Daniel Gross (Slate): The One Democrat Republicans Are Still Scared of: FDR
Why are today's Republicans so hellbent on changing Social Security? Clearly they're not driven by concern over government deficits. After all, they've engineered a taxing and spending regime that intentionally created record deficits. And it can't be that they oppose entitlement programs as a matter of principle. Medicare has an unfunded liability larger than Social Security's, and they just expanded it a couple of years ago with the prescription drug benefit.
Maybe it's because Social Security is an opportunity to refight—and perhaps win—a series of arguments the Republicans lost badly 70 years ago. To put it another way, it's a chance to knock down Franklin Roosevelt, finally."For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win," Peter Wehner, Bush's director of strategic initiatives, wrote in a memo to supporters in early January. In a column advocating the dismantling of Social Security, George Melloan of the Wall Street Journal editorial page last week wrote that"The Social Security Act of 1935 was the worthy achievement of the New Deal—almost the only one of any permanence—that gave relief to a Depression-battered nation." (In an interview, Melloan said he's aware that the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Triborough Bridge are all New Deal products of permanence as well.) The Cato Institute, which has been leading the charge against Social Security, includes among its many distinguished fellows Jim Powell, author of the deeply ahistoric history FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression.
Dead going on 60 years, FDR still makes self-styled champions of American-style capitalism fulminate, much the same way their counterparts in the 1930s raged against"That Man." Why? The New Deal era reminds national greatness Republicans like Wehner of their party's futility in a time of true national greatness. I also suspect that many Republicans are simply unable to forgive Roosevelt for what may have been his greatest and longest-lasting achievement: saving American capitalism through regulation. And since they can't tear down the Triborough Bridge or the Hoover Dam, these guys act out by going after Social Security.