Linkmeister

"No Man is an Island"

Jonathan Chait has an excellent explanation of the reasons why Bush's SocSec plan needs to be defeated.

Privatizers portray Social Security as a kind of low-performing 401(k) plan. But the program was never intended as a personal retirement plan. It's a form of social insurance, designed to spread risks throughout the population. One such risk is that you get sick or hurt and can't work anymore; 11.5 percent of Social Security benefits go to disabled workers (which is another reason why retirees get a lower rate of return). (Emphasis mine)

Another risk is that your income will decline, perhaps because economic changes make your skills less valuable. (Today, for example, steelworkers could be made redundant by productivity increases. Perhaps in 30 years it will be accountants or software engineers whose work was outsourced overseas.) That's why Social Security gives low-earning retirees a greater return on their taxes than high-income retirees. Still another risk is that you'll live a very long time and exhaust your savings, which is why old-age benefits are indexed to inflation and last for a lifetime.

He's exactly right. The program isn't an IRA, a 401(k), or a private pension plan. It's a safety net, and one the Republicans, reciting their "personal responsibility" mantra, want to take away. If you want to play reductio ad absurdum, you could say that each of us is personally responsible for the road in front of our home or business; that gravel stretch in between? Well, get your shocks fixed. It doesn't work. Franklin is credited with the phrase "let us all hang together, for if we don’t, we most assuredly will hang separately," and he was right. There are aspects of being citizens that require us all to work toward a common goal, and what could be a more common goal than to care for those who are the poorest and weakest?

The next time you hear one of the privatization crowd blather, quote this:

...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...