I read with interest the letters in the Voice of the People section today condemning Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, Republicans, the tea party and your newspaper for endorsing a different way of thinking about the government and entitlement programs. Clarence Page’s article (“Reaganomics? Meet ‘Ryan-omics,'” April 11) provided a similar take on the same issues. They illustrate the success that big government (consisting of both parties) has had in brainwashing the American public, even those as erudite as Mr. Page, into its way of thinking.
The issue is not whether certain constituents of the population need some support from other constituents, the issue is how best to provide that support. The notion that the government has gotten people to buy into, even intelligent people, is that the government “provides” these benefits, when in fact it is the taxpayers that do. Even Mr. Page says “Americans don’t appreciate how much the government is helping their families, until the help is gone.” This is not to say that the government does nothing at all, or that people in government positions do nothing at all, but when the matter is income redistribution, the government really is not providing anything at all; it is taking money from one group of people, using that money to fund its own priorities and activities, and giving what is left, considerably less, to another group of people.
The problem is, just as many businesses succeed in growing the profits they accrue to themselves by taking just a small amount of money off of the top of a lot of transactions, the government does as well. The larger the number of transactions (i.e, the larger the government), the larger the take. If Social Security was intended just to help the poor, why do we all have to contribute into it? Some would say that is so that we all share the burden of taking care of the small number of people, who could not, over their entire working lifetimes, in a society that offer enormous opportunities, manage to save for their retirement or afford to purchase insurance against untimely death to provide for their families. But the editorial writers obviously don’t believe this, and many in government don’t either. They think the rich should provide for these people. Well enough, then why do we all have to be involved in this Ponzi scheme of a program? Let’s have a program where only the rich get taxed and only the truly needy get supported by the program. To tell the truth, I think that the rich would prefer that, because it would result in a much smaller program and much less government largesse to support. In fact, privatization of the program inevitably leads to this conclusion, which is why so many in the government fight the idea. After all, why does the government have to be involved in a program where most people actually own what they contribute?
Anybody who has seen the actual math knows that Social Security is a bad deal for most people. But the government has succeeded in making sure that people are fooled by the math. One person even wrote in his or her letter to you that Social Security cannot be the source of our deficit, because it has “revenues of $654 million.” Those “revenues” are taxes. The fact that they have been allocated to Social Security by government accounting does not mean that Social Security spending is not a problem. Under this line of thinking, we can solve all of our budget woes by allocating more money to those areas that are underfunded. Of course, we cannot do that without creating a problem in some other area of the budget. Also, it ignores that fact that Social Security has a huge future obligation that even the government has to admit will not be met. The problem is that our spending is out of control, and since Social Security is one of the larger areas of spending, it rightly falls on the table as something to be considered as we address the problem of our spending. Sure, we can look the other way and address it later, but then the problem will only be bigger and even more people will have been fooled into believing that the program will be of some benefit to them, so the consequences of such a delay would only be worse.
Everyone who follows politics knows that Ryan has touched the “third rail” by advancing the truth that we are on an unsustainable path to a more impoverished society for all of us if we continue doing what we’re doing. That does take courage, and you were right to applaud him for it.
— Brion Johnson, Hinsdale
