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  • 2014-05-14 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Eisenhower Warn About Political Parties Who Wanted to 'Abolish Social Security?' (en)
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  • One favorite tactic in political debate is to put words in the mouth of a respected elder statesman to make it appear he presciently anticipated some modern issue or political personality (and, naturally, took a stand that supported the viewpoint of whoever put those words in his mouth). Therefore, given the debates that arose in over President George W. Bush's efforts to alter the Social Security system, one would expect the appearance at that time of a fifty-year-old quote from a former President (and fellow Republican) labeling as stupid certain Texas oil millionaires who wanted to abolish social security to be a similar fabrication. See this claim we collected got in the Snopes inbox in 2005: Save for a few minor details, however, the quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower cited in this message is in fact an accurate one. It wasn't something he uttered but rather something he wrote, and the version reproduced above omits Ike's reference to a specific Texas oil tycoon (H.L. Hunt), but it otherwise is taken verbatim from a letter President Eisenhower penned to his brother, Edgar Newton Eisenhower, on 8 November 1954: A meme circulated in 2015 elided the reference to Texas oil millionaires and presented the quote as something aimed at the modern Tea Party: Politically, Ike was a classic small-government Republican. He was of the opinion that the federal government had grown too large at the expense of local and state authority since the advent of FDR's New Deal in the 1930's, a situation exacerbated by the national emergency produced due to America's entry into World War II. Since the Depression and the war were over by the time Eisenhower took office in 1953, Ike felt it was time to return to a middle way that included pruning federal subsidies to industries such as agriculture and power companies, which he believed no longer needed government assistance. At the same time, he wanted to sustain and even increase funding for programs he thought had good track records, and Social Security was paramount among those programs. (en)
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