Tweet
Social Security Works’ Alex Lawson had a wonderful exchange with former Senator Alan Simpson, the co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, about Social Security. Alex politely peppered the former senator with reasonable questions about his views on Social Security, which led Mr. Simpson to alternately curse and lecture Lawson about the structure of the program.
In the course of an 8 minute exchange, Mr. Simpson repeatedly expressed the view that the government was somehow unaware (at least until recently) of either the baby boom cohort’s existance or that life expectancy was increasing. He kept repeating, as though he had just discovered it, that life expectancy had increased from 57 when Social Security was started in 1937 to 78 years for today’s newborns.
But the best part of the show was Mr. Simpson’s discussion of the bonds held by the trust fund. Simpson was anxious to tell Lawson that we had spent the money. They had a bit of back and forth over what the money was spent on. (Simpson emphasized spending on highways and infrastructure, Lawson pointed to the money spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Bush tax cuts.) But, both agreed that the money had been spent.
Simpson then implied that Social Security was broke because the money had been spent. Lawson pointed out that the trust fund held U.S. government bonds that are backed up by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Simpson acknowledged this point, even completed Lawson’s sentence.
So, if the bonds held by the trust fund are backed up by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, then what is the problem? The trust fund contains bonds that must be repaid just like the bonds held by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and rich people like Peter Peterson.
Where will the government get the money to repay the bonds held by Social Security? It will probably get the money from the same place it gets the money to repay the bonds held by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and rich people like Peter Peterson. We never ask where the government will get the money when Goldman Sachs or Peter Peterson want to cash in their bonds, why on earth would we ask that question when the issue is cashing in the bonds held by Social Security?
So, we have the land of non-sequitors where we keep hearing about an issue that has nothing to do with the health or solvency of Social Security. I just keep thinking of that old Billy Preston song.
77 Comments
Yeah, that was some really good work on the part of Alex Lawson. Alan Simpson sure is a piece of work. He really popped up on my radar when NPR basically gave him an open mic for an hour. His greatest concern seemed to be that(in his words) the elderly were driving lexus’s to pickup thier senior discount cards.
However, it was not clear if he prefered taking away thier lexus’s or taking away thier senior discount cards. Everything was on the table (except taxing Wallstreet or growing the economy).
Thank you for posting this!
x2
Alan Simpson is evil.
Alan Simpson isn’t evil… well, maybe he is. He’s just a republican who will never, ever need the benefits of the Social Security safety net, or Medicare or any other program designed to assist middle-to-lower income Americans who have paid into these programs their entire adult life (and in some cases since they were working teens, my record goes back to a grocery-store job when I was 15).
The reality is that instead of appointing republicans who might understand the need for SSI (are there any?), Obama appointed a doctrinaire snake who hates what FDR did as all doctrinaire republicans before him have.
The New Deal, they hated it then; they hate it now. What’s changed except the century mark?
It’s
funnydisgusting that the “bond vigilantes”don’t want one of the largest holders of US debt to be repaid.
Non Sequitur – Obvious Man
Re: Social security and The “Big Club”
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything.
They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls.
They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else,”
“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want, they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.
They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security.
They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”
-George Carlin
Here’s how I heard SImpson (“Simpson, eh?”): It’s bad enough that receipts are lagging outflow, and now we have to repay the interest on the bonds too, so that’s even more outflow, so the SS fund is even more broke, and that’s what we have to fix by slowing the total outflow generally, and that probably means paying SS participants less either across the board, or else by denying payment until they get older than we promised.
Of course that’s a disingenuous answer that would only satisfy a ninny.
1) The interest on the bonds is a real expense, but the SS participants didn’t inflict it on the program; the SS fund management (USG) did, so it’s they who bear the extra burden there, not the program participants.
2) If the USG had surplus finds in any other area of the Federal budget, you know damn well they would not be contemplating these benefit cuts. (Or, in the alternative, they would not have the excuse to gather like vultures to kill this program whose New Deal ideology they hate.) Cleaving this whole discussion from the larger discussion of the national budget is deeply disingenuous, and the program could be left unchanged with only modest adjustments to war spending.
3) The program could also be left unchanged benefits-wise by simply raising the contribution cap. The only arguments against doing so are again merely ideological. Insofar as we are at a recent-historical low overall taxation of the wealthy, and in a recession, with an unprecedented rich.poor gap, the time is ripe (politically speaking) to even up the tax burden anyway.
Therefore, any movement towards cutting benefits in this project can only be because the committee members want to — there is no good reason why they actually have to.
Also, the argument that SS wasn’t originally (perhaps never) intended to serve as a full pension program is completely irrelevant to the question of whether program benefits should be reduced. Whatever portion of a person’s retirement income the SS income represents, reducing it is both a financial injury and a failure to keep a promise that the USG made. If it wouldn’t be theft, it wouldn’t be far from it.
Don’t fall for Simpson’s bullshit framing.
If those trust fund bonds won’t be repaid, will we be getting a refund of all payroll taxes paid in excess of payouts since 1983? It would be only fair.
I seem to recall some bad apples who stole their union members retirement funds and went to prison for it….
Of course, we all knew that the gov had stolen it, probably a long time ago.
What really burns me is that Reagan made the boomers pay double and now, they say they ain’t got it; so sorry Charley.
But they still take a wad out of everyone’s paycheck.
And, of course, it’s all OUR fault for being so damned healthy
Alan Simpson went into this determined to gut SSI. The result would be no different if it had been Grover Norquist.
No one will face the fact that Ex-presidents, Congresspeople, and Government employee’s, and the richest of the rich get Social Security. They get the highest amount possible, and yet compared to their income because of the cap, pay in a smaller percentage than the poorer people.
It’s like having a million dragons bleeding the blood out of Social Security, while bitching about the retiree’s of the baby boom wanting theirs.
The rich use their Social Security to fritter away on Golf, Yachts, and the riches toys, while the poorer people use it to live on.
No Conservative, Republican, or rich person refuses their checks, but they do claim we can’t afford Social Security for the little people, and want the little people to invest their money so they hopefully won’t need it.
The real class war, and redistribution of wealth they all complain about, is to benifit the rich, and our Government Officials who have made Social Security their personal Piggy Bank.
If Something as benificail as Social Security is faultering, one would think that finding new ways to fund it and make it solvent would be a prime priority, but instead ways to to do away with it seem more the talk.
If people had decent jobs SS would take care of itself. That’s just a fact.
Very good point, except the very people who want to dismantle Social Security are the people keeping Americans from having good jobs, and defend Corporate America for sending them overseas, not paying good wages, want to break the unions, and say we need the illeagal workers.
Yet People still vote for Republicans.
“the richest of the rich get Social Security. They get the highest amount possible, and yet compared to their income because of the cap, pay in a smaller percentage than the poorer people.”
Nope-
The SS program is very progressive – but it i in the formula used for the benefit calculation that it becomes progressive – there are 3 factors used – first few dollars of average income has a very high factor, the next few dollars of average income a lower factor – with the factor applied to the rest of the income up to the cap at a very low level. That is why raising the cap – eliminating the cap – results in a 2% decrease in the rate of payroll tax needed for the rest of us. So the rich “overpay” for that higher benefit check – and that is a good progressive result – and paying the rich their checks keeps the program from being seen as welfare – and welfare is much easier to cut than is an “entitlement that has been paid for over a lifetime”. There is 2% tax level “underfunding” so raising the cap solves all problems – if you assume that the very conservative projection that shows the 2% gap is to be believed (another projection – there are 3 done every year – shows near zero tax gap).
Thank you for this diary. I need a better understanding of this issue and this helps.
PS. Allen Simpson was an ass while He was in the Congress, and people fell all over Him like he was great, and after He left, intead of letting Him retire or die they keep bringing Him back like a bad f^#k-ing Dream.
This is one of my Bitches with Obama, He keeps digging up these people and giving them new jobs. Bob Grahm couldn’t handle the CIA, and now Obama gave Him this new Job on the OIl Commission like He is trusted expert.
I sware that Ronnie Reagan better have million ton blocks put on His Grave or Obama will want to dig Him up to.
There will be a Pete Peterson sponsored
con-jobTownhall in a community near you next Saturday.I urge everyone to use the search function at that link, and sign up and attend.
1 – Get familiar with the bond issue Dean Baker brings up.
2 – Bring your Social Security statement of total payments into the system and what your eligibility would be. The older you are, the more surprised you’ll be about how that 6.25% you’ve paid, and the 6.25% your employers have paid adds up.
3 – Make statements at the Townhall like “Here’s my lifetime paid in amount. (In me and belch’s case it adds up to about $400,000! – that’s both of us contributing over more than 30 years) A – your suggesting it’s an entitlement, when clearly I have paid and B – if you want to welch on Treasury Bills, how about welching on Goldman Sachs, or the Chinese? Why me?”
4 – Point out that it truly is about priorities, and 55% of the budget goes to military spending. And we spend more on the US military than the rest of the world governments COMBINED!
Change the tone of that Pete Peterson sponsored Townhall!
Search function doesn’t appear to work. I used the zip code of my most-local event, and it said there was nothing near me. Still popped up with a list of all events, so then just searched by state.
From their “Federal Budget 101″ document:
Too fricken precious. They assume endless war, endless tax cuts for the rich, but the piddly tax cuts that went to ’95% of working families’? OUTTA THERE!!
Signups for the events include demographic info (so they can be sure the crowds are representative, uh huh); I’d be interested to see who gets disinvited. The only event currently scheduled for the SFBay is being hosted by a local ‘community foundation’ – 2009 numbers look dodgy, but may be atypical due to the crash.
Totally spectacular, Kelly!!! {{As usual!}} Carry On!
But Pretzelchoker said the bonds were just pieces of paper! He’s a businessman he should know! Just ask the shareholders of Arbusto how much pieces of paper are worth!
I understand your rationale a little better now from this paragraph. I approach this problem with SS from the perspective of its just another liability. Your rationale is that just SS will be cut while it business as usual for the other parts of government spending. Easier to see the outrage expressed now.
What if it were found out though that SS is given highest priority for redemption and all other programs are cut to “reasonable” levels, yet there is still a financial specter haunting this country. Would there be acceptance for further cuts like an increase of the age limit? Where is the line in the sand?
If it was acceptable to spend social security funds as a part of the budget as a whole it can be funded from any budget funding source.
There is no failing in the SS program. They took the money and spent it. Now say they can’t pay out because the SS funds are dry.
If healthcare costs in this country were similar/the same as other industrialized countries, there would actually be a surplus in SocSec/Medicare/Medicaid.
The deficit problems are caused by the very greedy and very visible hands of the market in the form of corporate profiteers in medical care and military spending.
Never more true words were spoken.
Alan Simpson is no newly discovered snake. He has always wanted dismantle SS.
It is Obama who appointed Simpson. Obama is the leader of the party in power in Congress. Obama wants to dismantle Social Security.
Alan Simpson is just a convenient face on a bipartisan effort to cover up the looting of Social Security. Yes, the money was spent. Now Obama, Orszag, Democrats and Republicans are joining together to fob off some half-ass rationale for why they are not going to pay Social Security back. Full faith and credit my ass. That only means something if you are a bankster, and then it doesn’t even have to be in writing it is simply assumed.
BTW it is non sequitur.
Take the cap off FICA, apply it to all income, and means test the high end of Social Security and the program will be solvent forever.
No means testing. That’s only a wedge to dismantle it later.
The rule should be if you pay, you get paid, period.
Income tax is or should be progressive. There is no reason that Social Security should not be too. All taxation is social engineering. And they are trying to dismantle Social Security now. So we don’t have to worry about later.
I just disagree with that, as there are too many other places to make the budget balanced before you get to SS and means testing.
Means testing seems to me like a classic Democrat maneuver to pre-compromise which needn’t be offered prior to the negotiations. Because then it all becomes about the level of the “means.”
So You are against means testing huh? I guess because Warran Buffit paid in He should get the Max, even though His percentage of pay in was probably less than Yours hey.
You do not understand the math – means testing is meant to kill “entitlement that has been paid for” and turn it into welfare.
Plus SS is progressive – the cap does not mean it is not progressive. The poor get more per dollar of tax paid than the rich. The cap just stops it from being even more progressive.
The point is that Social Security replaces a fixed percentage of wages of retirees up to the cap. It is perfectly fair for Buffett to get his money, he paid just exactly as much as anybody did for those benefits.
We MUST avoid turning SS into WELFARE.
Well said.
The SS funds paid for the tax cut for the rich – and Simpson does not want to raise taxes on the rich so they are forced to pay off the bonds they forced us to issue to fund that damn tax cut. Simpson believes the rich keep the tax cut we could not afford without the funding from SS, and now we kill SS so those SS bonds are never cashed in and there is never any pressure on the rich to repay them.
One of the men who put SS in place for FDR noted that a program for the poor soon becomes a poor program: you’re right, means testing, which I once supported, is a bad idea. The wider the vested interest, the wider the buy-in.
Hey, I had treasuries for years and never did I doubt that I’d get principle and interest. Safest debt paper in the world, overall. Do you have any idea what a humongous, unimaginable financial Armageddon would ensue if the USA defaulted, DEFAULTED, on any of its debt paper? Not paying those bonds is DEFAULT. There’s not an exchange or a market staffer anywhere in the world unaffected or unknowing. Can’t happen, would make treasury paper worthless. All the countries which hold US paper? The USA, biggest debtor nation in the world, defaults? Get out the end of the world type, ruination here we come.
Simpson is Obama’s appointed executioner of the elderly.
He is Obama’s hatchet man, under the guise of “bipartisanship”.
Teddy Partridge is upstairs!
Sunday Late Night: What Fools They Be
All this talk of the Social Security Bonds, when the chances the Government will ever pay them back is almost nill.
If they have to back up Social Security, they will just borrow more money from the Chinese, and we will have to pay the interest on that.
The full faith of the American Government is, they will never do the right thing, because we won’t make them.
That should be the new mantra. This question should repeatedly be asked by anyone attending “America Speaks”, journalists, all citizens who paid into the Social Security Trust Fund, and basically by those who have compassion for their fellow man.
“compassion for their fellow man”
That’s a rare breed.Not many around.
At the risk of stating the obvious…
The government gets the money to repay the bonds held by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and rich people like Peter Peterson by selling bonds to Social Security.
You can’t do that to pay back SS and that is the problem.
What’s this economy coming to, when a person can’t borrow money to make payments on their debts?
Sorry but that is not obvious – the government issues new bonds every month – and those new bonds can be used to pay back SS – so if we must avoid new taxes on the rich, we can do it.
It is just not my preferred solution.
Please consider not caving prematurely on restoring a more reasonable level of taxation on the rich. Let’s start on a position of strength there.
I think the point is being missed here.
Try @ 4 minutes: and then at minimum expose yourselves to Lesson 6.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6HuzhMUHGM&playnext_from=TL&videos=gZShgzcdyVc
No, we’re just disagreeing. And that video is so simplistic that it borders on moronic.
I’ll keep an eye out for your brilliance, although you appear to have missed the simple point that eludes most everyone as they act as ambulance chasers while the slaughter is going on unimpeded. “Of course” smart people are so wrapped up in that self pampered ‘smartness’ they fail to notice the quintessential problem and instead, rant on the peripheries, as your little ‘insight’ @ 8 amply illustrates.
~~~Remain civil, please.~~~
sorry, the condescension was hard to swallow.
the brilliance of the series, that was met by Hmm with elitist dispensation, is precisely that it makes complex issues understandable to the public mind. E=mc2 (hmm..,so simplistic it borders on moronic)
~~~Then perhaps you could also turn off the condescension.~~~
Pot meet kettle.
And I thought the video was kind of crappy and simplistic, too.
The american public votes left and right in order to make a difference in their lives, the battle however is small vs. big, lords vs. servants (neo feudalism). So as long as we occupy ourselves with the horizontal axis, our lunch, and the lunch of our children is being eaten. The question then would be; how do you get that point across to your average voter, or a Kossack?
This man is trying to get across the reality that escapes far too many, imo.:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/members/19658/Damon%20Vrabel/
and here @ KeiserReprort starting at 14 minutes : http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/max-keiser-interviews-damon-vrabel-our-strabes/39415
Then why didn’t the government sell bonds to the market instead of raiding the SS trust fund?
Wait a minute. You don’t mean to say that the bonds will be repaid from taxes. We’re already over taxed. More taxes would kill jobs, and too many people are already unemployed. Our fragile economy couldn’t withstand it. No. No. No.
Nonsense – taxes do not kill jobs until they get well over 50% – check out the various studies. Indeed tax cuts do NOT generate jobs, once you are under 50% FIT rates, at even half the rate jobs are produced via Federal infrastructure spending.
That was meant to mock the deficit hawks’ usual bullshit about why we must cut benefits to the poor and middle class rather than raise taxes on the wealthy.
Per Ian Welch, in 1980 there was a class war and only the wealthy showed up. They won a major victory and are largely in control of the country. But they still resent the scraps (aka entitlements) are the poor and middle class are allowed under our current system. The Obama/Peterson Catfood Commission is the opening salvo an epic battle of class warfare in the United States. (Bush’s feeble effort at privatizing Social Security was merely a probing action.)
BTW, Helicopter Ben ran off a cool two trillion on his printing press to loan out to fat cat banks, whose names he refuses to disclose. Perhaps, he could run off a couple trillion more to pay off Social Security. Ya’ think?
I wonder where Mr. Baker would wind up in the Big vs. Small / Right vs. Left diagram which comes up @ 5 min,
although the whole of lesson 6 aught to be made mandatory watching for DKoss, and FDL memebers alike.
Watch it!
Renaissance 2.0: Lesson 6 (part 2 of 3) – Brightening the Future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6HuzhMUHGM
People have been really overreacting to disagreement here lately. If I may be so bold.
So, if they cut social security won’t that endanger the economy even more? Did they steal everything?
This post is good in so many ways. But there’s one way in which it’s disingenuous. Dean says:
What’s disingenuous is that Dean knows very well where the Government will get the money. In fact, he knows that the Government, doesn’t need to do anything “to get the money.” All it has to do is to use its constitutional and legislative authority to spend it by marking up whatever bank accounts it needs to markup. The Government, in fact, has no solvency risk in a fiat money system like ours, and it has no problem paying its social security or any of its other obligations for reasons I’ve explained here, here, here, and here, and in other places.
Dean knows all this, and I suspect he agrees with it too. But instead of writing about it, he’d rather act as if the deficit hawks are talking about a legitimate issue, the issue of Government solvency, which, however, just doesn’t apply to SS.
This is the kind of game that even if it doesn’t result in SS reductions, will result in Medicare losses, or losses in other valuable programs for no other reason than that even when the issue is on their side, progressives will always have to give up something of value to the claims of compromise and bipartisanship so long as they begin by agreeing that the notion that we have an impending solvency problem is a valid notion and that sooner or later we will have to balance the budget and reduce the public debt-to-GDP ratio because the Government can’t run deficits forever.
What Dean and the rest of us have to is to forget about defenses like this and tell Americans the truth, namely that we have no solvency problems, and that the whole effort of the deficit hawks is a monumental distraction from the real issues of the day such as full employment, enhanced Medicare for All, Wars we have no business fighting, reconstructing the energy foundations of our economy reconstructing our terrible education system, and all the rest.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the problem with that the fact that the US government doesn’t issue money, the private banks in the Federal Reserve do? Doesn’t that mean that the government has to pay interest to those banks for the use of those funds? Isn’t that why our money should be owned and issued by the Treasury Department as U.S. Government Notes or U.S. Treasury Notes and not Federal Reserve Notes?
Yes we pay interest! Where do we get the money to pay the interest? We just borrow that too. Where does this end? Some seem to think that it can go on forever.
We don’t have to borrow the money at all. the Federal Government is like the scorekeeper at a game. It neither has not doesn’t have points; but it can create and allocate as many points as necessary to the players according to the rules of the game. The points here are USD and the Government can create as much or as little USD as required to take care of its obligations. Again, it doesn’t need to borrow money, because it makes the money.
Congress could authorize Secretary of Treasury to issue what Title 31 calls “United States currency notes” (or their electronic equivalent) instead of Treasuries. US Notes are considered public debt but are not counted in the statutory debt limit (apparently there’s still $150 million or so still in circulation among collectors from when Lincoln and Kennedy issued “Greenbacks”). Alternately, Congress could order the Fed to buy Treasuries directly, that would also create interest-free money since the Fed refunds to Tsy its net profits anyway, but it would be counted under the statutory debt limit.
Of course, none of that is necessary if the President utilized the signioriage (e.g. profit from the creation of money) power that Congress has already delegated to his Secretary of Treasury:
(k) The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.
31 USC 5112(k)
If Congress passes a budget with a $1.4 trillion deficit, Geithner could order the minting of 14 platinum coins with a face value of $100 billion each (face value and metallic worth are unrelated… 1 oz gold coin has almost $1700 worth of medal but has a face value of $50). All coins are legal tender and are bought by the Federal Reserve at face value. The Fed marks up the US Mint Enterprise Fund by $1.4 trillion. After deducting the minting costs (err, $25,000 or so), the Secretary can sweep the remainder into Tsy’s miscellaneous receipts account at any time. No deficit, no interest, no statutory debt limit and no vote by Congress necessary. Curiously, even under the proposed Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, seigniorage income could be used freely to fund deficit spending. Unless and until Congress (and the state legislatures) go crazy and pass a BBA, I suppose the smart play is to go with the solution favored by Lincoln, Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt (though his 1907 efforts to issue them were thwarted)… US Notes.
It may sound sound shocking that the government can create coin money out of nothing (well, out of platinum) but as letsgetitdone points out above, the Fed does it every day for banks and no one complains. Its only when the government borrows back its own seigniorage power that people get their nose out of joint about “printing money”.
Thanks beowulf. Very nicely done.
Thanks, sorry for the typos (metal, not medal, etc). I should point out that the CBO estimates over the next decade that 3.2% of GDP ($5.4 trillion over 10 years) will go to debt service.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why no politician in either party has jumped on the interest-free money issue to capture that bundle before the other side does. For Democrats, that’s 5 times what the health care bill is spending, for Republicans, well that could an awful lot of tax cuts. I can’t figure out whether its due to ignorance or corruption.
Nope. When the Government spends it simultaneously creates money in the Non-Governments sector. For example, when it deposits an SS payment in a person’s account.
When it taxes it takes that money out of circulation in the non-Government sector.
Moreover, the Fed cannot itself create currency, even though it can create other forms of money. Only the Government can do that according to the Constitution. Finally, for all intents and purposes, the Fed is a Government agency. Any interest it collects from the Government paid on Government bonds it buys, it must return to the Treasury by law.
In fact Dean Baker recently advocated that:
Of course, this scenario is superfluous too, in that the Government can just spend money with issuing debt instruments since it doesn’t have to rely on loans to get the authority to spend.
I see you all been drinking the kool aid for far to long, so far be it for me to argue with you.
You people actually beleive the rich pay their fair share.
Someone like John McCain is getting Social Security, Military pension, Senate Salary, and all the benifits the fart can grab, and People say He is great American for sucking at out trough for all His life.
You evidently like supporting these rich people who would steal the bread from your mouths if they had the chance.
You like paying SS to crimials in jail, the CEO’s on Wall street, all those Bankers who probably stole either your life saving or your property value.
Keep up the good work and there will be no SS, Medicare, or even Welfare.
Because the rich won’t defend You, like You defend them.
As an Indigenous Person, in responding to this ‘issue’ of Social Security, it would take my writing a book in order to explain in considerable detail, as to why President Obama’s political aspirations for 2012 would crash and burn should he take the decision-making to default on the treasury bonds currently owned by the Social Security Fund.
Consequently, an internet post wouldn’t do sufficient justice for a long-winded explanation on my part.
However, from here in the Sonoran Desert, Obama has the first of three strikes against him, when it comes to my utilizing a sports analogy. He’s now working on his second strike, and that being immigration reform. As to the third strike, Jobs, will be well-noticed when the demographic trends are factored in by the Spanish-speaking voters, and which will be reflected all across America. A large portion of the approximately 170 million unemployed in the next 20 years, will be the Spanish-speaking voters, and which doesn’t bode well for Democratic aspirations. Thus, the Bull-crap is going to spread all across America’s face, and the Shinola shoe polish, won’t be able to hide the damage done by Democrats to Democrats.
And in a comparison and a contrast, the bond “default” will trump the Three Strikes Analogy. Moreover, Simpson will ‘bury’ Obama’s aspirations, politically speaking, and Obama and his Attic Cousin, Rahm, are simply too smart for their own good, and for failing to see the obvious.
Thus, there is considerable merit in “Telling the Truth and Shaming the Devil!”
Jaango
“Where will the government get the money to repay the bonds held by Social Security? It will probably get the money from the same place it gets the money to repay the bonds held by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and rich people like Peter Peterson.”
But yes – and from the same place that paid – and pays – for trillions of Bush tax cuts.
From the trust fund itself.
See, if we just have another Greenspan commission that “defers” more benefits until after death and raises the duration and level of FICA payments, the trust fund can remain untouched forever, and even be build up further against any possible future crisis. It is not enough to not pay back those bonds, it is necessary to add more bonds to the pile, for even more retirement security. Call it the National Trust Fund State. Those bonds shall never ber touched! Why, we might even call it a lockbox.
It is not enough to steal from the past, we also have to rob the future.
If the federal government can default on its SS debt holdings, what is next? The Chinese debt holdings, Fannie and Freddie, all others who hold T-Bills. And what of the federally guaranteed private debt at the big banks and other entities? Surely they all must be next.
When the so called bond vigilantes wake up and realize that a default of one class of debt makes it easier to default on other classes of debt, you can bet that they will go wild.
IMHO, there’s no way they are going to default, and the deficit hawks that perfectly well. Their insinuations and claims that “the money is gone, already spent” is a harassment tactic intended to create confusion in the public and the press.