Here's a book that needs to be on President Obama's immediate reading list: Nancy Altman's excellent The Battle for Social Security: From FDR's Vision To Bush's Gamble. In it, Altman dispels the kind of Zombie Social Security lies that have been showing up in President Obama's talking points. Dan Froomkin has the details on how he got its history wrong.

At the press conference (see the transcript), Obama defended his controversial decision to give in to Republican demands for a massive tax cut for the rich on the grounds that "in order to get stuff done, we're going to compromise." His prime example: "This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people." .... Obama's overall point -- that Social Security wasn't born fully grown -- was exactly right. But his facts were exactly wrong. The Social Security Act, as first signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, paid retirement benefits to the primary worker -- and not to their widows and orphans. It wasn't until a 1939 change that the law added benefits for survivors and for the retiree's spouse and children.

The system was set up specifically not as welfare for the neediest, aid to widows and children. It was set up as an insurance program for every American worker, into which every American worker paid, and done so for very smart political and policy reasons. Here's how Altman describes that history:

FDR recognized that a visible dedicated contribution makes it both politically and morally difficult for future politicians to cut Social Security. When pressed about the impact of payroll taxes on the economy, FDR said: “I guess you’re right on the economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”

The myth of Social Security as a widows and orphans program has been a right-wing talking point that diminishes Social Security's role as a social insurance program--an insurance program paid into directly by the people who will benefit from it eventually. It reduces it to an "entitlement" program, implying that it's not a program in which we all, collectively as American, have a stake.

Unfortunately, the President's repetition of Zombie Social Security lies goes beyond just the program's history. Here's one of the worst (h/t Progressive Blue):

(NPR's) INSKEEP: Won't Republicans argue - and, in fact, won't reality argue that any cuts will have to be even deeper because this package that you're pushing for now will mean there's even less government revenue? OBAMA: Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they'll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

Maybe he meant "Medicare" or there was a transcription error. Yes, Medicare--because of huge and rising systemic medical costs is a problem for the nation. Medicaid too, but less so. But, let's say this loud and clear, again: Social Security does not now and never has added to the deficit. It very simply does not and never has. As Zach Carter says, "Targeting Social Security in order to fix the deficit is like invading Iraq to fight Al-Qaeda. The issues are not related."

This has been one of the hardest Zombie Lies to kill, you need no further proof of that than seeing a Democratic president repeat it. The fact that he's repeating it, when coupled with his catfood commission and the potential trap being set with this tax cut deal, all bode poorly for Social Security coming out of this administration unscathed, much less strengthened.