Today’s links Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict: If conservatives were really interested in millennial life-chances, they’d demand inheritance taxes, not Social Security cuts. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict (permalink) The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won’t voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage. They’re at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security’s imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they’ve been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a “foundation” to peddle his disinformation in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A. Peterson’s go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they’re paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they’re still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to…Pluralistic: Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict (01 Nov 2023)