Re: [PEN-L] bush & SS

[Joel Blau]

On both counts, this was what I was saying.  First,  I was writing in defense of universal programs, and in the process describing how they came to arise. >From the Swedish Farmers Party joining the Social Democrats to pass universalistic legislation to Social Security in this U.S., the political dynamic has always required that unless everyone (or nearly everyone) gets benefits, social programs are either a) impossible to enact or b) means-tested. Second, as you indicated, the issue of "the exploiters" is rarely on the table in the kind of social democratic compromise that universalistic legislation represents. So my language was indeed merely an attempt to capture the diversity of those who work for someone else--especially in the U.S., where many better off workers wouldn't otherwise wanted to be associated with poor people in any piece of social legislation.

Joel Blau


Carrol Cox wrote:

Joel Blau wrote:

Or in other words (and this is true across all welfare states), if we
don't pay give the affluent some money,  the poor will never get
theirs.

Simple answer: Yes. And why not?

More complex. The contrast of "affluent" and "poor" tends towards
differentiating the working class into strata and simply ignoring the
exploiters, who after all make up a very small percentage of the
population. (Probably around 2%). They are few enough in numbers to make
social services/payments to them a trivial matter and raising it
politically distracting.

Among the various strata of the working class, from desperately poor to
quite affluent: means testing is the perfect way to fragment,
depoliticize, and weaken workers. Means testing does to the working
class as a whole what the (so-called) Merit System does to unity among
faculty (K-12 and university).

Means-Testing and Merit systems are two of the most powerful weapons the
capitalist class has to keep workers down.

Carrol