Why do they hate Roosevelt so much

Why does Dear Leader want so badly to screw your grandkids? The little weasel is not a conservative - witness his deficits, although, come to think of it, the deficits are a tool to screw your grandkids (see my post here), but those around him certainly want to screw you grandkids, so never mind. Read this:

Assault on Social Security
By Harold Meyerson, February 2, 2005, The Washington Post

Tonight the president of the United States will come before Congress and call for the repeal of the New Deal.

Not frontally, of course. Indeed, George W. Bush has taken to invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt as a fellow experimenter-in-arms. That's true as far as it goes, but the goal of Bush's experiment is to negate Roosevelt's. …

… And so we will hear tonight that Social Security may be doing fine today, but it will be a toothless geezer of a program by the time today's young people hit 65. There will be so many retirees living so long that only by redirecting young people's money out of the program and into the market will we preserve the solvency of the old.

All this is nonsense, of course. According to the system's actuaries, if we do nothing at all, the system will remain in the black, paying out full benefits, straight through 2042. Beyond then, its liabilities will amount to just a fraction of 1 percent of the national income. The program, like all programs, could use some modest fixes over time, and by such measures as raising revenue through a hike on the employer's payroll tax (by eliminating the cap on taxable employee income), it can be fixed.

But Bush is not seeking to strengthen a strong system; he's seeking to dismantle it. The private (or "personal," in poll-tested Bushese) accounts we'll hear so much about tonight provide the pretext for slashing benefits to future retirees by as much as 40 percent. As with that village in Vietnam, it's become necessary to destroy Social Security in order to save it. …

Myerson points out that the plans to privatize Social Security have been devised by the people who are ideologically committed to its destruction: the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. These plans have been in the works since at least 1983.

To that end, Heritage Foundation analysts Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis authored a what-do-we-do-now article in the Cato Journal in 1983. The piece, "Achieving a Leninist Strategy," called for mobilizing support among financial institutions that would profit from privatization. As well, "an economic education campaign," they wrote, "must be undertaken to demonstrate the weaknesses of the current system.” (All praise to Los Angeles Times reporter Janet Hook, who recently uncovered this article.) The critical point here is that all these doomsday predictions come from the people who yearn to be the system's executioners. I do not know of a single economist who's not already a committed opponent of the government's involvement in the nation's social welfare who adheres to such a dire scenario for Social Security's future or who recommends so deadly a prescription. …

Tonight, we'll hear that a great system is in trouble. It is, but only because the people who run the government wish it ill.

It’s truly sad that the man who America should be able to trust more than every other human being can cheerfully stand before us, look into the camera, and lie over and over again. First about tax cuts, then Iraq, then his record, then tort reform, now Social Security. What’s next?