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President Obama is meeting with progressive groups today, and then CEOs tomorrow, so they can all get on the same page as him about the Fiscal Cliff and, perhaps, his Grand Bargain. Someone at one of these meetings needs to play this clip for him, of the last ‘transformative President’ who made a Social Security deal that not only accommodated the baby boomer bulge but also ensured the system’s viability through 2035.
After playing this for Obama, he needs to be told the simplest way to reform, repair, and re-fund Social Security: Raise the Damn Cap. If the cap on earnings is removed, and if all income including carried interest income is payroll-taxed for Social Security, the system is solidly funded in perpetuity. Everyone knows this but it is never on the list of policy prescriptions discussed in The Village.
But — before getting into logical and straightforward policy propositions that have the advantage of taking a little bit more from the people who got us into the current Jobs Crisis — the president needs to watch his favorite transformative president explain that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.
Nothing.
h/t Digby
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Possibly our most evil and clueless president, but the cult of admiration around him is still very strong in The Village, where they named their airport for him while he was still alive. So it’s nice to find him saying something not nonsensical about a topic the corporatists have kept alive all this time: taking our earned retirement away from us.
As nutty as Reagan seemed at the time, he seems absolutely sane by today’s standards. The jerks in Washington DC are truly salivating over the prospect of taking our retirement away completely, it seems. No amount of reason will reach them, because it’s not about fiscal responsibility or “saving” Social Security, but is about alpha-male behavior. What good is power if it is not wielded? They do this because they want to wield power over others, and taking away retirement security is an easy way to do that while stealing trillions in the process.
Reagan could never, ever be nominated by the current GOP.
I’d like to see someone run for their nomination, though, proposing exactly his platform and record. Might be fun to watch all their idiots fall into outrage and attack mode about Ronnie’s own eight-year tenure.
Unfortunately when Obama talks about Reagan and SS, invoking the bargain Tip O’Neill helped negotiate, he’s referring to the 1983 changes which increased the payroll tax rate, raised the retirement age, and decreased benefits, resulting in a 19% decrease in benefits.
Thanks for the video. A good reference to have.
Nice one, Teddy.
Which gives us the chance to respond: “Hey, we fixed this already!”
Thank you! It’s Digby’s catch, actually.
Teddy Teddy Teddy, please this is way to simple and you know where we on Main Street are really headed. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel not even a train to run us down. How Sad my friend.
Nice post, Teddy, but Obama doesn’t have to give a fuck anymore. He’s on the path to Bill Clinton riches: a hundred million dollars for selling out the Democratic base.
However, there are plenty of Democratic politicians in Congress who do plan to run again.
Our job is to make them understand they have no chance if they vote against (yet again).
And our hurdle for this job is the large number of people who would rather chant about “firebaggers”, “emo-proggies”, and “ideological purists”, while they support Democratic corporatists who cynically count on them doing that very thing.
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It just needs some “tweaking.”
Normally I’m against using Republican arguments to support liberal positions, but Reagan might be one of the few people Obama would listen to. Of course, Reagan also thought torturers should be prosecuted, and how much good did that do?
tweeted and recommended with thanks teddy — can’t wait to show that clip to some of my relatives…
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Actually, more recently, Obama isn’t defending changes to SS on the basis of its contribution to the deficit.
He’s “strengthening” it for future generations. So he wouldn’t see any contradiction with Ronnie Raygun.
The NYT has a story that the Pres already gave up cuts on entitlements during the debt deal negotiations and it is unlikely he will go back on that bc ” that’s the way negotiations work”. That sounds right. So now we just need to know how much. The Times has some numbers that don’t look good.
When I first began reading this part of your post, I honestly thought you were referring to Obama.
We ‘fixed’ it on the backs of the bottom 80% back in ’83. There is no intention now to do any different. Those changes make the retirement age too high for manual workers, and they make SS benefits too low for most of the bottom 80%. If we completely remove the cap — a simple, easy to understand, and fair solution — we can reverse both of those anti-the-rest-of-us changes.
me too