Staying With the Program
By Robert G. Kaiser
December 28, 2005
It's Nancy J. Altman's bad luck that President Bush abandoned his effort to end Social Security as we have known it before her fine history of America's most important government program could reach the bookstores. Her book would have enriched this round of the old debate about Social Security because it provides historical context -- a quaint intellectual notion often evaded in Washington arguments.The context provided by Altman, who chairs the Pension Rights Center's board, may actually offer the best single explanation for Bush's humiliating failure to "reform" Social Security or even build significant support for his ideas. As she demonstrates, the Social Security program has become a pillar of American life that supports millions of Americans -- one that we take for granted, like death and taxes. Altering Social Security significantly, as the president proposed to do at the beginning of his second term, would mean altering the basic rules of the game of life. As polls keep reminding us, most Americans would rather not do that.
So in 70 years, Social Security has been transformed. What began as a radical departure in social policy (Altman tells this story wonderfully) is now one of the most reliable institutions of a conservative society. Messing with Social Security is now seen as the radical alternative; leaving it alone is the conservative choice. (Of course, I am using the word "conservative" as it is defined in the dictionary -- "tending to preserve established traditions or institutions" -- not as it is used in our ongoing political wars.)
The first Republican to try to create a popular mandate for undoing Social Security was Alf Landon, the GOP's presidential candidate in 1936. Challenging President Franklin D. Roosevelt that year, Landon and the Republicans campaigned against the new Social Security Act (passed in 1935) as an attack on American freedom. They denounced the 1 percent payroll tax scheduled to go into effect at the beginning of 1937 as government larceny of earned wages. Many employers put just that message, in writing, into the pay envelopes of their workers on the eve of the 1936 election. And Landon was trounced anyway.
At once, Republican members of Congress began to vote overwhelmingly in favor of expanding Social Security and increasing its benefits. Some staunch conservatives in the GOP continued to denounce the program, but Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in the post-FDR era, was having none of it. He wrote to his brother Edgar in November 1954, ridiculing oil tycoon H.L. Hunt of Texas and like-minded millionaires who refused to accept Social Security. "Their number is negligible," Ike wrote his brother, "and they are stupid."
Through the 1950s and '60s, Social Security taxes rose gradually but steadily, as did benefits. New medical programs for the elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid) were added, finally overcoming opposition from the American Medical Association, which had successfully blocked the inclusion of health insurance in the original Social Security program. In 1971, Rep. Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.), the longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed historic changes in Social Security that he hoped might help his candidacy for president in 1972. That went nowhere, but the Mills amendments made cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security benefits automatic and raised the basic benefit for retirees by 20 percent. President Richard Nixon obligingly signed these changes into law. Suddenly, millions of Americans had a guaranteed retirement benefit big enough to survive on. The new schedule of benefits lifted millions of elderly Americans above the official poverty line.
Before George W. Bush, only one president showed any inclination to alter Social Security: Ronald Reagan, who quickly changed his mind and instead oversaw modest, practical changes in the program that were approved in 1983 and assured its viability well into this century. A similarly modest package of changes now would take care of the problem for another half century or longer, Altman argues.
Altman is no David McCullough; her prose is clean and workmanlike, not literary. Her story gets confused in some places, bogged down with detail in others. Still, the book generally moves briskly along the interesting story line. She is an unabashed enthusiast for Social Security, though she gives credit to the Cato Institute and other opponents of the program who got a radical overhaul back on the national agenda this year, however briefly.
This book will still be relevant the next time Social Security's critics manage to revive the effort to undo our only national insurance program. And this is certain to happen again. The history of Social Security confirms one of the iron laws of official Washington: In this town, no important policy dispute is ever definitively settled.
