THE STONING OF DONALD REGAN: How I Set Off Washington's Great Gaffe Machine
Fallows, James
THE STONING OF DONALD REGAN: How I Set Off Washington’s Great Gaffe Machine For once, my heart goes out to the Reagan administration. Because its Secretary of the Treasury, Donald T. Regan,...
...A few minutes later, Robert Abernethy of NBC news asked Regan what he meant when he talked about “rethinking” the program...
...If the population is aging-so that fewer workers will be paying taxes, and more retirees will be drawing benefits-how do we adjust our retirement plans...
...When the show was over, Regan affably said, “Well I gave you fellas some news today...
...Gaffe” coverage debases everything about politics...
...With leadership that explained the facts, they would see the distinction between the Harrimans and the Joads...
...And aren’t such distinctions all the more justified if, as is now the case, Social Security constitutes a windfall profit for everyone who receives its benefits...
...Regan’s comments made the front pages of the major newspapers, but what began as a perhapscontroversial idea was transformed into a mistake, a blunder, a “gaffe...
...I left thinking more highly of Regan than I had an hour before...
...At that point, his PR man, sensing the drift of things, started moving him toward the door...
...Those over 65, as a class, now have about the same income distribution as the rest of the population-which means that some of them are quite comfortable and others (especially single women) wrap themselves in newspapers in the winter to save on the heating bill...
...One subject I had been boning up on was the federal budget, so when my turn came, I asked whether Ronald Reagan, in a second term, would attempt to control the four largest categories of federal spending-retirement benefits, medical programs, the military, and interest on the debt, which together account for more money than the government collects in taxes...
...Regan answered, in essence, yes...
...Question: Is that justifiable in this day and age, when again we’re facing such mammoth cost in the Social Security system...
...Because Social Security taxes were so low for so long, and because federal indexing formulas were so generous, almost everyone who has retired on Social Security has taken out far more money from the system than he and his employer had ever contributed...
...Certainly at the lower end of the scale we shouldn’t do anything to Social Security...
...But it will not suffice for all time...
...someone said...
...It leaves-or should leave-politicians and reporters embarrassed and readers suspicious...
...Regan said, “When Social Security was started, about 50 years ago, it was intended merely to help people who would be destitute when they were older...
...Good question, I thought...
...James Capra and Peter Skaperdas of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have demonstrated that a man who retired this year at age 62, after earning the average wage for all his working life, would receive through his retirement years more than twice the amount he and his employer had contributed plus the accumulated interest...
...James Fallows is Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...I think we’re going to have to revisit that and rethink why do we have Social Security and what is it for...
...This is not a role that falls to me with such frequency that I can afford to be blase about it...
...The benefit structure, which gives the greatest benefits to those with the highest lifetime earnings, leaves many Social Security recipients without the money for a decent retirement...
...About Social Security...
...Can’t we make ethical distinctions between, say, a retired president and a retired maid, if we have to save money somewhere in the system...
...Some people, after careful consideration, might not find them persuasive-but a large number never hear them at all, because most politicians are terrified of the issue...
...Political reporters, as a class, know and care more about the politics of an issue than about the issue itself, and their natural instinct was to look right past the substance of Regan’s comments, so they could start handicapping its effects on the political horse-race...
...When Robert Byrd says, as he did to Spencer Rich, that “trusting the Reagan administration to protect Social Security after the November election is like hiring a self-professed pyromaniac to guard your firewood,” he is indulging in scare politics...
...Social Security has become an enormous national chain letter...
...Today, regardless of what a person receives in the way of a pension from the corporation from which he is retiring and the like, or how much they’ve saved or how much wealth they have, they still get Social Security...
...In specific, I asked Regan whether he foresaw any further progress toward giving retirement benefits, especially Social Security, only to people in need...
...Claude Pepper may believe that Social Security is perfect in every way, but opinion polls show that most of the public recognizes its basic problems...
...Rich did not even touch the substance of Regan’s proposal until the very last paragraph, in which he quoted Robert Ball, a former Social Security commissioner, as “attack[ing] Regan’s idea...
...No, Regan said...
...I think we’re going to have to revisit Social Security sometime in the late eighties...
...It was, in short, another political gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s comments about Poland or Jimmy Carter’s about “ethnic purity,” interesting only for the political damage it might do-certainly not as a plausible idea...
...Not a word in Spencer Rich’s story hinted at the possibility that Regan’s comments could be anything other than a lamentable blunder...
...The payroll tax...
...on practical grounds” as opposed to all the other people he quoted, who attacked it on political grounds...
...Such, at least, were my thoughts-and, as far as I could tell, those of Donald Regan...
...Abernethy shot back, “I assume, from the way you put it, you think it’s not Ljustifiable.]” Regan said, “It’s something we’re really going to have to study...
...What happened last year [the Social Security amendments] was something that was well done and good for the time...
...If we could continue to afford it-if productivity were rising so quickly or if we let millions of new immigrants into the tax-paying work force each year-there might be nothing wrong with such an arrangement...
...Within 48 hours of his appearance on “Meet the Press,” Donald Regan came to understand why...
...When the Spencer Riches of the press corps seek out this, and only this, sort of demagoguery, they practice scare journalism...
...ceaselessly jacked up, places a proportionately heavier burden on low-wage earners and small business than on stockbrokers and lawyers...
...Part of this, I confess, was the natural esteem in which we hold people who think the same things we do...
...No, no-1 meant about the tax hearings,” Regan replied with the first trace of worry in his voice, referring to something he had said that was technically “news” but of little moment...
...It began on May 6, when Regan appeared as the guest on “Meet the Press...
...When you have to cut the budget somewhere, he said, shouldn’t you start with people who don’t need public help...
...Usually, when asking questions of politicians, you hear answers that have little to do with the point you want to explore...
...Do some people have a greater moral or political claim to public support than others...
...One of the other reporters answered Regan, “Because [the rich Republicans] paid into it .” Regan began explaining how little they’d actually contributed over the years, compared to the benefits they would be receiving...
...To his mild credit, Francis X. Clines, who wrote the counterpart front-page “gaffe” story in The New York Times, took a little more care to explain the demographic and financial background to Regan’s remarks...
...But since we can’t afford it, don’t we need to start distinguishing between Averell Harriman’s right to Social Security and Ma Joad’s...
...Where is the damage to anyone except Donald Regan, who is presumably big enough to take it...
...But, with journalists like Rich and politicians like Pepper intimidating people like Regan, where is the leadership we need to solve these problems going to come from...
...My blood is boiling because I played a minor role in this episode and saw first hand how idiotic and unfair the attacks on Regan were...
...On the front page, under a headline reading “REGAN’S BENEFIT-CURB REMARK BLASTED,” Rich led with this paragraph: “Democrats strongly criticized Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan for suggesting that it may be necessary to curb the Social Security benefits of higher-income recipients before the end of the decade, and the White House speedily distanced itself from the politically explosive idea...
...The Republicans were backpedaling away from Regan too, disavowing all intentions of doing the awful thing he had so foolishly mentioned...
...But at the upper end, we’ve got to reexamine it .” Are you talking about a means test for Social Security...
...asked Irving R. Levine of NBC...
...But I think that somewhere along the line, at some cutoff point, we may well want to say, Well, why does such a person as that really have Social Security...
...I was one of the reporters invited to ask him questions...
...The most egregious example was a story by Spencer Rich in The Washington Post...
...The conventional-wisdom, Claude-Pepper-type answer to the first question is that we make adjustments only by raising the tax rates;‘ and to the second, that everyone has an equal and indistinguishable right to Social Security benefits, since everyone has “paid into the system .” Comforting and familar those answers may be, but they allow the Claude Peppers of the world to overlook how regressive and unfair the current system has become...
...Because its Secretary of the Treasury, Donald T. Regan, tried to make an important point in an honorable way, he was ground to pieces in the great “gaffe” machine of the Washington press corps...
...It hasn’t been permanently fixed...
...But at this point, he was still unconcerned enough to elaborate on his view of Social Security...
...I tried to think up questions that the other reporters, who were more on top of the breaking news than I was, might overlook-and that would not reveal my ignorance of the latest minutiae about the Federal Reserve Board or the Argentine debt negotiations...
...He named several rich, prominent Republicans and asked, Why should they be getting Social Security...
...There followed quote after predictably denunciatory quote from Democrats such as Robert Byrd, Dan Rostenkowski, Claude Pepper, and even a man who presumably knows better, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (“It risks undermining the universal support our nation’s social insurance program now enjoys...
...but in this case, Regan seemed to be responding to exactly the issue I was trying to raise...
Vol. 16 • June 1984 • No. 5
