Rhetoric of social security reform in the United States

This dissertation consists of three interrelated essays on the Social Security reform debate in the U.S. Throughout these essays, rhetorical strategies involved in proprivatization and antiprivatization positions have been studied from an interdisciplinary perspective.The first essay is devoted to the critical analysis of the Bush administration's rhetoric of reforming Social Security through private retirement accounts that have been introduced as a part of the broader political project, Ownership Society. The rhetoric of Ownership Society has become integral to framing the political motivation behind the Social Security reform. This motivational frame involves a fierce advocacy of autonomy. In this 'proprivatization' framework, the social adequacy component of the system fades away as actuarial fairness comes to the fore as the chief theme. Contrary to this position, I will suggest a 'prosocial' rhetoric that recognizes the pursuit of social standards as providing the element of autonomy.The purpose of the second essay is to provide an alternative approach to studying the rhetoric of policy-oriented economics suggesting that the range of economic-policy possibilities is conditioned by the rhetoric of economics. To this end, Martin Feldstein's proprivatization rhetoric will be compared to that of President Bush. In doing so, I will aim at showing that just as the political rhetoric of Social Security invokes the authority of ideographs such as 'personal ownership' to draw on a society's ideological and cultural repertoire, economic rhetoric undertakes a similar task by employing "economic ideographs" like "deadweight loss" to resonate with fellow economists through an appeal to the implicit normative premises embedded in the language of economics.The dissatisfaction that motivated my last essay centers on the observation that prevalent examples of antiprivatization rhetoric expose the drawbacks of private retirement accounts, but fail to satisfactorily explain why the current Social Security system is more desirable. In reframing Social Security, I follow a two-stage strategy. First, I articulate the desirability of Social Security grounded in the function it serves in a way private retirement accounts are not teleologically suited for serving: being a social income insurance scheme inherently favoring the least fortunate in a Rawlsian fashion. Second, I concentrate on how Social Security provides this nonmarket choice by drawing on the unique resources not entirely available to the market.