Wealth & Money Quote by John Shadegg

“Germany” is doing a lot of work here. By pointing to Bismarck-era social insurance as the origin story, Shadegg signals the classic American conservative move: make a familiar program feel foreign, imported, and therefore suspect. It’s not an accident he chooses Germany rather than, say, the New Deal architects or the broad postwar consensus that treated Social Security as civic infrastructure. Germany evokes technocracy, statism, and a certain historical chill; it frames the policy as something we copied, not something we built out of our own crises.

The phrasing also turns a foundational social contract into a blunt, almost transactional mechanism: “tax workers to pay retirement benefits.” That’s accurate in a narrow pay-as-you-go sense, but rhetorically it strips away everything that makes Social Security politically resilient: its universality, its earned-benefit design, the way it functions as insurance rather than charity. By stressing “tax workers,” he primes resentment between generations, turning solidarity into a zero-sum ledger.

The subtext is reform-by-reframing. If you can recast Social Security as an aging pipeline that simply transfers money from the young to the old, you weaken the program’s moral claim and make privatization, benefit trimming, or means-testing sound like common sense rather than a breach of promise. Shadegg isn’t offering history as trivia; he’s offering it as a wedge, using origin mythology to smuggle in ideological judgment without stating it outright.