Ponzi Schemer
by digby
I find it very hard to believe that Rick Perry can get elected president with this crude of a message on Social Security and Medicare. It’s bad enough that it’s derisive toward the older people who are in the room and depend on the program.(Bunch ‘o swindlers!) There’s just nobody but wingnut extremists that don’t support the program. Certainly, not the young people he says he’s “protecting.”
It’s not surprising that Americans over age 65 are virtually unanimous in seeing Social Security as an important government program. As a group, they rely on it as the single greatest source of income in retirement.
But a poll commissioned by AARP to mark Social Security’s 75th anniversary (President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the transformational legislation on August 14, 1935) has found something even more interesting: young people line up solidly behind Social Security, too.
In a national phone survey of 1,200 adults by the GfK Roper consulting firm (margin of error: plus or minus 3 percent), 90 percent of those ages 18 to 29 deemed Social Security important. In fact, almost half of them agreed with the statement that it is “one of the very most important government programs,” an opinion held by nearly 80 percent of those over 65.
And nearly three-quarters of these youngest respondents strongly agreed that while they may not need the program when they retire, a time that probably seems infinitely far away, “I definitely want to know that it’s there, just in case I do.” Sixty-two percent said they will rely on Social Security payments in some way. By a wide margin, they opposed cutting benefits to reduce the federal deficit.
George W. Bush was not the brightest light the GOP ever produced. But he wasn’t dumb enough to attack the most popular program in history as a con job. This guy is just an aggressive thug. I’m beginning to think they let him in there to make Mitt Romney look better.
Update: Mojo has a nice piece up about the differences between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme. Let’s put it this way: is Social Security turns out have been a decades long Ponzi scheme, it means that the US Government will no longer be in existence when these young people get old. In which case, I think they might have bigger problems.