Social Security Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision
By ROBERT PEAR
The Social Security Administration is preparing a campaign
to convince the public that private accounts are needed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/politics/16benefit.html?th
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Health Care's Unlikely Surgeon
By STEVE LOHR
Newt Gingrich is probably the most visible spokesman for a
set of ideas about health care that is gaining support in
the Bush administration and in business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/business/yourmoney/16newt.html?th
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With a second term in place the Bush team seems be working down the line now to sabotage our basic social services as indicated by the two articles above. The upshot will be an ever widening poverty/wealth gap -- between our greedies and those struggling to get by. Our survival rates for newborns are a national disgrace. It looks as though our seniors are next in line for the big Bush hits. Let us hope that our under forties can be persuaded that they are headed down this same life trail. What they decide now will determine their own futures. Death spares no man or woman.
There is a certain irony here as the U.S. crosses over the divide to emulate previously class and caste bound nations such as Brazil and India which have traditionally favored the privileged with all benefits while leaving the bulk of their citizens as 'untouchables' and/or 'peasants' to fend for themselves as best they can.
I well remember a Brazilian commentator at our Columbia University Faculty seminar on Human Rights explaining the class divisions along racial lines in Brazil -- Euro\Afro\indigenous - with benefits, privileges, and rights allocated in descending order. The way Brazil worked was to grant the privileged (lighter complexions were better -- adelanter de raza) the bulk of the wealth with access to advancement through private school educations for their children by which one only could reach higher education and the professions. Public education was scattered and inferior and fitted one to be a worker at best -- if available to all, leaving most illiterate. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been trying to do better by his masses of late, as has Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, whom Bush has tried to unseat.
An Indian commentator in this same faculty seminar (a recently appointed Chief Justice who hoped to achieve some reforms in the system) explained that Gandhi's 'self-help' program had precluded routine state-supported social services for the masses along similar caste lines. The state would intervene to cope with major catastrophes such as a flood or drought or the recent Tsunami, but the masses living in ordinary poverty were subject to not so benign neglect -- one starved or died of treatable medical conditions on one's own -- or in some cases was even subject to the equivalent of slavery through captive status in such situations as a quarry run by a wealthy owner with small huts for workers bound to the system with minimal handouts of food rather than wages for their families, including children bound to labor rather than to live normal lives with education and other basics. Also see Arundati Roy's The God of Small Things:
http://www.salon.com/sept97/00roy.html
One reads that more recently India has been introducing affirmative action for untouchables, but still about 40% or Indians are stranded in abject poverty while a more comfortable 60& runs Indian 'democracy'. Alexis De Tocqueville (Democracy in America) spotted the same sort of fatal flaw in our Republic back in 1835 -- our potential for tyranny by majorities here:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch15.htm
as did John Stuart Mill later in the century:
http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/jsmill.htm
And so it goes -- Amerika -- now becoming our newest banana republic in the Western Hemisphere!
And lest we forget, as we recall his contributions to our American dream, shortly before he was assassinated in 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was rapidly losing popularity in some circles for moving on from his campaign for voting rights to the problems of poverty that beset so many Americans. See the following excerpt from his last and least known book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, in which he argued on behalf of a guaranteed national income as the solution to cruel and destructive American poverty:
http://www.educationplanet.com/redirect?url=http://www.progress.org/dividend/cdking.html
In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.
While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at a similar rate of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing -- they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
"Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.
We have come to the point where we must make the non producer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.
In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:
"The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased."
We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.
Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would have to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.
This proposal is not a "civil rights" program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.
Our nation's adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however minuscule, through welfare benefits.
John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam."
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
