A think tank which raised money by targeting elderly Americans with Social Security scare letters paid for more than $130,000 in travel expenses for the House Republican leader, his wife and his staff, RAW STORY has learned.
The National Center for Public Policy Research, a highly controversial and little-known conservative think tank which has been sending Social Security “fright mail” for years, paid for two posh trips for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) in 1996 and 2000, each at the cost of at least $64,000.
Mmmmmm, tastes like payola. It’s good to be Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay, who got to travel to Russia and Europe on separate occasions on the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR)—but, wait, the cash came from public contributions sent by Americans who thought they were paying for research and lobbying to preserve Social Security! The trips were allegedly for “study,” but what connection they had to the Social Security issue is a mystery, since the United Kingdom is considering rolling back its privatized social insurance programs from the Thatcher era and, well, Russia is a mess. Got to love the comment from the director of the NCPPR that the seniors they mail to should know how to take care of themselves.
If DeLay had been studying between meals at the Four Seasons Hotel in London, here’s what he would have found, according to The American Prospect:
For all the fanfare that surrounds the Bush administration’s efforts to present a bold new idea on pension reform, the truth is that it is not new at all. In fact, the proposal looks suspiciously like the plan set in train during Thatcher’s ?rst term in 1979 and which has since led Britain to the brink of a crisis. Since then, the nation’s basic pension, which is paid for out of tax receipts, has shrunk dramatically. The United Kingdom has the stingiest state pension program of any G8 nation, and there is growing consensus — even among British conservatives — that reform is needed. And ironically enough, considering that America is on the verge of copying Britain’s mistake, most experts seek reform in the direction of a more generous, and simpler, basic state pension — one similar in design, in other words, to America’s Social Security program.
David Willetts, the Conservative MP who is the opposition spokesman on pensions (and whose intellectual agility has earned him the sobriquet “Two Brains”), is one admirer of the U.S. system. “I like the way they distinguish between Social Security and means-tested welfare,” he says. “They have higher Social Security bene?ts to keep elderly people off welfare.” And last year, in a startling reversal of its decades-old policy, the Confederation of British Industry, the United Kingdom’s premier business group and the functional equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called for a more generous state retirement bene?t, saying — remember, this is the nation’s leading business lobby talking — that it would even support raising taxes to help pay for it. (It also called for raising the retirement age.)
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