When the Social Security Act of 1935 was being drafted, liberals chided Franklin Roosevelt for the measure’s funding method, via payroll taxes, which did little to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.
Roosevelt responded that the critics misunderstood the purpose of the payroll taxes. “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and the unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”
