Reply #20: If Al Franken is our last hope, we are truly fucked. [View All]

[Foo Fighter]

I saw him on a show where he not only said the "payroll tax holiday" was great for SS but he felt it didn't go far enough. I can't find a link to the show but essentially, his vision for SS funding would guarantee it's demise and was the EXACT opposite of the why and how FDR had set up the funding the way he did in the first place: so that "no damn politician" could ever scrap it. Here's an FDR quote:

The most important program of 1935, and perhaps the New Deal as a whole, was the Social Security Act, which established a system of universal retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, and welfare benefits for poor families and the handicapped.<49> It established the framework for the U.S. welfare system. Roosevelt insisted that it should be funded by payroll taxes rather than from the general fund; he said, "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program." One of the last New Deal agencies was the United States Housing Authority, created in 1937 with some Republican support to abolish slums.

And the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

Either Franken was being disingenuous or he has no clue about the history of SS.

I'm not sure which is worse.

Franken isn't fighting for us. He has bigger masters now.