Subj : More Abortion Atrocit
To   : Bob Klahn
From : Earl Croasmun
Date : Tue Jun 11 2013 17:47:04

Your ignorance SHOULDE make you humble.  That would lead you to try to reduce 
your ignorance.  But your ignorance leads you to a perverse sense of arrogance 
which makes your comments really funny but also sort of sad.

>>>> It is the right that came up with the term "entitlements" just to promote
>>>> the idea that the people receiving services have not and will never
>>>> contribute anything.
> ...

>> His partisan bias leads him to make stuff up.  Social
>> security was sold to Congress and the public as an earned
>> entitlement, as a way of saying that it was not just a
>> charity but a system of payments that the recipients were
>> entitled to.

> Do you have anything at all to back that up? Contemporary news reports?
> Transcripts of congressional debates?

Are you really THAT ignorant?  That was the whole phil;osophy behind the 
program.  That was why it was supposed to be paid for by an earmarked payroll 
tax rather than out of general revenue as a welfare program would.

In the words of Roosevelt: "those taxes were never a problem of economics.  
They are politics all the way through.  We put those payroll contributions 
there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to 
collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits.  With those taxes in 
there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

Unlike you, apparently, I have indeed read the debates over Social Security, as 
well as the reflections of Myers and others.  I don't have them handy, but the 
basic idea should be easy for you to find.  It was at the core of Roosevelt's 
proposal of the program.  Sylvester Schieber's book, The Predictable Surprise, 
is one of the better books on the subject: "FDR, who understood public 
sentiments on many matters as well as anyone, felt strongly that the system 
should be 'contributory' because it would give participants a sense of 
ownership and create a sense of 'rights' or 'entitlement' that would not 
dismissed lightly."  The same point was made by John Corson when he looked back 
on the first decade of the program in his 1942 article in Social Service 
Review: "The contributions, like the premiums paid under a private  insurance 
contract, create a feeling of personal entitlement which  tends to preserve the 
self-respect of the beneficiary and his survivors"

Those are the basic facts.  A person in possession of the facts would never 
have made the profoundly stupid claims that you have made.  Most people who 
were not initially in possession of the facts would have been hunmble enough to 
seek out the facts.  Only a profoundly arrogant ignorant person would make 
something up and proclaim that it is true solely because they WANT it to be 
true.


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