Maggie, I beg to differ. Rick Perry is absolutely right to go full-bore after Social Security and exposing it for what it really is (as Reason points out, it’s actually worse than a Ponzi scheme) instead of what people think it is. If this “scares seniors,” too bad. Somebody’s got to tell them the truth.
Besides, how dumb do we think seniors are? Heck, I’m practically a “senior” by the government’s definition, and I’ve been yelling about the fundamentally unsound nature of Social Security for 30 years. It obviously can’t work — the numbers and the demographics are inexorably set against it — and the sooner seniors are forced to accept the truth, the happier this land will be.
The only reason it continues is precisely the set of circumstances you cite: seniors vote, kids don’t. But is that any excuse to continue with what we know to be a ruinous fraud? Somebody’s got to bite the bullet, cut the Gordian knot, and mix the metaphors, and it might as well be the guy from Texas.