Sound Familiar? Socialist FDRcare

[_MeDotOrg]

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” - Mark Twain

During the Great Depression, nearly half of the country's elderly lacked the income to be self-supporting.

FDR's Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins, helped convince Roosevelt to propose the Social Security Act.

Republican Congressman John Tabor: "Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people."

Republican Congressman Daniel Reed warned if Social Security passed: " the lash of the Dictator will be felt".

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned of "more unemployment in the future, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs." (Perhaps the 'Job Creators' in the 30's were geese.)

FDR spoke to the fears in one of his fireside chats: ""A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing," he explained in his fireside chat in June 1934. "Sometimes they will call it "Fascism", sometimes "Communism", sometimes "Regimentation", sometimes "Socialism." But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical. "

Despite the dire warnings, FDRcare (Social Security) passed into law.

The Republicans weren't done. Alf Landon (the Coolidge of Kansas!) the Republican Presidential nominee in 1936, pledged to repeal Social Security, calling it "a fraud on the working man" and "a cruel hoax".

Silas Strawn, former president of both the American Bar Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, described it in October 1936 as "economically preposterous and legally indefensible" that was "calculated to destroy our democracy and substitute a socialistic state." It was, he said, part of Roosevelt's attempt to "Sovietize the country."

Today 87% of Republicans and 91% of Democrats believe that Social Security has been good for the Country.

(Condensed from an article by Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen).