Nothing New Under the Sun

From Theda Skocpol's "The Missing Middle" (W.W. Norton, New York, 2000) at 46-47:

When Ronald Reagan achieved the presidency in 1980, fiscal conservatives hoped he would cut social spending on the middle class as well as programs for the very poor. But after briefly raising the possibility of such reforms, President Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, quickly retreated from cutting middle-class programs in the face of an upsurge of public concern. Thereafter, the Reaganites concentrated rhetorical and budgetary fire on means-tested social spending for the poor. At that point, in the mid-1980s, opponents of Social Security retreated to a more indirect and long-term effort to undermine middle-class faith in the Social Security system. Following tactics laid out in a remarkable article by Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation and Peter Germanis of the Cato Institute called "Achieving a Leninist Strategy," critics stopped calling for immediate cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits, and instead began talking about a looming future "crisis" for the nation as a whole.