Instead of responding to an attack or rallying to "save" Social Security from "reform" we should be developing our own strategy.
Ask the question why, aside from wanting to do favors for their friends in the finance and insurance industry, Republicans are so reluctant to administer programs of any sort, whenever they are in power.
The answer, I would suggest, is that the Republican elite is a lot like those plantation owners before the Civil War, comfortable holding onto or borrowing money but incapable of actually DOING anything. Republicans are incompetent. The only way a Republican executive achieves anything is if he's got a strong Democratic Congress setting policy, outlining procedure, managing the finances and providing sufficient over-sight to see that things get done.
The only thing Republican administrations have been good at is messing things up and then when the Democrats clean up, complaining that it costs too much.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for people who think that the people they elect SHOULD be able to take it from there and run the country in an efficient manner while they, the Republicans, go about minding their own business. The problem we have is that today's Republicans are basically incompetents, even when they come from a business background. Why is it that whenever a business or an industry finds it difficult going, the first thing they need is either a tax cut or a bailout?
Whatever happened to the basic tenet of capitalism that you save for a rainy day?
Why should the American people who have set aside money in the Social Security Trust Fund hand it over to people who have proven themselves improvident in the extreme? To people who think that the only thing a trust fund is good for is to spend as quickly as possible?
Any common sense person can see that what the Republicans are proposing is insane.
Of course, to the extent that the Democrats have allowed this pattern of rubber-stamping stuff for an incompetent executive to go forward, they are also to blame. Even if they did it just to see how bad it could get, that may be understandable. But now it's time to say "enough is enough."
Posted by Hannah at March 2, 2005 08:09 AM