Reading the obituaries for former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who died at 93 on March 14, you would think he was a pleasure to have around — a life-and-soul-of-the-party man and a perfect scream, as P.G. Wodehouse might have described him.

The Washington Post said Simpson was known for his “barbed wit” and “feistiness.” The New York Times called him “folksy.”

Those who value Social Security and strive to protect it from its enemies might have a different view. They’ll recall Simpson’s relentless attacks on the program and its beneficiaries beginning around 2010, which he pursued with noxious glee, crass insults and outright lies. All in all, Simpson distinguished himself as a foul-mouthed purveyor of misinformation about Social Security.

He never responded to the multiple critiques of his false claims about the program with cogent counterarguments. Instead, he attacked his critics with name-calling.

(The average Social Security retirement benefit at the time was $19,455 a year, a couple of notches above the federal poverty line. It’s $23,712 today; the federal poverty level for a two-member household is $21,150. Simpson’s annual congressional pension, for which he became eligible after retiring from the Senate in 1997 after less than 20 years of service, was about about $87,000.)

In a 2010 email to Ashley Carson, then an official of the Older Women’s League who had upbraided Simpson in the Huffington Post, Simpson compared Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits” and closed the email with a rudely dismissive sign-off: “Call when you get honest work.” He denigrated seniors concerned about their benefits as “greedy geezers” and added, “What a wretched group of seniors you must be … for shoveling out this bull—.”

Simpson plainly had a surfeit of charm that disarmed his political adversaries. Robert Reich, who served as Clinton’s Labor secretary and is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, wrote a heartfelt valedictory to Simpson honoring him as a “very dear” friend and relating how much they discovered they had in common despite occupying “the opposite extremes of Washington.” They even did a joint public television show, discussing the political issues of the day, called “The Long and the Short of It.” (Simpson was 6 feet 7, Reich is 4 feet 11.)

President Joe Biden awarded Simpson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022, placing him on a roster that included five social justice activists; leaders in the medical, labor technology and entertainment fields; and Olympic athletes. The award, which may have reflected Biden’s faith in congressional bipartisanship, cited Simpson’s outspoken advocacy for campaign finance reform and marriage equality.

But we shouldn’t overlook his record on Social Security, because his heirs in the Republican Party and the Trump administration have picked up where he left off.

Their attacks on Social Security, like his, are based on lies. Their depiction of its beneficiaries is similarly negative. Like him, they claim to be interested only in improving or fixing the program, while they plot to eviscerate it. And like him, they are operating with sheer ignorance about how it works and why it was brought into existence in the first place.

So let’s turn Simpson’s passing into a teachable moment by revisiting his record.

Simpson emerged as a spear-carrier for Social Security benefit cuts in 2010, when he was appointed the GOP co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, established by Barack Obama as a sop to conservative deficit hawks. (Simpson’s co-chair was Erskine Bowles, a centrist Democratic Party mandarin.)

Unable to persuade a majority of the commission to endorse their deficit-cutting recommendations, Simpson and Bowles took it upon themselves to issue a list under the portentous title “The Moment of Truth.” The centerpiece of their prescription for Social Security was to raise the retirement age to 69 (it currently tops out at 67) and the minimum age that workers could claim benefits (now, as then, 62) to 64.

They didn’t mention that this was the equivalent of a cut in benefits, or that it would fall more harshly on lower-income workers, whose working lives tend to be shorter than those who spend their work days behind a desk, and on Black workers, the demographic cohort with the shortest life expectancies.

They also advocated changing the formula for annual cost-of-living increases in benefits to one that lags behind the existing formula; they claimed that the result would be a “more accurate measure of inflation,” which was nothing like the truth.

When Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, asked him politely to “please cease and desist with the mean-spirited, denigrating and hate-filled personal attacks on America’s seniors,” Simpson replied, “you refuse to deal with the math and the facts … since you make money pretty good by juicing up the troops.”

The irony was that no one ignored “the math and the facts” about Social Security more than Simpson. He claimed that when Social Security was created in 1935, the average life expectancy was 64 and the retirement age was 65, implying that the program was a scam from the inception. This claim made it into “The Moment of Truth.”

This claim was, at best, grossly misleading. Although average life expectancy at birth was about 64 in that era, that was an artifact of infant and child mortality. For children who survived to age 5, average life expectancy was about 67.5. For those who reached age 20 and thus were entering their working years, it was about 68.5, and for those who had reached age 60, it was nearly 76. By 1949, infant and child mortality had been reduced and the average life expecancy from birth had risen to more than 68.

The drafters of Social Security knew all this, and they placed the retirement age at 65 to accommodate average work lives and to provide for retirees for a decade or more.

After I called Simpson out for his response to Richtman, he sent me a message stating that Social Security had never been designed as a retirement system but as “an income supplement.” He claimed to have reviewed the 1935 congressional hearings on the pending Social Security Act and “never found the word ‘retirement’ in any of the early beginnings of the construction of Social Security.”

He issued me a challenge: “When you find the word ‘retirement’ in your vast research, either uttered by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins or Edwin Witte, head of the Committee on Economic Security, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1934, please share it with me.”

This was too easy. I had all the hearing transcripts at hand. I responded with chapter and verse, pointing to the repeated use of the word “retirement” by Perkins and Witte. He never responded.

Over the last 15 years, Republicans and conservatives haven’t progressed much beyond the Simpson approach to Social Security, which amounts to finding ways to erode the public’s faith in what has been the most effective anti-poverty program in American history.

Elon Musk slanders Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”; he and Trump assert that it is shot through with fraud, when it’s one of the most fiscally efficient programs in government. Despite Trump’s pledge not to cut Social Security, they aim to sap the public’s confidence in the program by erecting pointless and inexplicable obstacles to prevent people from claiming the benefits they’ve paid for over their entire working lives.

Simpson didn’t write this road map to the destruction of Social Security; he just exploited what Republicans had charted almost from its inception. But he drove the level of discourse down by more than a few notches. In that respect, Musk and Trump are playing from his playbook.