The RADICAL REPUBLICANS want to take us back to the early 1800s before there was Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Dsiability Insurance, Aid To Families With Dependent Children, Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Pension Plans, Child Labor Laws, and a 40 Hour Work Week. They want the worker to live and die in poverty, to live in misery, in plain, in illness until they meet death.
The Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.” But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116, you left “general welfare” out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that “general welfare” includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does “general welfare” mean to you? [PERRY:] I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do. So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”? [PERRY:] I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant. But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution. [Silence.]
The Social Security Act was past in 1935 and signed into law by then President Franklin D., Roosevelt to help a dispread nation sunk deep into the “GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s.” Europe had long had a safety-net to help its citizens who were too old to work, the disabled, and families with dependent children.
Why is privatizing Social Security such a turkey? Because retirees shouldn’t have to depend on the market’s vagaries for survival money. More than half of married couples over 65 and 72% of singles get more than half their income from Social Security, according to the Social Security Administration. For 20% of 65-and-up couples and 41% of singles, Social Security is 90% or more of their income. That isn’t projected to change.
