Mean-Spirited Economics

Simon Johnson:

How does it help any economic recovery when the people who lose jobs cannot even afford to buy basic goods and services – enough to keep their family afloat?
This was the profound insight – under tragic circumstances – learned from the Great Depression. Unemployment insurance and Social Security were introduced together in the 1930s and funded in the same way – through payroll taxes. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said at the time (quoted by David M. Kennedy in “Freedom From Fear,” on Page 267):

“We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security programs.”

That logic worked for nearly 80 years. In the face of our modern mean-spiritedness, it now seems likely to collapse.

All because of a war on taxation. And common sense.