Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [93]
Programs such as Social Security and Medicare serve the utopian purpose, for they create a widespread dependency on a post-constitutional government and its masterminds. These schemes are built on the illusion that the individual has a vested ownership interest in, for example, a pension or insurance program. Through forced taxation, misleadingly referred to as “contributions,” the individual is encouraged to believe that he has, in effect, purchased a pension annuity or health insurance policy, which becomes his personal property. But his tax dollars are actually subsidizing others, and later others will subsidize his retirement and medical care in what is an elaborate and unsustainable undertaking. As such, it falls on future generations, including children and grandchildren yet born, to sort out the financial ruin and societal havoc let loose by the masterminds.
Roosevelt understood, and intended, that individuals would rely on these misrepresentations and false promises and plan their retirements around them. After all, the hoax goes so far as to require that pay stubs show the funds deducted from every paycheck, which are then tracked by the federal government to presumably fund the individual’s personal retirement and medical benefits. Individuals logically conclude that they have a “right” or “entitlement” to the benefits for which they paid over a lifetime of work. Any attempt to alter the conditions and benefits in this arrangement is seen by the individual as a violation of his property rights and an injustice. For the mastermind, it is an exploitable opportunity to ingratiate himself with the “masses” as he positions himself as the defender of those rights. That said, the mastermind frequently alters the arrangement, including in small ways that are difficult for the individual to discern, or in bigger ways that are masked with self-serving declarations and cloaked in deceit. But the basic structure must never change, for the utopian must never relinquish control.
As Roosevelt himself explained when criticized that the Social Security payroll tax was regressive, “Those [Social Security payroll] taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes 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.”55 By this Roosevelt meant that the utopian pursuit is an undying pursuit.
In 1966, Social Security Administration official John Carroll put it this way: “It can scarcely be contested that earmarking of payroll taxes … reduced resistance to the imposition of taxes on low-income earners, made feasible tax increases at a time when they might not otherwise have been made, and has given trust fund programs a privileged position semi-detached from the remainder of government. Institutionalists foresaw these advantages as means to graft the new programs into the social fabric.”56
Social Security is the single biggest program in the federal government. In 2010, it paid benefits to almost 54 million individuals.57
So successful was the Social Security deception that in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson used it as the basis for establishing Medicare and Medicaid. As Twight noted, it is not widely remembered that in 1960, Congress had already passed the Kerr-Mills bill—a needs-based medical program to assist the aged poor.58 But a welfare program instituted exclusively to subsidize medical care for poor patients cannot be convincingly presented as an insurance program. Nor can it engulf enough individuals in the utopian cause.
Johnson insisted on a new entitlement that would cover nearly all individuals age sixty-five and older. The opportunity arose