Bernie Sanders begins, "In the 77 years since President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law on August 14, 1935, the retirement program has been one of the nation's most successful anti-poverty programs. Before Social Security existed, about half of America's senior citizens lived in poverty. Today, less than 10 percent live in poverty."
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
Social Security Under Fierce Attack
15 August 12
n the 77 years since President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law on August 14, 1935, the retirement program has been one of the nation's most successful anti-poverty programs. Before Social Security existed, about half of America's senior citizens lived in poverty. Today, less than 10 percent live in poverty.
Today, Social Security not only provides retirement security but also enables millions of people with disabilities and widows, widowers and children to live in dignity and security.
In these highly volatile economic times, when millions of Americans lost their life savings in the 2008 Wall Street crash, it is important to remember that since its inception, through good economic times and bad, Social Security has paid every penny owed to every eligible beneficiary.
Despite Wall Street and right-wing misinformation, Social Security, which is funded by the payroll tax, does not contribute to the deficit. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund today, according to the Social Security Administration, has a $2.7 trillion surplus and can pay 100 percent of all benefits owed to every eligible American for the next 21 years. Further, unlike the huge commissions paid out to Wall Street firms, Social Security is run with very modest administrative costs.
Despite Social Security's popularity and overwhelming success, we are now in the midst of a fierce and well-financed attack against Social Security. Pete Peterson, the Wall Street billionaire, has pledged $1 billion of his resources to cut Social Security and other programs of enormous importance to the American people. Other billionaires and Wall Street representatives are also working hard to weaken or destroy Social Security and endanger the well-being of millions of Americans. We must not allow their effort to succeed.
Let us never forget that the current deficit of $1 trillion was primarily caused by two unpaid-for wars and tax breaks for the rich. These policies were strongly supported by "deficit hawks." The deficit is also related to a major decline in revenue as a result of the Wall Street-created recession. The deficit is a serious issue, but we must not move toward deficit reduction on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. This would not only be immoral, it is bad economic policy. At a time when the wealthiest people in this country are doing phenomenally well and their effective tax rate is the lowest in decades, the top 1 percent must begin paying their fair share of taxes. At a time when large corporations are enjoying record-breaking profits, we have got to eliminate the huge corporate loopholes which result in a massive loss of federal revenue. At a time when we have tripled military spending since 1997, we must take a hard look at a bloated and wasteful Defense Department.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has been a proponent of privatizing the retirement program by putting seniors' savings into risky Wall Street investments. Even before tapping Ryan as his running mate, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said he wants to begin the process of privatizing Social Security. He also would gradually increase the retirement age to 68 or 69. And he favors slowing the growth of benefits for persons with "higher incomes." Under a plan floated by Romney's allies on Capitol Hill -- Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) -- someone making about $45,000 a year today who retires in 2050 would receive 32 percent less in annual Social Security benefits than under the current formula. By that definition, the top 60 percent of all wage earners would be considered "higher income."
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, was a staunch defender of Social Security in his 2008 campaign. So far this year, however, Obama has refused to stand behind his four-year-old opposition to cuts. In fact, the president has signaled that he may be open to lowering benefits by changing how they are calculated. In my view, it is long past time that the president told the American people in no uncertain terms, as he did in 2008, that he will not cut Social Security on his watch.
To keep Social Security's finances sound in the future I have introduced legislation -- identical to a proposal that Obama advocated in 2008 -- to apply the payroll tax on incomes above $250,000 a year. Under current law, only earnings up to $110,100 are taxed. The Center for Economic Policy and Research has estimated that applying the Social Security payroll tax on income above $250,000 would only impact the wealthiest 1.4 percent of wage earners.
Those who want to cut Social Security benefits are looking at a number of proposals. One of the most talked about ideas is moving toward a so-called "chained-CPI," which would not only impact seniors, but also military retirees and those who receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The "chained-CPI" approach changes how the Consumer Price Index is calculated, so that a person 65 years old today would earn $560 a year less in Social Security benefits once they turn 75. Benefits would be cut by nearly $1,000 a year once they turn 85. Instead, I have proposed legislation to base Social Security cost-of-living adjustments on a Consumer Price Index for the Elderly, a measure that would increase benefits because it would take into account the real-life impact of rising health care costs and prescription drug expenses paid by seniors.
While we often take Social Security for granted, we must not forget that Social Security today is providing dignity and security to tens of millions of Americans. It is a program that is working and working well. We must stand up today, on the 77th anniversary of this enormously important program. We must pledge to continue the fight against the right-wing Republicans, some Democrats and their wealthy backers who want to destroy the program.
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They are trying to sustain until IBG-YBG sets in and they won't have to see what history writes about them. (I Be Gone - You Be Gone)
If we elect Romney=Ryan, we will all suffer as they dismember Social Security and Medicare while reducing their own taxes and raising ours.
Maybe if it were the law that anyone that voted to raid the funds would forfeit their congressional retirement and serve a ten-year prison term, that might discourage some of them.
The talk about gutting SS could be a smokescreen to allow more devious corporatist legislation to slide in under the debate.
Read the -entirety- of the legislation where they are claiming to want to gut SS. They will add clauses and addendum to these types of Bills that are disastrous, knowing all along that they were never going to really gut SS in the first place. Then when you are claiming victory on "saving SS" from the evil villains, the evil villains got all that other disastrous stuff through.
Please don't keep falling for this trick, because you are destroying the Country.
They have been doing this to us for 30 years and really it is time that you wake up.
When Unemployment runs out or becomes underfunded and in this job market SS Disability Benefits become another option. Do I think it is the most efficient way to keep what is left of the unemployed afloat? No. Do I think that if the GOP/TP would get off their collective well fed butts and start a real recovery program that that is more efficient. Yes. This is an effect of deficit hawk ideology, not a cause.
Should enough of these programs, entitlements because they are payed for by the self-same tax payers, be done away with the economy will tank even farther. It is a lesser of two evils in a class and system under attack. Only the enormously short sighted Ayn Rand adherents will not see it.
Following are the facts about his assertions: The supposed contents of this so-called "Trust Fund" are bonds/IOUs that account for how much money the Treasury has borrowed from the account and has already expended. Those bonds are said to be backed by the "full faith and credit" of the United States. However, in order to to come up with the cash to redeem those bonds and utilize the proceeds, Congress has to find and appropriate the money by a combination of revenues and public borrowing, just as for all other federal spending.
In effect, the Treasury's situation is exactly equivalent to what it would be if the account contained no bonds at all. What has happened is that when there were surplus Social Security revenues, the government has diverted those funds to unrelated federal spending. Now that the surplus is becoming a deficit, the government has to shell out real money from some source, whether or not there are any "pretend" bonds in the supposed "Fund". So it really amounts to a shell game, akin to a Ponzi scheme in which withdrawals are now about to exceed revenues.
Someone should explain these fiscal realities to Senator Sanders, who is engaging in "let's pretend" rhetoric that detracts from his stature.
The current supreme court -or as I call 'em, corrupt lawyers with robes, wouldn't know a "human right" if it was served up to them on a Wedgewood platter with Bechamel sauce and could give a shit about S.S.
So what's yer point?
Quoting Robert Cohen:
Think about it. Dollar bills are IOUs too.
Would you rather the cash sit doing nothing or that it be available as a LOAN (as you said) to prevent unnecessarily borrowing from China or something.
Someone passed you this freaked out nonsense because it SOUNDS logical. but it's nonsense, if you think about it.
Now we have to undo the this fallacy again... and every time some well meaning citizen repeats it.
And that's not really a problem. It's an opportunity.
Welcome aboard! :-)
Thanks "MidwestTom" for mentioning that depression (I've been fighting it since my personal crash and see a counselor who does some barter) -I wasn't aware that it could be used to claim SSD.
It's not just young people, although I feel for them as their education opportunities and employment chances are increasingly out of sight. But try and get any kind of work as you get older; nada -and I have two degrees, worldwide experience and am multi-lingual.
Yet these greedy bastards who caused it it the first place want to make it all worse so they can become yet more powerful and monopolist; they may as well come right out and seek the absolute powers of a hereditary monarchy with all it's trappings and "off with their heads" at a whim.
We've all heard how Ryan is advocating for this although he used his father's SS survivor benefits to get through college.
"Swine" is too nice a word and an insult to an intelligent and useful animal.
Those of us on SSI have to either live in delapidated noisy so-called 'SRO's (single room occupancies) or residential hotels (which themselves are very expensive) or in 'in-laws' rooms in garages of houses, or for those not so lucky, as many of these 'cheaper' accomodations have been snapped up by the working poor, wind up essentially, HOMELESS! (Con't...)
As a retired federal employee, Social Security is a part of my retirement and I paid into it. This was Reagan's idea in 1984 when he ended Civil Service retirement.
To hear the same party now trying to get at Social Security and to turn Medicare into a scam of vouchers angers me greatly. And especially when we know they will support all breaks for the 1% who are getting free rides!
Americans who don't see what these people are trying to do are blind. The GOP is destroying the country and they need to be stopped now.
This is America? 'Give me your tired, your poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, and we will simply dump them onto the streets and parks as HOMELESS ...to DIE! This seems to be what Amerika is all about today under this feudalistic archaic 16 Century capitalist system!
What we really need is a 'revolution' for DEMOCRATIC Socialism! (NOT the so-called socialism of the CCP or that old stuff, but a modern green democratic form of socialism like Germany's relatively new Die Linke Partei!
If SSA were to be placed in a museum, then the poverty level would overnight soar to unimaginable levels surpassing all the Third World countries put together on this planet! Shameful!
I believe you are the one that doesn't understand. SS has IOUs just like I have a Treasury bond. Try telling people that have a treasury bond there is no money to give you and see it that would please them.
There is a subtle but fundamental difference between your Treasury bond and the bonds in the Social Security "trust" account. Your Treasury bond is part of the "public debt" (what the government has borrowed from, and owes to the public), whereas the bonds held in the Social Security account are owed by the government to itself for its borrowings from Social Security, plus annual interest payable on its debt to Social Security.
It's as if you had robbed your own piggy bank and replaced the coins you had spent with an IOU to yourself.
If trustees of a private pension plan diverted pension assets to unrelated uses, they would warrant being prosecuted.
Read Mr Cohen a bit more carefully and you will find nothing he wrote is in error.
Where do you think the government gets the "money" to pay your T bond interest?
Hmmm. They borrow it. You see that is a large part of what the looming fiscal crisis is about. The "money" keeps going out exponentially faster than it comes in.
The danger is that we owe so much "...to ourselves..."( and our financiers like China) that we can't borrow enough fast enough, to even pay the interest we owe let alone any principal.
If you believe that government can't default on their obligations (that includes your T bonds)I advise a bit of reading on the subject, it's been in the news quite regularly of late.
No legitimate actuary from either party denies the looming fiscal crisis. Dems and Pubs both agree on it. They simply lack the political will to do anything other than try and kick the can down the road.
Unfortunately the end of the road is close.
And those wars have cost us a fortune. They want to rid themselves of the money that they owe to the Social Security for sucking up its funds. Tax the rich, damn it. Tax the rich and the problems will go away.
Since SS, people do not need to have all those children to provide for their old age.
Does anyone really want to go back to that? Could our children even afford to do that nowadays?
not without JOBS!
No medical coverage = death or bankruptcy (therefore more monopolist control) = no means to recover = no education = a bereft middle and working class = small business depression and feelings of worthlessness = thoughts of suicide = a slave class (therefore complete monopolist control). Removing S.S. would be last nail in our collective coffins, then fall back into the medieval slime America, from which your "discoverers" sought to escape.
The native inhabitants of this country had a giving and sharing tribal structure: inter-tribal skirmishes were about honor and spiritual strength, not power over others or exploitation.
As Spotted Tail bluntly stated "The White man made us many promises but he only kept but one: he told us he would take our land and he took it"!
And has been raping, pillaging, lying and cheating in every conceivable way with rapacious power-drunk savagery ever since.
Maybe the Indians (yes, I'm saying "Indians" which is how my native friends refer to themselves collectively outside of tribal affiliation, not without a certain amount of amused irony when spoken thus) will get it all back when the Empire crumbles, as it must from the monopolists devouring each other.
Google the words of John Trudell, the Lakota poet, for some wisdom and a look at what we are and have become; Gore Vidal too.
That's the reason the Communist system in Russia went under...they spent too much money on the military. Face it, you can't spend a billion dollars a day in Iraq and Afghanistan and have anything left for ANYTHING else.
That's not to mention the 'ones' that aren't paying...Big oil companies like Exxon and BP generally make the highest profits of all the corporations in the world and usually pay low or no taxes...and certainly, the wealthy, as Buffet has been saying for years now...are paying far too little.
So the burden is falling on the little guy and we're pretty much back to a reverse-Robin-H ood system where the poor are paying everything while the rich are getting a free ride.
My friend at work is all for getting rid of SS...until I told her they're still going to take the money - they're only stopping the benefits - NOT the contributions!! ! The benefits are now going into the general budget and are paying for these endless wars...
The SS and Medicare funds have been made part of the 'General Fund' as of early this spring. So now they can be used freely without Congress having to 'borrow' them in return for an 'IOU'. So now they can be used to pay for the current wars and any new ones.
We spend over $1B (1,000,000,000) per day in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's my GUESS that we probably kill about 100 'enemy soldiers' (95% civilians?) per day. So, by my math...it costs us $10M to kill one enemy???!!! Let's assume we kill 1000 'enemies' per day...that's drives our costs down to only $1M to kill one enemy.
THIS MAKES NO SENSE WHATEVER!!!
Who...in their right mind...would vote to go to war if they knew they would have to pay $1M for every enemy they killed???
And face it...for every worker in America earning under $100K...there's 15% of his income (half his contribution and half from his employee) sitting there in the General Fund...as Bernie said...it's a couple Trillion...just waiting to pay for a war in Iran...
But I have a hard time forgiving him for caving to White House and Wall Street pressure and voting for the Romney--I mean Obama--health-c are reform that slashes Medicare, rations care--and provides tax-payer subsidies to HMO insurance cartels.
If Romney and Ryan are unacceptable right-wingers on this issue then so is President Obama.
And the President has the Wall Street-preferre d skill of silencing minorities and the Left--with his complexion if not his program...
$250,000? That's still peanuts. Remove the taxable base cap altogether.
If you can call what most of 'em do "working"!?
And to Mr. Cohen -you are writing from an abstract language most of us, if we are to be perfectly honest, don't even begin to comprehend, which is how the economic pundits like it! Another page in the "Divide and conquer" bible.
That said, my opinions:
When I got laid-off from my great well-paid job at age 59...all of a sudden I went from 'person most able' to 'we don't hire 60 year-olds'...ye s, friends, age discrimination is alive and well here and if you ever need a job in your 50s and 60s...you're in trouble.
So my friend...also in computers...dec ided around age 45 that computer work was just too stressful and she didn't want to work anymore. So she sold her house and moved to FL and applied for SS disability funds because of the 'stress'. Took her a year and a great SS lawyer and 3 tries...but she finally got her SS money early. After that, she was free to party for the rest of her life. Apparently, if you're 'stressed' enough...there is not one single job in America that you are able to do. Amazing.
I live in California, and our last governor was named Arnold. He was fairly popular through most of his governorship by holding down taxes in our state. I do not claim our taxes are low; I claim he was popular for not increasing them. Today we face an infra-structure in peril. We drive expensive and vulnerable cars over poorly maintained roads. We deny entry into our colleges of some of our best and brightest. We have fire-department s and police-departme nts working overtime--to the point of sleep-deprivati on and inefficiency..
Do you really value your precious and hard-earned affluence so much that you will let it drift into decline rather than maintain the infra-structure that protects it?
#1 Debt Free Home Ownership is the securest way to live in retirement. Allow use of Social Security to payoff a primary mortgage at 40 with a payback agreement into Social Security over the following 22 years.
#2 A Health Savings Account is the Best Medical Insurance Program to ever come out of Washington. Backed by both Clinton's and Bush's. Allow use of Social Security funds to remove the hurdle of the high deductible in the beginning years with agreement of paying it back into Social Security. In retirement years the cash savings will become a supplement to Social Security.
#3 Social Security Purchasing Power needs to be protected from Federal Government deficit spending and The Federal Reserve printing money which devalues the US Dollar. Privatization, nor government controlled investment are the answer but maybe allowing private individual Social Security accounts to use a percentage of their money to purchase Gold and Silver bullion coins from the US Mint would help maintain purchasing power.
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