Today marks the 77th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law, creating arguably America’s most successful social program. “We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age,” FDR said on that day.

Today, as this table from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, Social Security is keeping more than 20 million Americans out of poverty:

As CBPP’s Kathy Ruffing noted, Social Security is “the single most important source of income for its elderly beneficiaries, contributing on average two-thirds of income for recipients over age 65. For more than one-third of them, Social Security constitutes 90 percent or more of income…Without Social Security, nearly half of elderly Americans would live below the official poverty level; instead, fewer than 10 percent do.”

Conservatives — aided by a media content to misinform about the program’s finances — love scaremongering about Social Security, despite the fact that it is exceedingly easy to secure its solvency for decades to come. Any talk of cutting its benefits ignores the very real impact that it has on elderly, disabled, and young Americans.

That House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) supports the privatization of Social Security is well known. Ryan proposed $1.2 trillion in cuts and the partial privatization of Social Security upon taking control of the Budget Committee in 2011, and he has constantly warned about the supposed doom facing the program if major reforms aren’t enacted immediately.

But Ryan’s attempts to gut the most popular entitlement program in America go back quite a few years, as Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of the conservative hero makes clear. Ryan’s fight against Social Security has been ongoing since he pushed President George W. Bush to privatize the program in 2005:

Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear. [...]

Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.

Bush ultimately went with a slightly less radical proposal that still failed in the Senate and caused Republicans massive losses in the 2006 mid-term elections. But Ryan, undeterred, told Lizza that the failure of privatization was simply due to marketing, not that the plan was unpopular:

What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job of selling it,” he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. “And . . . thud,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.” The lesson: “Don’t let the engineers run the marketing department.”

Aided by the mainstream media’s spreading of the lie that Social Security is “going bankrupt,” Ryan has been able to thrust Social Security “reform” back onto the table, and it was embraced during the primary by virtually every Republican candidate.

What Ryan and his Republican colleagues continue to ignore, however, is how easy fixing Social Security would be if they weren’t so insistent on protecting the wealthiest Americans from a single tax increase. By lifting the payroll tax cap that currently limits Social Security contributions to the first $110,100 in income, Congress could ensure the program’s solvency for the next 75 years — longer than the program has been in existence to this point.

That wouldn’t fit Ryan’s belief that the government doesn’t have a role in helping protect the financial security of the American people. But it would prevent millions of Americans from losing the much of their retirement savings, as they would have during the 2008 financial crisis had Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security become law.

A House Republican plan to slash funding for a Social Security program would cost taxpayers far more than it would save, according to a letter from Social Security’s chief actuary. The Republican plan, which is focused on a program meant to ensure that beneficiaries are not overpaid, would cut more than $800 million below the level agreed to in the Budget Control Act, the spending agreement passed during last year’s debt limit negotiations.

According to Social Security chief actuary Stephen Goss, however, the cuts will cost taxpayers between $5 billion and $6 billion, Talking Points Memo reports:

In a Thursday letter responding to inquiring House Democrats, Social Security’s chief actuary Stephen C. Goss concludes that cuts will cost taxpayers “between $5 billion and $6 billion more over the lifetime of those who would not be reassessed due to the reduced funding.”

The cut would hamper the highly-effective program that roots out waste, fraud, and abuse in Social Security — according to Goss, such reviews produce between $6 and $9 in regained savings per dollar spent. While the analysis only covered the impact on the program this year, future cuts would likely have a similar impact on the program.

House leadership isn’t likely to give the Labor, Health, and Education appropriations package that contains the cuts a vote before the full House, but the plan keeps up the GOP’s disturbing trend of targeting social safety net programs that largely benefit the lower- and middle-classes.

Inequality has been front and center this political season, but one relatively unexamined aspect of the problem is the way it has exacerbated the financial distress of Social Security. As work by Monique Morrissey at the Economic Policy Institute shows, the spike in income inequality in recent decades accounts for as much as half of the program’s long-term financial shortfall.

This is because the payroll tax meant to fund Social Security is capped: The tax currently applies only to income below $110,100 a year, while any dollar an individual makes over that amount is not subject to the tax. So the growth in inequality since the late 1970s has pushed ever more income out of the reach of the payroll tax. When the formula for setting the cap was reformed in 1983, only 10 percent of earnings in the country escaped the tax. By 2008, that had grown to 16 percent:

Restoring the taxable earnings cap to cover 90% of earnings would close 31% of the projected shortfall. Add in forgone revenues and interest from 1983 to 2008, and the trust fund would now be larger by over $850 billion, equal to 16% of the $5.4 trillion shortfall. All told, growing inequality accounts for roughly half (47%) of the projected shortfall that has emerged since the system was last restored to balance.

Eliminating the cap entirely would close 71 percent of the shortfall, even if benefits for higher income earners are increased to reflect their greater contributions.

Another way to tackle the question: What if the cap had remained the same as it is, but inequality had not taken off? Which is to say, what if wage growth had maintained its historic connection to productivity growth, instead of decoupling since the 1970s, and median wages had not stagnated?:

If real wage growth had kept up with productivity from 1983 to 2007, the trust fund would now be larger by roughly $450 billion, equal to 8% of the $5.4 trillion shortfall. Going forward, the Social Security actuaries project relatively slow wage growth of 1.2% above inflation, but wage growth of 1.8% above inflation (the average productivity growth rate over the past quarter century) would eliminate 43% of the projected shortfall, according to the trustees’ 2010 report. All together, then, slow wage growth accounts for roughly half (51%) of the projected shortfall that has emerged since the system was last restored to balance.

In other words, America’s failure to maintain policies that support the wages of middle and lower-income Americans has contributed significantly to Social Security’s decline.

Meanwhile, increasing the retirement age or cutting benefits ignores the reality that Americans in the lower half of the income distribution missed out almost entirely on the gains in life expectancy, and that Social Security benefits as they currently stand kept 13.8 million seniors out of poverty in 2010.

During an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) compared social programs like Social Security to slavery, arguing that President Obama’s failed economic policies are creating a culture of “dependence” that is causing people who lose their unemployment benefits to enroll in the Social Security program:

HOST: The number of people going on Social Security disability out-paced the jobs created by the economy in the the month of June, that is a trend we have seen increase, and holding steady since ’09. Do you have a theory as to why that is happening? Is that something the federal government is creating or an unfortunate consequence of our economy?

WEST: That is an unfortunate consequence of failing economic policies coming from the president so that now when people are running out of the unemployment benefits, now they are looking toward going on Social Security disability… so once again we are creating the sense of economic dependence, which to me is a form of modern, 21st century slavery.

Watch it:

West’s comparison is not only dismissive of the 12.3 million people in forced labor around the globe — including many sweatshop workers held illegally and paid very little, girls and women forced into prostitution, and many others — but it is also wrong on the facts.

More than 8.1 million Americans received SSI in January 2012, and nearly 1.3 million of the recipients were children. SSI’s support is modest — the average monthly payment in January was $517 — but important. A 2005 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that SSI lifted 2.4 million Americans above the poverty line in 2003 and is a crucial safety net that is keeping families afloat.

The Republican Party of Texas released its 2012 platform this month, outlining its policies on taxation, education, and a host of other issues related to the economy. Texas Republicans, according to the platform, support eliminating the minimum wage and the prevailing wage, doing away with the Department of Education and Department of Energy, and “reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education” — but those aren’t even the most damaging positions.

Here’s a look at the five most outrageous beliefs Texas Republicans hold:

1) The party opposes almost all forms of taxation: The Texas GOP supports “repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment,” which instituted a national income tax, and instead favors a wildly regressive national sales tax that would hit low- and middle-income Americans hardest. It also favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent and repealing the capital gains tax and the estate tax, the latter of which it claims is “immoral and should be abolished forever.” On the state level, it supports abolishing property and business taxes, and property taxes on inventory, and opposes efforts to institute a state income tax, an Internet sales tax, professional licensing fees, and taxes on real estate transactions. Instead, it supports “shifting the tax burden to a consumption-based tax.”

2) It supports returning to the gold standard: “We support the return to the time tested precious metal standard for the U.S. dollar,” the platform states, echoing Rep. Ron Paul (R), the state’s eccentric congressman and presidential candidate. While returning to “sound money,” as the platform calls it, is popular among far right-wing conservatives, it is “not feasible for practical and policy reasons,” according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Most economists agree that the gold standard never worked and that returning to it now would have disastrous consequences for the American economy.

3) It supports privatizing Social Security: Given that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” during his ill-fated presidential campaign, it may be no surprise that the Texas GOP opposes one of the nation’s most successful federal programs. “We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax,” the platform says, ignoring that had such a plan been enacted prior to the Great Recession, it would have cost an October 2008 retiree tens of thousands of dollars (and that was before the market bottomed out in 2009). Millions of Americans lost everything in private accounts during the recession, and Social Security was all they had left.

4) It opposes multicultural education and “critical thinking”: “We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive,” the platform says, adding that it supports teaching “common American identity and loyalty instead of political correctness that nurtures alienation among racial and ethnic groups.” In Arizona, where Republicans banned multicultural programs, students in those programs actually out-performed their peers. Texas Republicans also believe “controversial theories” such evolution and climate change — which aren’t controversial at all — “should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced.” There’s more: the GOP also opposes the teaching of “critical thinking skills” because they “focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

5) It supports corporal punishment in schools: “Corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas,” the platform states, adding that teachers and school boards should be given “more authority to deal with disciplinary problems.” Actual research, however, shows that corporal punishment is bad for children and their education. Research shows that corporal punishment is “associated with an increase in delinquency, antisocial behavior, and aggression in children,” according to the American Psychoanalytic Association, which “strongly condemns” the use of such punishment. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents and schools use other forms of punishment because “corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects.”

(HT Jessica Luther)

Update

Texas Republicans also have radical policies on LGBT issues, voting rights, and health issues like sex education, and Jessica Luther has a run down of the entire platform’s extreme positions.