Social Security. Read "Perfectly Legal:The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - And Cheat Everybody Else" by David Cay Johnston (it's chapter 8 'How Social Security Taxes Subsidize the Rich') where he tells about Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan's skepticism about the need to adjust SS back in the early '80's. Greenspan was the pointman back then.
"Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan...said the social security scare was a phantom. He said raising more from Social Security taxes simply masked the drop in tax revenues caused by the Reagan tax cuts. Moynihan called the Social Security tax hike "thievery". The beneficiaries of the stolen goods, he said, were the rich who would keep their Reagan income tax cuts while everyone below them paid more in taxes." page 122
"Once the Democrats made the decision to tax their constituents decades in advance of when they would receive their retirement benefits, they also had to assure people that that money would be there when they filed for their retirement benefits...But the money ws not used in the way most people think...Social Security taxes were used to pay the ordinary bills of the government, making up for the taxes that were no longer being paid by the rich because of the 1981 income tax cuts." page 123
The Reagan era holdovers are all back in power now and are playing from the same script. Remember, even Reagan had to raise taxes after those 1981 tax cuts...they called them 'revenue enhancements' and these SS payroll tax increases.
So now, boys and girls, we've taken the curtain that surrounded the Wizard's policies. The question now becomes, 'Are the Democrats going to play the Republican's game in the second go-around ?' Even Moynihan decided to lie and play along
(see
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/issuebriefs_ib159 "The commission's straw man Social Security well prepared for retirement of baby boomers in 2016" by Christian Weller read quote:
"The commission's co-chairmen, former Senator Patrick Moynihan and AOL Time Warner Chief Operating Officer Richard Parsons, have said that, "
f no changes are made before <2016>, the government will either have to raise taxes, cut benefits or other government spending, or add to the public debt" (WSJ 2001). This statement is untrue." )
Social security isn't broken and it doesn't need fixing ! In fact, nothing prevents you from going out right now and buying an annuity and doing what the Republicans, who normally disdain government interevention in YOUR financial decisionmaking, want you to do by yourself for yourself.
In fact, the program that REALLY needs fixing is Medicare/Medicaid with this snippet from
"Medicare faces cost crisis
Multitrillion-dollar deficits loom over federal programs" by
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer, Sunday, November 7, 2004
""There is considerable debate about how much trouble Social Security is in and whether it requires the fix Bush has proposed. But there is little doubt about the difficulties in store because of the future costs of Medicare and Medicaid.
In fact, the secretaries of the Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services departments said just that in a March report, "The Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs."
"Medicare's financial difficulties come sooner -- and are much more severe -- than those confronting Social Security,'' the report said. So why does Social Security rather than Medicare top the president's agenda?
"Because Social Security is the easier of the two problems to solve,'' said Texas A&M economist Thomas Saving, who signed the report as a public member of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund, the board that oversees the financial health of the two programs.
Saving said elected officials of both major parties have been unwilling to face the future costs of federal health care programs.
"I don't have to be as careful,'' said Saving, who outlined the Medicare problem in an analysis issued after the official report.
In his analysis, he writes, "Although policy-makers have focused on the long-run sustainability of Social Security, the financial problem in Medicare is five times as great.''
Looking more than 75 years into the future, Saving estimates that the nation faces a $62 trillion unfunded liability for Medicare -- versus a $12 trillion gap for Social Security.""
It looks like Bush is trying out a further raid on SS dollars in order to really trash the Medicare/Medicade system...
Hold onto your wallets, it's going to be a wild ride. Let's hope Sen Harry Reid (D-NV) really does know how to fight and not dance.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
