For a very long time, Americans on the political right have known that anyone who receives anything from the government - especially a helping hand in time of need - is a somehow inferior being and is to be approached with some caution.

That rule applies, of course, only to individuals. The reason for that is that individuals, especially if they are women, children, and the elderly infirm, really can’t do much to harm their detractors.

This condition may not be uniquely American, but many Americans on the right have brought it nearly to an art form. So many millions of them - people who can be assumed to be living a comfortable or affluent life - have a need to look down on those who need such things as unemployment insurance benefits, Medicaid, Medicare, or help from a food pantry, now and then.

Now, those who are collecting benefits from Social Security - or are about to - are considered to be “lesser people.” At least, that’s the view of Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who is co-chair of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission.

It’s known in some circles as the Social Security reduction commission, since that is one of the three primary target areas at which the commission is looking. The commission is looking at so-called entitlements to reduce the federal government’s annual bill for things that serve the people.

Strangely, the people who receive monthly checks from Social Security don’t look at the program as an “entitlement.” Rather, they look at it as something they participated in and paid into for as much as a half-century or more. And, they don’t agree that it is going out of business any time soon.

Statistics show that, if nothing is done for the next three decades, Social Security may have to pay only 75 percent of benefits, but that is not likely to happen, since economists and accountants with a bit of integrity in their backgrounds know that, with a few adjustments, the money that flows into the system will outstrip the money that is paid out. All that’s needed is a little equity in paying for it.

Obama’s quest for bipartisanship resulted in his choosing one of the more right-wing members of Congress of recent decades as co-chair of his commission - Simpson, who in a long career in the U.S. Senate never saw a social program that he liked. Fattening on his pay and other perks of office - private and public - he came to expect that all Americans should be able to get what he stooped to achieve.

In retirement, though, he can afford to be magnanimous. He wants to save programs like Social Security, so that the “lesser people” of America will have some kind of floor under their financial existence. At least, that’s what he told an interviewer as he left a commission meeting room earlier this summer (the meetings are not open to the public or the press or others).

In a combative interview that was conducted by a very respectful interviewer (all on videotape), Simpson verbally abused the interviewer from Social Security Works, Alex Lawson, as Lawson tried to get from Simpson some idea about how they were approaching debt or deficit reduction in the three major programs - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Lawson tried to determine whether the commission was considering the “adequacy” of the programs, rather than just the cost.

Simpson said that the 15 members of the commission were not balancing the cost of the programs and the federal budget “on the backs of” senior citizens. Asked whether the rumored raising of the retirement age from 65 to 70 was a benefit cut, Simpson further verbally abused the interviewer, and so it went for the duration of the interview.

When Lawson pointed out that the Social Security fund has some $2.5 trillion in it, Simpson retorted that that was just “a bunch of IOUs,” and just because the fund is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government doesn’t mean that the $2.5 trillion is there to be used for benefits. That money, he said, was used for the Interstate highway system and other things that Americans have enjoyed for generations.

In other words, it’s possible in Simpson’s view, that the government can default on its obligation to its own people - who have paid into the $2.5 trillion fund - in deference to paying off the debt to more important entities, like to China or Japan, or others who own a large portion of our global debt.

What the right wing of America doesn’t seem to know - or, if they know, they won’t acknowledge - that Social Security is not an “entitlement” program, in which people who haven’t paid in get some kind of benefit. Rather, it is a funded program into which people have paid all of their working lives.

Even Medicare and Medicaid are programs that would be universal (that is, for everyone in the country), if we had kept up with the enlightened social programs of all of the other industrialized or “developed” countries and adopted a medical program that was not owned by the for-profit insurance and health industries.

To protect the profits of those industries, people like Simpson have done all in their power to keep huge money-generating programs in private hands for generations, thus ensuring that the costs never would come down, because, if the costs came down in the current system, it would mean lower profits for Corporate America.

Welfare for the poor and infirm always has been the whipping boy for the minions of the corporations. They are the “entitlement” programs that have to be curbed, even though it is clear that tax breaks, subsidies, grants, and other benefits, created for corporations, are the real “entitlements” and account for greater claims on the federal budget than single mothers with a child or two, or older people who cannot work, or the disabled. Otherwise, there could not be the historic current disparity in wealth that exists in America, something that has not been seen for a century.

It may have been a Freudian slip on the part of Simpson to say that people who are beneficiaries of social programs are “lesser people,” it was a slip that has shown the attitude of the rich and powerful about the American people through much of our history.

That attitude apparently is common, whether members of the ruling class were scions of the robber barons or made their way from rather wild teen years in Wyoming into the U.S. Senate.

Considering the powerful myth of America as a classless society, this kind of thinking never should occur, but Simpson exposed it in two words this summer, and the politics of the nation gives evidence of it every day.

To the recent suggestion that the rich should be taxed as a means of increasing the government’s income and paying off the nation’s debts, Paul Craig Roberts (who obviously thinks a lot like Simpson) recently wrote that the rich have enough money and, if their taxes are raised, they’ll just stop “earning.” It shows how little Roberts and Simpson know about working for a living. Generally, these people “earn” nothing; they’re just paid a lot.

When it comes to “earning” their wages, the “lesser people” will be expected to just keep on working and supporting everyone, especially the top percent or two, who seem always to find a way to concentrate most of the money. It will now be up to the “lesser people” to make certain that Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are not hollowed out and those who actually work get some benefit from their labor.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

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