Is Brit Hume a responsible journalist? The FOX News managing editor and anchor claims that FDR wanted to ultimately replace Social Security with private accounts. Instead, FDR advocated for "voluntary contributory annuities" to
SUPPLEMENT guaranteed Social Security benefits and
NEVER PROPOSED replacing those benefits with private accounts.
Update: Al Franken discusses this today with FDR's grandson, James Roosevelt Jr.!
FDR's legacy is at stake here. Let's review after the jump...
Hume makes his claims here in a piece called
Dems Invoke FDR (opens in new window).
But it turns out that FDR himself planned to include private investment accounts in the Social Security program when he proposed it.
In a written statement to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt said that any Social Security plans should include, "Voluntary contributory annuities, by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age," adding that government funding, "ought to ultimately be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans."
Let's look at the actual statement from President Franklin D. Roosevelt:
In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, non-contributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps thirty years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. 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 David Brock puts it on Media Matters for America:
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 mandatory contributions 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.
Is Fox News acting responsibly when it's anchor deliberately lies about FDR's intentions when creating Social Security? I'm tired of the dumbing down of the American Public that constantly happens in the echo chamber of the right. This is a serious issue that needs to be kept alive.
As Clinton has said many times, Democrats stand for a more perfect union... for shared sacrifice, shared responsibility and shared opportunity for all. FDR is the embodiment of everything that is good in the Democratic Party. This issue goes to the core of our beliefs as a party. We cannot allow the Republican Party to manipulate the image of an icon & hero of the Democratic Party. Can you imagine if the left tried something like this on Ronald Reagan's legacy?
The Bush Administration is trying to dismantle FDR's legacy & one of his greatest achievements. The use of images of FDR in their advertisements to promote private accounts in order to "save" Social Security is an abhorrent offense. Brit Hume in his intentional deception of FDR's letter to congress on the creation of Social Security is an outright attempt to further the Bush Administration's propaganda. Now the right wing echo chamber has picked up Hume's lies & are repeating it so that half the nation, the Fox News watching nation begins to believe it.
We must ask for Brit Hume to resign. We must bring integrity back to journalism. We need to change the current state of the media. We must not let this issue die! Join me in this cause!
Let's let Fox know how we feel about this...
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I leave you with words from Green Day's Grammy Award winning AMERICAN IDIOT...
Don't want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's going out to idiot America.