WHEN MY grandmother's great grandfather died, he was living on the poor farm in Lawrence County, Ala. Before there was Social Security, those old folks who didn't have any family or whose family couldn't afford to take care of them went to the poor farm or the poor house. In Lawrence County the seniors who could still get out of bed in the morning went on down to the fields and hoed cotton or squash, working until the day they died. Many old folks who didn't end up on the poor farm lived with their relatives. My grandmother told me that often a husband and a wife would be split up for their final years because one family could not afford to take care of both of them. Perhaps a son's family would take care of the mother and the daughter's family the father.
None of my relatives live on the poor farm today. No elderly person has to suffer the indignity of being separated from her or his spouse because of economic necessity because in 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress created Social Security, which Lyndon Johnson expanded to cover all seniors under the auspices of the Great Society. According to Associate History Prof. Grace Hale, these federal programs had virtually eliminated poverty among the elederly by the 1980s. While rising drug prices have compromised the living standards of seniors in the past decade, Social Security nevertheless ensures that my grandmother can retire in her home rather than till the soil on the poor farm.
Why, then, is President Bush attempting to dismantle Social Security? Why privatize, and thereby destroy, our country's most successful social program? Why would the Republican Party return us to an era when old age was characterized by poverty? It is not only callousness to the well-being of my grandmother and all working-class senior citizens. To be sure, Bush will sacrifice the interests of the seniors in order to enrich the stock brokers and mutual fund managers who, as Hale pointed out, are the only sure winners of Social Security privatization. Yet Bush is not attempting to destroy Social Security merely to transfer the retirement savings of all citizens to some stock brokers on Wall Street. Bush must destroy Social Security because its existence is a daily refutation of Republican ideology and "free" market rhetoric.
Social Security has vastly lower management overhead costs than privatized pension systems in oher countries (such as in Britain), according to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and Social Security is so successful that we effectively eliminated poverty among seniors. The Social Security Administration estimates that "nearly half of all older Americans" would live below the poverty line without Social Security, based on data from 1999. Fifteen million seniors would live in poverty today without that guaranteed benefit. Over the last forty years, the time since Johnson expanded Social Security to include all seniors, the poverty rate for the elderly has fallen 72 percent, according to the SSA.
But because the Republican Party thrives on criticizing "big government," the existence of a big government program that eliminated poverty for old folks threatens their party's and their ideology's long term solvency in America. If we can eliminate poverty for seniors, there is no reason we cannot eliminate poverty among children, who currently suffer the highest rates of poverty. If we can eliminate poverty for seniors, perhaps we can provide employment for workers who have seen their jobs sent to Mexico and China by their former corporate employers. Social Security's unambiguous success is a stirring testament to the power of government to affect positive change in the average person's life.
My father and mother deserve to retire after a lifetime of labor. My cousins in northern Alabama should not have to work at Wal-Mart until the day they die. We have a moral responsibility to protect Social Security from Bush's assault, and expand the welfare state where otherwise possible, precisely because the wellbeing of my family, of most American families, depends upon it. We cannot return to an age when, as Prof. Hale said, Americans "worked until physically unable, then lived with family or in the country home, the poor house."We have an obligation to protect the "profoundly important" achievement of our grandparent's generation, lest we condemn our children's to the poor farm in their old age.
Zack Fields' column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
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