Fox's Hume & Bennett LIE -saying FDR wanted Soc Sec to be Priv Accts

[papau]

Distorting FDR: Bennett and Hume claimed father of Social Security system wanted privatization

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In an attempt to promote President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett and FOX News managing editor and anchor Brit Hume falsely claimed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt advocated replacing Social Security with private accounts. In fact, while Roosevelt advocated "voluntary contributory annuities" to supplement guaranteed Social Security benefits, he never proposed replacing those benefits with private accounts.

Earlier that evening, on FOX News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Hume provided the alleged historical basis for Bennett's claim:

HUME: In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, quote, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, quote, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."

But Roosevelt was not advocating that the present system of guaranteed Social Security benefits "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans." Rather, he was proposing that both guaranteed Social Security retirement benefits and voluntary annuities would eventually eliminate the need for a different fund which was established to provide pension benefits to Americans who were already too old in 1935 to contribute payroll taxes to the Social Security system.

Roosevelt outlined the three major tenets he envisioned for Social Security in the January 17, 1935, speech that Hume quoted. As the Social Security Administration (SSA) has noted, these tenets are: 1) "non-contributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance"; 2) "compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations"; and 3) "voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age."

The second element, "compulsory contributory annuities," is the backbone of Social Security's current system of guaranteed retirement benefits, which are funded with payroll taxes that employees pay throughout their working years. But it was the first element, a retirement benefit fund for those who would never pay into the new system due to advanced age, that Roosevelt said would eventually be "supplanted" -- or made unnecessary -- by both private accounts and guaranteed Social Security benefits like those in the current system. In his January 17, 1935, speech, he noted: "It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan , which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans." As the SSA noted, "It was the President's view ... that ultimately the welfare pensions funded by the states with federal contributions would become unnecessary as the two programs of annuities would gradually come to obviate any need for such welfare type programs."

During 1935 congressional hearings on Roosevelt's Social Security bill, Edwin Witte, executive director of the committee on economic security (CES), clearly stated that the voluntary accounts were intended as a "separate undertaking" meant to "supplement" the compulsory system, not replace it: "The voluntary system of old-age annuities we suggest as a supplement to the compulsory plan." Indeed, prominent contemporary Democrats support Roosevelt's idea of government-sponsored private investment accounts that are paid for by non-Social Security funds.

Former Social Security associate commissioner James Roosevelt Jr., Roosevelt's grandson, noted in a January 31 Boston Globe op-ed piece: "The implication that FDR would support privatization of America's greatest national program is an attempt to deceive the American people and an outrage."

[slor]

1. Good Grief!!!

Why don't they just come out and say God wanted private accounts too!

[sellitman]

2. I'll join their "Ownership" society when

1) bush takes "ownership" of the busted budget.

2) bush takes "ownership" of the Abu- Graib torture situation

3) bush admits "ownership" of the fact he lied to get us into a War for Oil.
4) bush takes "ownership" of Valerie Plaime affair.

5) Etc and so forth.

[pretzel4gore]

3. brite hum and bennet talk too fukkin much

they shit too much, eat too much, think too much, lie too much and bitch too much....brite hum needs a good slap to SHUTTTHEFUKKUP!