drive to cut Social Security benefits via the chained CPI and other means.
This is an effort to begin the retroactive repeal of the progressive tax.
The payroll taxes that fund Social Security are taken beginning virtually on the first dollar that a working person earns. The percentage of the working person's income that is "taxed" for Social Security has grown since the program started. At this time, if you include the portion paid by the employer, it is about 15 cents per dollar that a working person earns.
We are told when the money is taken out of our paychecks that we are paying toward our Social Security. Reagan increased the percentage taken out of the paychecks in 1985 so that we would have a surplus to fund the retirements of the baby boomers.
The ploy of the anti-Social-Security, flat tax billionaires is to pretend that money is not just on loan to the federal government's general fund, but is simply tax money no different from the tax money the billionaires pay on their investment earnings.
Not true. The Social Security Trust Fund is a real covenant between working people and our government. We paid the money in partly to support the retirement of our parents and partly to save for ourselves.
For Congress and the administration to borrow the Social Security Trust Fund's money at extremely low interest rates (the case right now) and/or never pay it back is theft, pure and simple.
And the most abominable aspect of it all is that it retroactively abolishes and destroys the progressive tax system. It is an underhanded, mean, dastardly accounting trick on seniors -- on elderly people who don't understand what is going on.
People like Obama and Timothy Geithner should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know whether these "intelligent" people are too stupid to figure out the accounting trick or whether they are just reacting to peer pressure, but to me, sitting here, retired in my ordinary living room in my ordinary little house, it is really obvious. Why don't these big-time economists figure it out?
This is an attack on the entire concept of progressive taxes. They are turning the sums we paid as savings for Social Security into general revenue for the general fund. It's like mixing wine and water.
Raise the taxes on the rich and leave Social Security alone.
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