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alwayssummer -> RE: Sanctimonious Deficit Hawks Target Social Safety Net (7/31/2010 4:49:10 PM)
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( Brain, I've contributed to yours and other threads more recently on the threats to social security. I commiserate with your frustration of trying to reason with those who base their knowledge of this trumpted up "crisis" on what they learn only through yahoo, the nightly news and other mainstream media. They regurgitate this complete and utter propaganda that the age of soc sec must be raised and that the benefits need to be cut to save it or to lower the national deficit or other bs.
Soc security is always framed as an "entitlement"...a word that (deliberately) reeks of welfarishness. It would be more accurate to call it an obligation - to pay back a debt to the workers/taxpayers who have faithfully contributed to it & will over their lifetime. The adjustments for the baby boomers retiring was made decades ago. Lengthened life span also has been factored in years ago and the age raised twice... now it's at 67. Seventy is too high. That blatantly cuts the payouts already contributed and is just plain cruel and punishing to the hard working elderly... like waitresses and roofers who actually labor for a living...to work until age 70? Inconceivable people mention this as a reasonable option.
If someone won't research the truth about soc sec( yes, here again "reality does have a liberal bias") in The Nation, or HuffPo, or Firedoglake for example ...then it's impossible to carry on a conversation about social security with them. It's like talking to people who fell hook & sinker for the WMD mythology. Very, very apt parallel actually on so many levels. Another example of (fake) "crisis capitalism" at work this social security "crisis". Ezra Klein recently wrote a very good article on these similarities in The Nation.
Social security has not added to the deficit. Though it has been raided and money replaced with treasury bonds. Those bonds need to be honored and also interest paid back to the taxpayers into the fund for these forced loans. The Bush tax cuts- especially for the rich and the demise of the estate tax- and his off the books war in Iraq are seen as the two greatest original causes of our current economic mess..Add to that the financial debacle,foreclosures, poverty and unemployment (and trillions that simply vanished out of the economy!) caused by the unregulated Wall Street Casino Exploding in October 2008 and ever ballooning military budget now into Afghanistan, and certainly the national deficit is obscene.
But not to be paid back by slashing social security - forcing people to work until seventy or reducing already barely subsistence payments. The only justifiable adjustment that should be made to social security is raising or eliminating the annual income cap. If the Dems capitulate to the (anti soc security ) Catfood Commission and the Repugs in their eternal desire to destroy or even reduce social security ...or give it all to Wall Street ...then the Dems will be committing political and moral suicide.
The model of social security was not designed to do anything but provide an economic safety net for the elderly & disabled. There are legal and responsible ways to raise money if Congress is truly serious about the lowering deficit: Letting the tax cuts for the rich expire, reinstating the estate tax (this year billions lost bkz it was not renewed - thanks, John Kyl et alios), charging a tax (like sales tax) for every Wall Street transaction, imposing an internet sales tax (and give some back to the states, that have been raped by this exclusion), implementing a public option & importing Canadian drugs, cutting the military budget...see Barney Frank's quick trillion dollar cuts in military waste and duplication... legalizing marijuana as a cost cutting measure (cops, courts, DEA and prisons) and source of tax revenue, and lets look at all the agribusiness and big oil subsidies and tax exemptions. How about making Govt Contractors pay US taxes instead of blatant evasion by headquartering with 3 employees in Dubai, Caymens etc.There are soooo many places to look. The list is truly endless....
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