Saving Social Security From Bush And McCain
Saving Social Security From Bush And McCain
Our guest blogger is James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
If you’re in Generation X, don’t give up hope — Social Security is not going bust. That’s news from the annual report from the Social Security and Medicare trustees.
The latest projection is that Social Security will pay full benefits for more than 30 years. After 2041, it will pay only 78 percent of promised benefits. The projection for the long-run shortfall has fallen 10 percent since last year.
The report is an important reminder that the program is not in a crisis. While we need reforms to extend the life of Social Security, we do not need to panic and adopt massive benefit cuts. And the last thing we need is the radical step of privatization — as George Bush and John McCain want -– that would cut benefits and shorten the program’s life.
Instead, we can save Social Security by setting the right priorities. Its deficit projected into the infinite future is 1.1 percent of the economy — about the same size as John McCain’s tax plan. Saving Social Security would be a better use of resources than a $2 trillion tax plan that delivers 58 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.
5 Responses to “Saving Social Security From Bush And McCain”
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I wonder how long it would be before they would implement a eugenics bill in order to steal monies in the SSD and then privatize it so their nefarious accountants and cronies could depress the economy through wallstreet long enough to steal it through backroom deals and gov’t payoffs with even more working class money ?
March 25th, 2008 at 9:22 pmI’ve paid into this program since 1961. It is a meaningful program for seniors/retired persons and many at this point in history are supported and helped by social security. Not because they are on welfare, like some rich republicans seem to think, but because they played by the established rules and paid in as they were required to do. Solvency of the Social Security program is an issue for the government. These politicians ought not to be worryin’ folks and get this program fixed if it needs fixin’. If it really doesn’t need fixing and it’s just a political football to make the people fearful, I recommend that the politicians shut the hell up.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:13 amI read the details from the Social Security report and I have a hard time understanding how it is a “crisis”.
The bonds which represent the Social Security trust fund will need to start being paid back in 2017. This means that we are actually collecting more money than Social Security needs for current benefits for the next decade. Paying back the bonds is not a crisis, but just the outcome of taking out bonds.
Using those bonds Social Security can pay 100% of current benefits through 2041! We have three decades to make the decision whether to cut benefits or raise payroll taxes. We will have anywhere from four to eight Presidents in that time. Sixteen Congresses will have the opportunity to weigh in.
This is not anything that needs to be dealt with now. Government usually looks out five to ten years in its planning.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:09 pmI, too, believe this is an unnecessary “crisis” — it is really the repugs who are pushing to eliminate soc. sec./medicare entirely.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:50 pmEven a person like myself, not schooled in economics, can see that there are remedies available, it’s just that it is more exciting to play Henny Penny in the media.
There is a crisis–it is the one being created by neocon presidential-imperialists and “postmodernists”–”those who want to wish reality out of exist so they can get on with their dogmatic pragmatic–impractical–tyrannizing”.
March 27th, 2008 at 4:09 pmCase in point? The Social Security system. It was designed after the Republican caused crash of 1929, caused by decades of actions such as permitting 10% margins on stock buys, handouts of bank money to any mental case calling himself a CEO, 2% and 3% Fed rates to “prime the pump”, encouraging reckless spending and delivering 10% justice in the marketplace of jobs and leadership earning to the victims thereof, while avoiding or ignoring badly-needed monitoring, failing to supply or apply vitally-necessary regulationsetc., denying individuals standing in the courts, punishing whistleblowers, penalizing creative minds, etc.
Before 1902 we whad been citizens of a real country not a miserably misgoverned presiendtial-imperial and pseudo-theocratic empire.
So, here we are again, more than a century after our leaders declared the US to be a public-interest empire, and look at the resuults Were these results not predictable I ask.
We’ve returned to the same conditions as were set up by our so-called leaders in 1928 and the same thing is happening: lowered stock margins; favors to mentally unfortunate CEOs and to their cronies; stimulating of the punp-primed economy, shoddy and questionable lending practices, lowered interest rates, and the theft of most of the money in the country by stupid, unethical and incompetent 1/2 of one percent pals of a government of top-down collectivistic tsars and pesidential-imperial power advocates.
No wonder people are comparing dinosaur-diea man John McCain with dinosaur-idea man Herbert Hoover; the parallel is too eerie.
Next they’ll notice the resemblance between George W. Bush and Warren Harding.
There is no crisis. Reestablish the tax on those who use our courts and systems the most, the 1/2 of one percenter elitists and the 5% cronies and the gap disappears. Their restored fair tax will help the rest of survive .
This is social security, remember–the security of each citizen against misgovernment; bad leadership and immoral unrealism that bankrupts the country’s citizens, hand millions to incompetent CEOs for no reason, creates massive inflation and reduces the rest of us to being rightless beggars in our our own country.