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**DECEMBER 20, 2023**
On the Prospect website
The American Judiciary Is Failing Its Trump Test
A would-be dictator does not deserve anxious consideration of his
rights. BY RYAN COOPER
The Leasing Loophole for EVs
Consumers can get the $7,500 federal rebate on any EV, no matter where
its parts are made, if they lease, which auto dealers quite like. BY
DAVID DAYEN
Building a Giant
Mapping UnitedHealth's consumption of our health care system-from
the '70s to today BY KRISTA BROWN & SARA SIROTA
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Fake Generational Warfare
A guide to the latest efforts to undermine trust in Social Security
The effort to promote generational warfare against Social Security is on
one of its periodic upswings. The granddaddy of this campaign was the
late Peter G. Peterson. He spent decades and at least a billion dollars
of his own fortune trying to persuade younger Americans that Social
Security would not be there when they needed it, and that they'd be
better off with personal accounts run by Wall Street. (Peterson had
headed Lehman Brothers and later co-founded the Blackstone Group.)
The latest entries in this never-ending propaganda campaign are an op-ed
piece by former Sen. Phil Gramm and Mike Solon. Their title is a cheeky
"Social Security Was Doomed From the Start
."
For a doomed program, Social Security has done pretty well over its
nearly 90 years, keeping hundreds of millions of elderly Americans out
of poverty in old age.
Gramm's story is that FDR's mistake was setting up Social Security
as pay-as-you-go, in which one generation's payroll taxes pay for the
previous generation's retirement. He's right that the program would
be even stronger if it banked a large surplus, the income on which could
partly pay the cost of Social Security checks. But the right way to fund
that is by raising taxes on the rich. How about it, Phil?
Another recent contribution to this crusade is a December 18 piece in
**Newsweek**, headlined "Young Americans Turn Against Boomers Over
Social Security
."
**Newsweek** cites a poll that it commissioned. But the actual poll
shows nothing of the sort.
I quote: "According to the poll, 56 percent of Gen Zers, 76 percent of
millennials and 69 percent of Gen Xers believed the system should be
reformed, against 50 percent of boomers."
But "the system should be reformed" could mean almost anything, from the
kind of privatization long advocated by Peterson, Wall Street, and
ideological opponents, to the kind of shoring up advocated by the likes
of me.
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What gives the issue new resonance is that the trust funds will not be
able to pay all of the benefits owed within a decade or two. We need to
act soon, either by increasing the revenues to Social Security or
reducing benefits.
That's the real debate we should be having. Donald Trump, who is a
psychopath but no fool, has avoided weighing in.
What is true is that Americans of my generation got a much better
economic deal than generations who came after. We had affordable
homeownership, whose increase in equity over a lifetime gave us nest
eggs for retirement. Half of us had real pension plans, as opposed to
inadequate 401(k)s and the like. We were able to get college degrees
without the burden of debt. Those of us without college had good
unionized blue-collar jobs that provided a middle-class lifestyle, often
on one income.
Younger generations have every right to feel cheated. But contrary to
the generational warfare fable, that rip-off was not the fault of
boomers. It was the work of conservatives of all ages who denied younger
Americans the secure social contract that my generation enjoyed.
And contrary to the attacks on social insurance, Social Security is a
relatively small part of that larger story. If we want to keep it strong
for future generations, the path is to strengthen its finances, not to
weaken its coverage.
Social Security is more essential than ever, given the collapse of
decent pension plans engineered by corporations and Wall Street, to
transfer all the risk to workers and retirees. The real generational
warfare is class warfare.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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