I want to keep it brief this week, since it’s membership drive, and you’re hearing more talk than usual, anyway. But I want to say a few things about Social Security reform, since the war President made that domestic issue the centerpiece of his State of the Onion speech.

With all the talk about Social Security, and with most people being too young to remember, a little history is in order. Social Security was created in 1935. It was the keystone of a comprehensive package which included Unemployment insurance and even welfare benefits. The package was supposed to create a security blanket for the working class. It was a direct response to the dust bowl migrations and the tent cities of homeless, impoverished people, called Hoovervilles, which sprouted during the economic depression in the early 1930s. The Republicans denounced the Social Security act as socialism, but under the circumstances, the voters weren’t especially responsive to that kind of talk. They supported Roosevelt in moving some money around to get the beggars off the streets. That is, after all, the primary reason for almost all the social programs which governments have created for at least 500 years.

So, for 70 years we’ve been seeing that deduction on our paycheck stubs usually identified as OASDI, which most people don"t even know means Old Age Security and Disability Insurance, a euphemism for Social Security. Now the Bushwhacker says you should be investing that money on the New York Stock Exchange, instead of settling for the paltry bank interest rates which it now earns. I’m not going to tell you he’s wrong. It’s likely true that if that pile of money doesn’t earn more, then when all of us boomers are retired, Social Security will be broke in a few years.

But as a practical matter, most of the people of my generation are already pretty skeptical about ever getting back what we’ve shoveled into Social Security. It’s been a long time since Social Security benefits, even for the biggest contributors, offered enough money for anyone to live on. If you don’t have something else socked away, you can count on being a wage slave until you die, or if you can’t work anymore, you’ll be living in a flophouse and eating cans of beans.

So maybe Bush is right, but I’d like to offer a couple of thoughts for your consideration. It was a big dive by the stock market which inspired the Social Security Act in the first place. So we’ve been dropping money into that fund for 70 years, and now we’re going to start handing it over to the stock market? The banking industry is regulated by the federal government. It’s essentially just a big Amway business. Banks make money by loaning money to each other. The amount they charge each other is called the Prime Interest Rate. Open up the business section and compare the Prime to what your bank will pay you for a personal savings account. The banks don’t want your money if you’re not rich. You’re just a nuisance and they wish you would go away. The amount the Social Security funds earn is roughly equivalent to what your savings or checking account earns. Pretty close to zero. Social Security is going to go broke because it’s paying benefits from the principle instead of the interest.

The federal government could, therefore, regulate a rate of return on that huge fund which would keep it solvent without entrusting it to the stock market. Maybe that would drive all the banking institutions to Bimini and Indonesia. So what? Let ‘em go. I’m pretty sure there would be some home grown American ingenuity eager to grab a piece of that action.

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We’ve talked about this before on Local Views, but when I start hearing from listeners saying, "That isn’t news," or "You’re not changing anyone’s mind about anything," I know it’s time to revisit the discussion about the nature of commentary. Local Views shows up, usually, with one collection of short essays which is broadcast two or three times each week. Obviously, it can’t be the kind of topical reporting you get every day from reporters. Commentary and reporting are very different things, but I’ve long believed that there is no such thing as objective reporting. It’s not difficult to discern the reporter’s point of view about the story. Whether we’re reporting or whether we’re commenting, the best we can do is to get our facts right.

Change someone’s mind? I don’t think so. Commentary is not an argument where someone ends up saying, "I was wrong; you were right." We comment to make people think about things in ways that might be different from the way they thought about them before. The people who hear a provocative commentary won’t change their mind, change their vote or change the way they spend their money, but that different way of thinking about something will ferment in the back of their mind, and it might change what they think and say and do in the future.

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