Print some of this to defend against the oncoming tsunami of Republican attacks on Social Security.
We can't afford it! Cut those scrawny benefits and tell the masses to suck it up!
I wrote my thoughts below, regarding a nice young mis-informed man that came in to advise us on our 401K, last May.
Professor Dean Baker is quoted below, he's one of those who must be ignored along with all the hippies that warned us of pending financial market collapse five years ago, most of whom also wrote there were no WMD's and Dick Cheney really ran the country.
MAY, 2009
This is for that nice young man advising us on our 401K the other day that "wisely" fears Social Security won't be there when we retire, so better invest in the brilliant market.
He's sadly misled, along with millions of other well meaning people, duped over many decades by right wing laissez-faire, trickledown elitists whose party voted against virtually every middle class enabling social program in our short history since the Republican Great Depression.
The author is Phoenix Woman over at www.firedoglake.com, one of the oft demonized "left-wing" blogs, where they actually know Economics and Constitutional Law and quote experts and facts.
It begins by notifying us that DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Steny Hoyer and other "Blue Dog" (Pro-Big Business anti-worker pretend Democrats) Democrats are getting ready to roll over for Republicans yet again and finally destroy the most efficient, cost effective program in American history.
"Looks like Steny Hoyer and his buddies in the Blue Dog Dixiecrat Coalition are getting ready to implement the long-standing fever dream of their Cato Institute mentors and wage yet another war on Social Security. Time to break out the pitchforks!
The last time Social Security was under attack, its attackers claimed that privatizing it -- that is, chopping it and its trillions-dollar trust fund into shreds and handing out the pieces to eager brokerage firms -- would make it more efficient and provide more money to retirees. However, the disastrous experiences of Chile, the UK and other nations -- not to mention the numbers in the last of the Bush plans to destroy Social Security-- have shown the exact opposite: America's evil-bureaucrat-run Social Security has overhead costs of less than 1%, whereas the Bush plan has ten times the overhead, the British plan has twenty times the overhead, and the retirees forced to live under the Chilean plan are seeing as much as a third of their retirement money eaten up by fees due to pension-fund owners more interested in turning a big profit than in providing for their elderly fellow Chileans.But isn't Social Security about to collapse? Um, no. Dean Baker explains:
"Of course, the only reason anyone is even talking about cutting benefits and privatizing the program is that the right has managed to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs. For more than two decades they have spread stories about the baby boomers bankrupting the system and multitrillion-dollar debts left to our children and grandchildren.In reality the program can pay all scheduled benefits long past the boomers' retirement. According to the Social Security trustees report, it can pay full benefits through the year 2042 with no changes whatsoever. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the date at 2052. And even after those dates, Social Security will always be able to pay a higher benefit (adjusted for inflation) than what retirees receive today. Those scary multitrillion-dollar debts translate into a deficit equal to 0.7 percent of future income--presented in very precise form in the Social Security trustees report for those who care to look."Dean Baker
Furthermore, as I have repeatedly explained, most recently a little over a month ago, it would take a decades-long Great Depression to make Social Security run out of money-- and if the economy is that bad, frankly, Social Security would be the very least of our worries. Cannibalism would be a more acute problem. (Oh, and don't get me started on how the people who are the Social Security Trustees are seriously cooking their numbers to get the doom-and-gloom stats the privatizers love.)
But isn't Social Security this big ol' drain on the budget? Um, again, no. In fact, it earns money most years, so much so that past administrations have used it to make their budgets look better. (This is a practice that President Obama, to his credit, might stop.) The deal is that its enemies are trying to get you to confuse it with Medicare, which really does need overhauling -- though of course not the sort that the anti-Social-Security folks are typically proposing. (Oh, and in 2001 Bush wasn't content to dip into the Social Security piggybank to mask the deficits he was running up; he used Medicare's kitty -- which back then was also running surpluses -- this way as well.)
Bottom line: Leave Social Security alone. Period."
2 comments:
Except the Democrats were the libertarians following Jefferson and Madison in the 19th century, whose change is now to follow Rousseau and Marx as cited in The Changing Face of Democrats on Amazon and claysamerica.com. The Republicans started with Hamilton, then Clay, to Lincoln up to Teddy Roosevelt and even John McCain, always as supporters of a national government and intervention by it, with the exception of Reagan's Presidency, more like the early Democrats. claysamerica.com
Thanks for commenting, Clay, I'll check out your site and do a little reading.
I'd just add that Republicans hated Teddy Roosevelt, which is how he got the Vice-Presidency to start with.
New York Republicans arranged to get him on the ticket to get him out of New York State, and the national Republicans weren't that fond of him either, as evidenced by his Bull Moose run years later.
Thanks again!
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