Social Security Works! by Nancy Altman

Author:Nancy Altman [ J. Altman, Nancy; R. Kingson, Eric; Johnston, David Cay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970478
Publisher: The New Press

Figure 9.1

MORE MONEY

Although Peterson is the primary money player, he and his Fix the Debt comrades-in-austerity are not the only tycoons involved in this debate. One of the conservative Koch brothers, Charles Koch, for example, used a drop of his vast fortune to found the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. (It was founded in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation but changed its name to the Cato Foundation in 1976.)67 The financial troubles of Social Security then making headlines were just too inviting a target.

In 1980, Cato published Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction, which argues that Social Security should be replaced with a system of private accounts.68 The author, Peter Ferrara, then just out of law school, has made a career out of pushing his Social Security views. He is currently a senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy at the Heartland Institute and a senior fellow at the Social Security Institute.69 In the more than thirty years since the publication of his book, Ferrara has, among other things, been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, directed the Social Security Project of the Free Enterprise Fund, and has served as senior policy advisor on Social Security and Medicare for the Institute for Policy Innovation and as senior policy advisor on Social Security for Americans for Tax Reform.70

Ferrara has also spent time at the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank. The Heritage Foundation was started in 1973 by another tycoon, beer magnate Joseph Coors, together with two young congressional aides.71

The determined foes of Social Security redoubled their efforts in the wake of their disappointment that their hero, Ronald Reagan, had not dismantled Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal. Just a few months after the enactment of the recommendations of the Greenspan Commission, the Koch-funded Cato Institute devoted its entire fall journal to criticizing Social Security and plotting its demise through the substitution of private accounts.72

Two employees of the Heritage Foundation co-authored one of the articles, provocatively titled “Achieving Social Security Reform: A ‘Leninist’ Strategy.” The authors chose that title because, they explained, they advocated adopting Lenin’s insight: “that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement’s ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents.”73 The authors encouraged their comrades to prepare for the long haul, concluding, “as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform.”74

The last thirty years have played out much as the revolutionaries envisioned it might. It has been aided by academics, some of whom were just starting out in the 1970s, when Social Security was first trumpeted in newspaper headlines as going bankrupt. Laurence J. Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, for example, published his very first professional article, titled “Social Security: Time for Reform,” in June 1978.75 It was published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a think tank established in 1974 by associates of then-governor Ronald Reagan.76 Since the publication

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