Bush Proposes Slashing Social Security Benefits
Why he’s doing this is beyond me. Maybe he’s trying to scare people into thinking the system needs radical change, so that when they rebel against the idea of slashing benefits, he’ll just come back and say, “well then, let’s do privatization instead.” Because if it’s not that, then his current push is absolutely bizarre. Didn’t he completely rule out cutting benefits not long ago? Or maybe he’s just so embarrassed and defeated from losing his two-month Bamboozlepalooza campaign to privatize that he’s trying to gut SS just to stick it to those ungrateful louts for not buying into his BS.
His proposal to “save” social security is really yet another tax hike in the form of service cut for the middle class. Won’t the rich take one in the chin, too? No, because they have the salary cap, and so don’t get much in SS benefits anyway. While people making under $20,000 a year may be eligible for the same benefits under the new Bush plan, and while the rich won’t miss the extra bucks lost, the middle class (and the higher end of the lower class) is going to find their benefit cuts hurting them to no end.
Of course, Bush has an explanation: since SS will go broke soon anyway, this is better than nothing. But he is completely ignoring the fact that SS solvency could be completely managed by simply eliminating the salary cap and making the rich pay the same percent of their income to SS as everyone else does. But that would be taxing the rich, and God forbid we should ever think of doing that. No, better to sock it to the middle class–they can take the beating with much better grace.
Seen this?
Gary Leupp piece on Chinese anger and Japanese history.
I think what scares the democrats more than anything is losing their legacy. They don’t really care as much about the poorer or middle classes as they once did. Bush is going to revamp Social Security, a program that you have to admit is another form of taxation. I say this because when it was created, the average age expectancy was 67 and the retirement age was set at 65. So you could expect to collect for about two years even though you may or may not have paid into it for forty or fifty years. Nobody complained about this at the time because no one had paid into that long. It was just not designed to have people living well into their eighties and nineties like they are today collecting each month. If FDR had set it up with private accounts like he wanted to, his economic advisers talked him out of it, there would be no problems associated with the program. Then came LBJ and the “great society” and how he was going to wipeout poverty, something that still exists today even with decades and decades of democratic congresses in power. The addition of those social programs and the longer life expectancies are what is killing social security. The beauty of private accounts is that the government does not have control of your money. You do. You can choose to put it in mutual funds or bonds similar to many 401K plans operating today. I am willing to accept some cuts in my benefits if I could have a private account. Raising the cutoff from 90K will hurt many in the middle class and I am opposed to that. I wish there was a compromise that everyone could agree to. At least, most Americans now understand that there is a problem and I’m tired of democrats not admitting that. Clinton tried unsuccessfully in his second term to reform social security and he would have done it had his other head not got in the way. Its too bad he didn’t have his priorities in the right order. He could have actually had a legacy to remember.