered system in place even if there are some people who either "don't deserve" (subjective conclusion) to benefit from it or actually commit outright fraud to collect a benefit they're not entitled to.

Where am I, anywhere, assuming that current conditions will remain static? The heart of the proposal is simply to revoke the guarantee of retirement, and instead focus on supporting those who have fallen on hard times or can't work. For those elderly who cannot find work or are unable to work, it effectively amounts to a retirement.

[Surlethe]

Primus' ideas strike me as pie-in-the-sky. Why precisely should we expect to overhaul the many, varied Welfare and Unemployment standards into something useful to pick up the inevitable slack Social Security creates, when we see that welfare is in fact more vunerable to political hatchetjobs?

These 'reforms' seem to exist in some fairyland where there is no large movement to cut off social safety nets.

Surlethe as a poster often approaches questions as questions for the purposes of argument without respect to the current state of things politically or what have you - the tone of the OP, combined with his acknowledgment of huge AARP political pressure, and the essential real-world political absurdity of reforming Social Security at all without utter, immediate political-economic necessity to me made it clear that his debate was discussing what was desirable or ideal, as opposed to practical or realistic.

Personally, I'd prefer to see such detached and idealized pontificating and navel-gazing in SLAM, as it is a question of morality and logic, instead of News and Politics, which as the name suggests, should naturally have some connection to real politics. It's fine as an ethical question, but this forum is clearly wrong for hypotheticals which discount real-world impacts. I can move the thread and note my objections were founded on this, if Surlethe requests.

IP got it essentially correct: the idea in the OP is to try to hammer out what Social Security would be like ideally. I put in in N&P because it seems to be a question of political theory: what is the goal we should work toward in approaching the question of how to reform social security? Nonetheless, if you feel this is better suited to SLAM, then I have no objections to moving it.

[SirNitram]

IP got it essentially correct: the idea in the OP is to try to hammer out what Social Security would be like ideally. I put in in N&P because it seems to be a question of political theory: what is the goal we should work toward in approaching the question of how to reform social security? Nonetheless, if you feel this is better suited to SLAM, then I have no objections to moving it.

Eh, I'll let it be as it seems to have those knowledgable here and isn't terribly disruptive; I merely dislike the 'Let's navelgaze ideals in the politics forum' threads. It's too easy to cast away real-world concerns and realities. It's sorta like 'Perfectly spherical chickens with no wind resistance...'

That said, if you want me to flesh out what I think the idealized would be, here are the basics:

Declare a logical cutoff in 2008$, based on likely expenditures for the elderly/disabled(Because, as others have noted, many people don't know much about this. If you're disabled, you too are on SS.). It may actually be superior to define a range, where your income from SS drops the higher you go, going from 'Full pension' to 'assistance' to 'Not needed'.

Index this to inflation.

Keep the inflation standard it's indexed to honest.

Following this, work must be done to standardize and render sane Welfare and Medicare/Medicaid. None of what has been posted here is an exagerration of how dysfunctional these are.

Personally, I see the effort to raise the income cap(Thus decreasing the regressive nature of the payroll tax) as politically challenging enough, even in an enviroment where people are resenting the fat-cats like now. The meme of 'The New Deal programs are evil, destroy them' has spread as planned, and social security is alive entirely because it is universal. I re-iterate this because I think, even discussing ideals, we should acknowledge the barriers.

[Patrick Degan]

Now, if I understand you correctly, you object to this proposal for two reasons: because it would make Social Security more vulnerable to political attack, and because people who have money would have to lose some of that money to qualify for welfare. The first objection is, frankly, silly; the logic that "X is more politically vulnerable than Y, therefore X should not occur" could just as easily be used to oppose expanding welfare, changing Don't Ask Don't Tell, or even repealing Jim Crow laws. The second objection is answered by agreeing that the welfare system is broken, which simply means that this social security reform of the nature I propose cannot occur in a vacuum. Surely you would support an expanded welfare system, which would make my idea more feasible in reality?

You make invalid comparisons between social welfare and constitutional rights —which Don't Ask Don't Tell and Jim Crow fall under. Jim Crow laws were struck down in their entirety when the Supreme Court finally reversed it's earlier decision and found that the 14th Amendment did not really support the "separate but equal" doctrine outlined by Plessy v. Ferguson. From that point onward, it didn't matter one jot what the states with Jim Crow laws wanted, since state law cannot trump the federal constitution —a point outlined when President Eisenhower said he'd enforce the Brown decision with the 101st Airborne Division if he had to.

By contrast, social welfare programmes are not seen in this country as a right, unlike in social and Christian democracies. A well-researched 2003 study conducted by Clem Brooks of the University of Indiana and Jeff Manza of Northwestern University, The Welfare State, Public Opinion, and Power Resources Theory: Social Rights Support and Welfare State Regimes in Cross-National Perspective, which is available online at the All Academic Research website, outlines a comparative analysis between the more advanced industrial democracies which support varying systems of social insurance and how the difference between social and Christian democracies, and liberal democracies (of which the U.S. falls into the latter category) in the view of whether social welfare is a right or a mere privilege impacts the level of governmental effort and popular support for welfare, and the effect of partisan control of government and mass opinion upon support for welfare programmes under the theory of power resource allocation. As Brooks and Manza sum up their study:

Novel Sources of Welfare State Regime Differences

While past comparative opinion research has established large descriptive differences
between countries in levels of welfare state support (Smith 1987; 1990; Kluegel and Miyano 1995; Svallfors 1995; 1997; Andersen et al. 1999), the interrelationship of such differences and specific welfare states or particular regime types has not been systematically investigated in a way that analyzes public opinion as an input into policy-making while also taking into account confounding causal factors and the time-serious nature of country-level data. This has left the theoretical status of factors relating to mass policy preferences ambiguous, making it possible for some scholars to potentially assume that public opinion must matter while others might categorically dismiss with equal vigor such factors as irrelevant. Given that our results suggest that mass policy preferences do influence public policy, it may be tempting to (again) assert the triviality of this proposition, but such reasoning would dramatically understate both the empirical analysis necessary to move scholarly debates beyond speculation as well as the ways (discussed below) this research advances welfare state theory. In this context, our decomposition results suggest the programmatic finding that cross- national differences in social rights support explain a very sizable portion of the variation between social, Christian democratic, and liberal welfare state regimes. Indeed, for five of the six policy domains in the analyses, differences in public support for social rights is the single largest factor behind welfare state regime differences, overshadowing demographic and macro- economic factors. For instance, using the key measure of overall welfare state effort, social rights support by itself accounts for 73 percent of the difference between social versus liberal democratic regimes. This result implies that absent cross-national differences in social rights support, welfare regimes would thus be far more similar, perhaps approaching the common institutional model envisioned by modernization or convergence theories (e.g., Kosenen 1995; Scharpf 1997; see also Ferrera 1996). By providing evidence for the centrality of social rights support to understanding why welfare states differ widely across countries, the current study illustrates the analytical benefits of bringing into focus the causal relevance of factors relating to mass opinion.

Extending Power Resources Theory
As discussed earlier, further decomposition results provide evidence that differences in social rights support also help to explain differences in aggregated and domain-specific policy outputs for specific countries.

How do these results bear on theories of the welfare state? We have argued that power resources theory has considerable affinity with propositions about the influence of mass policy preferences on welfare states. Indeed, power resources commentary on factors behind the persistence of regime differences is readily interpreted as suggesting that the degree of public support for social rights helps to explain cross national differences in welfare state effort. These considerations suggest that mass policy preferences (and the results of the current study) are usefully incorporated into welfare state theory, while acknowledging the other, better-established factors behind the origins and ongoing development of public social provision. In keeping with our extension of the power resources approach, we suggest the utility of conceptualizing the level of social rights support as an ideological resource, one that varies considerably across national or regime context. Viewed from this perspective, high levels of social rights support within Scandinavia are a powerful resource for proponents of social democracy, while lower levels of such support within liberal democracies may be a resource for proponents of market and other privatization schemes. Complementing power resources theory’s focus on the importance of class and partisan-political forces, a proposition suggested by this study is that welfare state regimes are also organized by reference to distinctive ideological bases. The various worlds of welfare states, to apply Esping-Andersen’s (1990) famous metaphor, may be distinguished not only by their economic, demographic, or partisan political dimensions, but also by forms of mass policy preferences that provide legitimacy to specific types of public (or private) social provision.

Essentially, what this means is that in the United States, as long as social welfare is not seen as a right of citizenship, support for the various social welfare programmes will remain predicated upon either interest-based appeal or a means-test method of allocation. Social Security enjoys universal support because it is universally available and is a programme in which nearly the whole population has an interest in maintaining. Health care is slowly swinging in that direction as well, which is why we may eventually see a national health-insurance scheme implemented, because the current coverage crisis and the cost crisis are becoming impossible to ignore or to be handwaved away. By contrast, welfare is not going to be seen on those terms because most people do not have need for it, may never have a need for it, and therefore is always going to be more subject to means-testing to grant access and far more vulnerable to partisan attack. The scheme you and Primus advocate would be feasible if a different cultural view of social insurance as a right was held in this country, but it is not. And there simply is no magic-bullet solution for implementing such a view since social insurance is not addressed in the constitution as a matter of civil liberty, unlike the overthrow of Jim Crow which did fall within that sphere.

How does the proposed reform cause millions of people to lose the value of their assets? The Catch-22 you point out is the logical end of the scheme I propose in the OP only if you subscribe to the notion that US welfare should not be made to work.

The proposed reform does entail that trap since welfare is, as discussed above, predicated upon means-testing, as Broomstick has been outlining in gory detail in the case of her own family situation.

Where am I, anywhere, assuming that current conditions will remain static? The heart of the proposal is simply to revoke the guarantee of retirement, and instead focus on supporting those who have fallen on hard times or can't work. For those elderly who cannot find work or are unable to work, it effectively amounts to a retirement.

Again, see above.