THANK YOU BROTHER, RICIN
After winning re-election 20 years ago, President George W. Bush wasted his political capital on a wild goose chase to partially privatize Social Security, an issue seldom discussed during the campaign. The more he pitched the concept during the early months of 2005, the less the public bought in. Nor could Dubya secure enough support from his enlarged majorities in both chambers of Congress to bring up the proposal for a vote.
This domestic-policy Edsel set the pace for a failed second term, including Republicans losing both houses of Congress in 2006. Yet prominent GOP voices since have remained stuck in the Bush dreamworld of “reforming” Social Security, exaggerating the projected, down-the-road funding shortfalls, as did Bush, into an existential crisis.
Former President Donald Trump understands the political reality that the 43rd president did not: Earned-benefit programs remain popular with Middle America, especially with voters over 45 years of age, who have favored Republican presidential picks since 2012. So his White House did not mess with Social Security or Medicare. As the likely GOP nominee this year, Trump has reaffirmed his pledge to heed the GOP base on these pocketbook issues.
He may lack the electoral magic of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, but Trump stands with the masters in accepting—not relitigating—the New Deal centerpiece that served the country well until the Great Society broke from the bipartisan policy consensus. The unconventional candidate might remember that FDR borrowed the Social Security idea from his GOP cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Or how congressional Republicans dared the Democrats, during the 1938 midterms, to improve the then-fledgling program. As social historian Allan Carlson captures the drama, by criticizing the stinginess of the old-age component that had yet paid any beneficiary, the GOP picked up 80 seats.
Consequently, the 1939 Social Security amendments transformed the original setup, modeled after private insurance, and geared to the individual worker, into pay-as-you-go social insurance delivering spousal and survivor benefits to the married-parent family, elevating “the American standard” as the socioeconomic ideal. So popular were these reforms, cementing Social Security’s enduring appeal, that the 1940 GOP platform endorsed the program.
Love,
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