[Ed. note: This is the first of a three-part series. Parts two and three will run later this week.]
Keeping faith with the faithless brings injury to all. In corrupt times the superior are despised, while those attempting to please the masses are preferred company. So says Richard Buskirk in Modern Management and Machiavelli.
Who attempted to keep faith with the public trust when Social Security revenues migrated from a separate (if pseudo-insurance-trust) fund to commingle in the coffers of the federal government’s general operating budget? Democrat Lyndon Johnson, needing to downplay the escalating cost of the Vietnam War, began a migration that has continued well into the administration of every president since. President Ronald Reagan ultimately proffered the most palatable reasoning to lawmakers for perpetuating this commingling of Social Security dollars with general funds. We were simply borrowing from ourselves in this age of the individual, so our Congress continued to create IOU’s for the Social Security Trust Fund. Workers were thought to represent the true value of the fund, and this became the general consensus among policymakers.
If workers represent the fund’s true value, why didn’t our nation’s CEOs rush to acknowledge stakeholder and employee appreciation and recognition efforts? Likewise, why didn’t Congress immediately pursue strong stakeholder protection laws that would have been the perfect corollary for the time? I have to think it’s because both Congress and CEOs recognized the “age of the individual” and “Reaganomics” for exactly what they were—political hype. For the eighties was more the age of suppliers of the MX Missile, “cheap” oil, and of tax breaks geared mostly toward an elite, with weapons manufacturers being among those most elite.
Administrations have very effectively diminished attention to the social and financial costs of tax concessions for this country’s elite with the commingling of Social Security revenues and general revenues. Ergo, this nation’s middle and low-wage working citizens have especially increased their tax contributions for the cost of their government under Reagan, Bush, Clinton & Bush (competitor of the venerable Dewie, Cheatum & Howe), with the single most regressive tax in our nation’s history—the Social Security tax.
The creation of the Social Security tax is not the culprit. It is the way the tax has been administered with blatant bias against earned wages that is abusive. We haven’t made demands upon the purpose of our tax laws, or the purpose of corporations conducting business in our land, with all their ready access to tax-payer funded services—such as the protections of our law-enforcement officers, our fire fighters, our medical providers, our streets, and our courts. We are keeping faith with the faithless.
Part two of this series runs tomorrow and looks at how the treatment of the Social Security fund served as a precedent for today’s corporate scandals.
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