Tag Archives: Social Security

Do Unto Them What They Want To Do Unto You

January 2, 2013

Let’s Apply The chained-CPI concept of Raising Revenue to How We Pay Our Government Officials

Those least able are being asked to make a greater sacrifice than others who are able

Some of you who have been keeping up with budget talks, especially the so-called “fiscal cliff” arguments, may be aware of one of the measures being discussed to reduce the deficit. It’s called the chained-CPI method of figuring cost of living raises (COLA) for, among other things, people who receive benefits from social safety net programs

Sophie Quinton’s article in the National Journal sums up nicely what the chained CPI is.

Here’s how the new metric would save money: Social Security, federal pensions, and military and veterans’ benefits are indexed to rise each year with inflation; so are tax brackets, exemptions, deductions, and credits. But experts say the consumer price index the government currently uses overstates how rising prices affect household spending.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has come up with a more accurate measure, which accounts for consumers’ tendency to switch to cheaper categories of products when prices rise. Rather than looking at a fixed set of goods—as the standard formula does—the new measure looks at how the set of goods changes, and then “chains” two consecutive months of consumption data together.

The chained CPI rises a little more slowly than the current measure. So if the chained CPI were used to calculate cost-of-living increases, it would mean smaller increases to Social Security checks each year. If the chained CPI were applied to the tax code, it would move taxpayers into higher tax brackets faster. SOURCE

There are at least ten things wrong with this method as Daniel Marans explains over at FDL news and they all impact the most vulnerable segments of our population, especially the elders on fixed incomes. I know we are all expected to contribute our fair share to lowering the deficit, but as Lambert Strether notes, this is hardly a “fair share” for some of us.

A “sacrifice” where some give up luxuries and others give up necessities is in no way “shared.” A marginal sacrifice for the rich is not commensurate to core sacrifices for the rest of us. But the tropes of official Washington carefully brush this reality away. SOURCE

Let’s not forget either that it was the spending of drunken sailors in the GOP under Bush/Cheney, along with conservative Democrats that started putting us in the fiscal hole. Spending that was aimed at benefitting wealthy corporations rather than those now being asked to saddle this undue burden on their source of income. Now is not the time to hit the poorest amongst us with benefit cuts and especially on the backs of those Social Security beneficiaries whose source of benefits DO NOT contribute to the deficit. Even the conservative’s darling, Ronald Reagan, pointed this out when he was President.

As much as those who continually and falsely shriek that the deficit is the biggest threat to our children’s future, there are ulterior motives behind this bogus pronouncement as Paul Krugman and others have duly noted:

Contrary to the way it’s often portrayed, the looming prospect of spending cuts and tax increases isn’t a fiscal crisis. It is, instead, a political crisis brought on by the G.O.P.’s attempt to take the economy hostage. And just to be clear, the danger for next year is not that the deficit will be too large but that it will be too small, and hence plunge America back into recession. SOURCE

The point of all this being that many of those who live off of our taxes rather handsomely seem too eager to reduce certain benefits that impact the poorest amongst us while leaving other areas alone, like the Defense budget. Why voters keep sending some of these yokels back to Washington is the height of foolishness but that seems to be where we are at these days. Voters appear ready to “throw the bums out” with the exception of their bum.

But most people would be in agreement I think if we started measuring “the bums” income by their performance and adjusting it accordingly. Clearly our representatives would be inclined to perform their duties more fully if the people had a direct means of rating their performance and legislation was in place that allowed the IRS to deduct their wages based on their performance. Likewise, their income would be raised based on how their constituents felt they were benefitting them as a whole.

MAYBE WE NEED TO CHANGE THIS?

Once a year people could vote on-line or by mail, registering their opinions on how effective they felt their representatives were performing. A rating system on a scale of 1-10 could be devised and unless they scored anything better than a 6, their pay would either remain unchanged for scores of 4-6, and lowered incrementally with scores lower than 4. The voters would be given the means to make their selections either on-line or by mail. At the end of each year, when employers are handing out W-2′s, attached would be a form that scored their congressperson’s performance along with a pre-paid postage envelope.

Too many people never make it to the polls on election day because they feel their vote never makes an impact. To a certain degree they are right. But having this direct means of effecting their representative’s wages with very little effort or expense on their part would see many of these people coming out of the wood work to express their views.

There of course would be those political blocs trying to influence their assessments similar to what we already have in the form of non-profit entities that we get regularly inundated with from TV and radio ads, postal mailings, e-mails and social network sources. The concern here is not unlike the one we currently face where the Citizens United court decision that allows unhealthy amounts of money to overwhelm the means by which we get information from.

We may just have to trust that the electorate will make the call that best serves their needs. Where there are those who may not like certain specifics on how their congressperson votes but are ideologically linked to them that prevents them from voting them out of office, they may be more inclined to use this more precise method of conveying their wishes while still supporting them in their elective status.

It’s time to reverse the worry element, where congressional and state legislative leaders need to lose sleep about their source of income being reduced rather than those of us they are supposed to fairly represent. Polls routinely show strong support for social safety net programs, especially regarding Social Security benefits. If this support gets expressed in how the income of our state and national representatives will be determined we just might find that the concept of democracy, that was intended when this union was formed over 225 years ago, will once again have its proper place in how we are governed.

BONUS: Here’s a little quiz that asks, How much do you know about the ‘fiscal cliff’?

Ruth Marcus: Let the Elderly Just Eat (Cheaper) Cake!

Posted by lbwoodgate in Budget Crisis, Medicare/Medicaid, seniors/aging Tags: balancing budget on backs of elderly and poor, benefit cuts in social programs, chained CPI, congressional performance, Consumer price index, cuts to Medicare/Medicaid, cuts to Social Security, deficit issues, Paul Krugman, safety net cuts, Social Security

9 comments

Can I Sell You Some Cheap Ocean Front Property in Yuma?

October 15, 2012

Hey young people! A word of caution for those taking the bait being offered by the Romney/Ryan plan to Privatize Social Security & Medicare

After being laid off in the fall of 2009 and concluding that at age 61 I was not going to get rehired in the severe recession competing with 5 other applicants, I decided instead to take the money in my 401k I had earned over the last 18 years, pay off all of our bills except the mortgage, roll the remainder into an IRA and go into to semi-retirement. I figured I could find some part-time work that would allow me to have a little spending money and within a couple of months I would be eligible to collect early Social Security benefits. I’m thankful my wife still has what seems to be a secure job as a registered nurse for the local school district because with both of us out of work this could have gone south real quick. Luckily too, both of our adult children are out on their own and are doing relatively well for the time being. It wasn’t what we planned for our lives but then things seldom work out the way you want.

We were more fortunate than a lot of people who found themselves unemployed in this Great Recession. I know, I know. The recession is actually over and we’re waiting for the job situation to recover. Wall Street is making record profits but Main Street has yet to fully recover. We could have been one of those poor souls that lost their home and health care coverage along with their jobs. But a monthly stipend from my IRA and $1500 a month in Social Security benefits along with my wife’s salary allows us to maintain the resources we need to remain solvent. Now if our luck and what savings we have will only last until we die.

Until earlier this year I was able to afford health insurance by adding myself to my wife’s benefit plan. But that changed when the school district replaced the insurance provider to keep costs down after state funding started drying up from the budget planning failures of Texas state legislators. The deficit the state faced last year “was created by a deal to lower property taxes while transforming the state’s business tax. It has never generated as much money as expected.”

When the new policy raised premiums and deductibles while lowering benefits, it became a financial impracticality to pay nearly $400 a month to keep me on it. This was my mothly premium but the new policy didn’t cover expenses until I cleared a $3000 deductible. I have instead been tucking a large part of that money into a separate account and using it sparingly until I am eligible for Medicare late next year. We keep our fingers crossed that a catastrophic health crisis doesn’t occur before then.

But I digress. The point I want to make here is to alert Americans, especially those in their twenties, thirties and forties, to view with suspicion the Romney/Ryan plan to privatize Social Security and make Medicare a voucher system. Despite Paul Ryan’s claim as being “indisputable fact” that bankruptcy for both of these safety net issues are inevitable, evidence by more rigorous authorities say nothing could be further from the truth. According to information put out by The Progress Report

[T]he possibility of Medicare going bankrupt is — and historically has been — greatly exaggerated. In fact, if no changes are made, Medicare would still be able to meet 88 percent of its obligations in 2085. Social Security is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter. There is also an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits.

What is an indisputable fact is that these programs that were instituted to keep more people out of poverty and serve as a means of last resort for people who fall between the cracks in our economy have been attacked by wealthy financial interests since their inception. In his book, The People’s Pension, Eric Laursen has detailed how specific politicians, lobbyists, and groups “have waged a steady battle to discredit and undermine” Social Security. They have aggressively pushed proposals to cut, privatize or dramatically transform” this trust fund for elder citizens.

Wall Street has been trying to get their hands on the billions in the Social Security trust funds for years. They assure us that putting your money into the stock market will see greater returns than what you’ll see after decades of payroll deductions applied to the government-managed system that has reliably paid benefits for more than 75 years. In his article, The Solvency of Social Security, Stephen J. Foster, Jr. points out what should be an obvious fact even to the casual observer.

Wall Street is known for gambling with other people’s money which has led to the Great Depression in the past and the 2008 recession. If you have a 401(k), you have experienced firsthand what can happen to your retirement portfolio when it is entrusted to Wall Street. People with IRA’s, 401(k)’s and other types of retirement accounts watched helplessly their savings disappear as the stock market took a historic tumble.

After clearing most of my debt and depositing the remaining $140,000 from my 401k into my new IRA on January 1st, 2010, the DOW was sitting at 10,428.04. Last Friday it closed out the week at 13,328.85, which was down 281 points from what it started at the beginning of the week. The DOW has gained just over 2900 points since I opened that IRA. My investments were primarily low risk investments. However, when things really started looking bad after Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling in 2011 and the country’s credit rating was lowered as a consequence of this dysfunctional action, I shifted everything into the safer areas of bonds and money markets.

We all know the stock market is volatile and that there will be ups and downs but even with my safe investments that were being handled by a professional money management agency I have lost roughly 4% of my overall investments into the stock market from the time I opened my IRA account. Clearly Wall Street has done well while my resources are losing ground.

A 4% loss over three years isn’t much when you are just beginning your life and putting some away in your twenties or thirties but for those of us who are at retirement age or getting close to it such losses hurt, especially as your health deteriorates from age and the costs of health care and insurance increase faster than the rate of inflation.

Ups and owns in the stock market are expected but over a 40-50 year period you can realize significant gains. But when our economy takes serious hits like it did in 2000 and 2008 people like myself watched their 401k’s take tremendous losses. My 401k lost a third of its value in each recession. I never did fully recapture those losses before I was laid off in 2009.

I worked 18 years building up a retirement fund and under normal circumstances would have accumulated about $350,000 at the rate I was going. Instead, because of two economic recessions within 8 years of each other where the DOW lost more than half of its value nine months before I was let go, I wound up with less than half of that. How much more would I and others have lost if the economic crisis reached Great Depression levels? Perhaps all of it.

The only people who really do well in the stock market are very wealthy people who can afford to take the losses that occur when hard times hit. The average investor is likely to suffer irreparable economic consequences at the most vulnerable times in their life as an aged retiree. Stephen J. Foster rightfully points out that once the wealthy financiers get their hands on your money they offer no guarantee that you will come out ahead. In fact, in rough times when markets are down, as your investments dwindle they lose very little because they are using your money to gamble with.

People like Romney and Ryan like to tout the notion that people can do better when they manage their own money but they would be hard-pressed to find evidence of that with most people who work all their lives. Unless wages allow enough to stick aside most people live from paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. And we all know wages for 95% of wager earners have not kept pace with the top 5% over the last 30 years.

If the payroll deductions for Social Security and Medicare were eliminated low and middle-income families would indeed have a little bit more money in their pockets but it wouldn’t necessarily go into a savings or a retirement plan in an economy where prices are rising faster than most people’s wages can keep up with. As much as it may hurt during those times when families are struggling to provide basic essentials for themselves, without the deductions going toward future social security benefits and health care coverage, adult children would suffer even worse, especially during economic hard times, when faced with caring for their aging parents down the road.

So I would ask all those young people who Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are appealing to – are you willing to risk this small percentage of your earnings each payday in the uncertainty of a volatile market or put it towards a financially secure, long-term investment? If you opt for those markets, how much time and energy do you think you will have to make sure your investments are as sound as they can be? When even professionals fail to read the tea leaves in the markets each day, how much better will those of us with an untrained eye do making such decisions?

When asked in a recent interview “Why should younger people of lower- and middle-incomes be especially concerned about Social Security?” Eric Laursen conveyed the following:

So many of their traditional sources of retirement income are eroding. Millions of younger workers will not be able to rely on employer-based pensions or from sales of their homes. Also, the stock and bond markets, which were supposed to be a vast new source of wealth through 401(k)s and IRAs, are treacherous. Health insurance costs and student loan payments eat away at what savings they’ve managed to acquire. Employment itself is a lot more volatile. Social Security is the one thing they have that is guaranteed. SOURCE

It’s a pipe dream to believe that the volatile stock market offers more security for the average working American than a secure fund backed up by the full faith and creditof the U.S. Treasury. One that wealthy investors want you to believe in order to increase their own capital wealth. By itself it will not meet all the creature comforts many people are used to but for an average worker, Social Security replaces about 40 percent of annual pre-retirement earnings, constituting about two-thirds of income for the average older beneficiary. Even more revealing is the fact that Social Security amounts to 90 percent or more of the income for one-third of seniors.

Making the government look like a bogey-man on this issue is part of a deception to extract even more of the remaining wealth from the 98% so when they lose their life savings and have to fall back on vital government assistance programs, they can be accused by people like Romney of being “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” rather than accepting responsibility for the failure to be honest with the American people about the risks involved with privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security is Under a Fierce Attack From Wall Street

Top Ten Lies About Social Security

The great Social Security lie

Historical Background and Development of Social Security

Posted by lbwoodgate in Medicare/Medicaid, Society and Politics Tags: 401(k), future of social security and medicare, Individual Retirement Account, Medicare, Paul Ryan, privatizing social security and medicare, Romney's 47%, social safety nets threatened, Social Security, Wall Street

9 comments

Anything But That Which Matters

June 15, 2012

How much confidence does a political Party exude when they only have a bumper sticker slogan for dealing with the complex issues we face as a nation?

The GOP hype that continues to over promise and under delivers

As we approach the November elections were are faced with selecting a candidate from one of two Parties that seem more bent on propping up wealthy interests than with promoting an environment that focuses on fundamental fairness for all people. Clearly the GOP is more cast in this mold than Democrats and this seems evident in their approach in their efforts to win come November. We seem to hear less touting of their own candidate and his policies than we do of their negative campaigning against President Obama. Their hollow message is summed up in three words and plastered on bumper stickers and websites across this nation – “Anyone But Obama”.

This is a scheme that offers nothing more than a return to the status quo we bled from under George Bush and Republican majorities in the legislative branches. Restoring political power to a Republican Party that has been hijacked by extremists could easily result in a return, perhaps in spades, to policies that created our worst economic nightmare since the Great Depression nearly 85 years ago.

The extreme view they hold that all government is bad and only free markets can save us from ourselves is one that created the environment that allowed Wall Street to plunder the savings and investments of millions of people and ultimately causing the collapse of the economy. The GOP and Mitt Romney have no plans to reduce health care costs in this country or any intention of keeping risky speculative financial interests from engaging in ventures that prompted bailouts back in 2008. What they do have a plan for is to squeeze the middle class and the poor to pay more and more of the taxes that focus more on subsidizing private capital interests, leaving more for their profits to pay themselves and their stockholders. This is a condition that has steadily increased the income gap in this country over the last 30 years.

Between 1979 and 2007, average after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation — an increase in income of $973,100 per household — compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household) for the middle fifth of households and 16 percent ($2,400 per household) for the bottom fifth

Mitt Romney has campaigned on his experience as a businessman, claiming he knows how to create jobs. Yet this country needs someone with more than mere business experience. Businesses focus on their bottom line and the interests of a few - their shareholders. Many like Romney also hold to the view that trickle down economics, that allows the rich to get richer, will pass on some of this wealth in the form of more jobs, better wages or a combination of both. Yet those Republicans who have won office lately have killed many pubic sector jobs that contributed to the economy and built up a strong middle class while showing little gains in private sector jobs.

People want to blame the President or praise him when the job reports come in each month but job creation in this country doesn’t rest solely at the feet of the federal government. How effective have GOP governors and legislatures been in creating sufficient jobs? Where some states have shown job increases they are too often of the quality that pays lower wages and has fewer benefits than in times past. Republicans reward so-called job creators by supporting policies that have seen many employers ship their industries to foreign job markets where people work for wages that barely meet subsistence levels for them.

” …one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts,evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.” - It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J.Ornstein

The GOP has also been more willing to allow wealthy business interests to conceal their tax revenue in off-shore accounts and both Parties continue to create loopholes in our tax system that allow some of the wealthiest people in this country to pay less income tax than wages earners who make under $100,000 annually. Tax reform may be talked about a lot but where the rubber meets the road there are no signs of tread marks anywhere to be found. It’s one of those issues that keeps getting kicked down the road.

The Democrats have done their share of inaction too and the President has not kept all of his promises but these pale in comparison to a Republican Party that is bent on establishing a wealthy oligarchy in this country who continue to privatize the public commons and whittle away at the vital programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid until only for-profit interests have complete control of all the natural and monetary wealth in this country. Instead of demurely responding to the Republicans, the Democrats need to relocate their FDR, Truman and JFK roots and proudly support those programs that built up the greatest middle class in modern times.

Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.

Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth. E.J. Dionne, Washington Post

We have serious issues with people going without basic medical care, children who experience starvation, elderly having to choose between needed medications and paying the rent or utility bill each month and an environment that threatens us all as toxic pollutants continue to contaminate the air we breathe and the water we drink. In the meantime the GOP has no problem finding money to subsidize oil companies who have had record profits, protect health insurers who fail to cover anyone with a pre-existing condition or who use less of your premium dollar to pay for services, and defend financial institutions “too big to fail” who continue to devise products that risk throwing the economy back into a tailspin and losing what gains we have made to recapture jobs and the housing market.

The republican form of government that was handed us by the framers of the constitution two and half centuries ago is ours to keep as Franklin suggested, if we are willing to fight for it. lf we don’t, the special moneyed interests will. These hounds are already at your doors dressed up as patriots screeching about “taking our country back”. But are they talking about a time when we emerged from a Great Depression and a World War where there was a large and vibrant middle class? Or do they refer to the one they nostalgically pine for in pre-Civil War days when only white male property owners were allowed to vote and control the mechanisms by which we are governed?

Posted by lbwoodgate in 2012 Presidential Elections Tags: Barack Obama, corporate-friendly GOP, Democrat, extremists policies in GOP, GOP, Mitt Romney, partisan politics, Republican, Social Security, status quo policies of GOP for 2012, taking our country back, uncompromising Republicans/TeaParty

4 comments

Tell Congress to Fix Social Security – NOW

May 23, 2012

Social Security continues to be under attack from private interests who want to use your SSI payroll contributions and risk them in speculative ventures that may or may not succeed. For most Americans, gambling with their retirement savings can have serious consequences at a time when financial security is most vulnerable.

The anti-government crowd headed by anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist wants to dissemble a secure retirement program and have you put your faith in a system that is often quite similar to casino gambling. You could walk away comfortably rich or you could walk away with nothing but the clothes on your back. To encourage this they are using the nation’s deficit structure as a fear-mongering tool to intimidate poorly informed Americans and direct them to make a choice that will assuredly benefit them and enhance their wealth at even greater levels while making no guarantees how your results will end up. As an added measure to persuade you, they would argue that Social Security is on the threshold of bankruptcy. The truth is quite different but there are issues with this system that can be easily fixed if only wealthy interests would quit creating obstacles to make such improvements

The hue and cry from the extreme right within the GOP is that public sector spending needs to be cut back to reduce the deficit. This itself is a political smokescreen that appeals to that austerity crowd who want continued cuts in social welfare programs while leaving a bloated defense budget untouched, along with leaving the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% in place.

The GOP has its sights on changing Social Security as we know it to correct it’s deficiencies while eliminating its impact on the deficit, or so they claim. But does Social Security dramatically affect the deficit? The CATO institute, a Libertarian think tank founded by billionaires Charles and David Koch, thinks it does. They have put some numbers together to support their contention. But there are equally creditable organizations who show a different story and point to the Bush tax cuts and the two wars in the mideast having the biggest affect on our growing budget. Dean Baker with the Center for Economic and Policy Research also points out something missing in the deficit hawk’s argument.

Under the law, Social Security is financed by a designated tax, the 12.4 percent payroll that workers pay on their first $107,000 of income each year. The money raised through this tax is used to pay benefits. Any surplus is used to buy U.S. government bonds. All funding for the program comes either from this tax or from the bonds held by the program’s trust fund. (The Social Security system is also credited with a portion of the income tax paid on Social Security benefits.)

Social Security is prohibited from spending any money beyond what it has in its trust fund. This means that it cannot lawfully contribute to the federal budget deficit, since every penny that it pays out must have come from taxes raised through the program or the interest garnered from the bonds held by the trust fund. SOURCE

What seems clear to a layman like myself is that projecting the future for a program so large as Social Security is not any easy task and we are dependent on the experts to give us an honest assessment of this important retirement resource for millions of Americans. We need honest, objective analyses that utilizes all data and not studies subjected to ideological dogma. Creating choices that fail to take in all considerations does a disservice to a public that is forced to trust those who are supposed to have the aptitude for such things. I like to gamble as much as most people do but when it comes to a retirement fund needed to meet my needs in old age, I don’t want to wake up one morning like many did in 2008 to find they lost most of their savings to a system that gambled on unsure bets.

What’s at stake here is a system that has served this country well for 75 years keeping many people from falling below poverty levels. It serves as a back up for those people who worked hard all of their life and still were unable to put enough away on their own to sustain them through old age. Raising a family with costly health care needs and equally costly education expenses makes the ability to set enough aside with wages that have been shrinking for several decades difficult if not impossible for some. Since the cost of living doesn’t ever really go down it is important that wages keep pace with the cost of goods and services.

The record shows that this hasn’t happened for the large majority of working families in this country. Since the 1980’s wages have been stagnant in comparison to wages for the top 1% of wage earners while the costs of goods and services continue to rise. As a result, pensions have been diminished and in a lot of cases lately, eliminated as businesses find ways to keep their profits on track. Income revenue for most Americans no longer allows people to save as they once did.

Social Security thus becomes essential in keeping many people from starving and succumbing to illnesses easier from lack of adequate health care once they lose their ability to work. It’s a system that a humane society put in place following the Great Depression of 1929 and has saved millions of lives. Each month a portion of one’s paycheck – 6.2% – is deducted and matched by their employer to pay in to the Social Security trust fund. Until 2010 there has been a surplus from this source to pay benefits for retirees who claim these benefits in old age. The economic disaster that occurred at the beginning of 2008, resulting from excessive risky investments by banks too big to fail sent the economy into a nosedive, creating massive jobs losses.

These job losses took with them the payroll deductions that are used to pay benefits to SSI beneficiaries causing the shortfall in 2010. But many of those years collecting revenue had surpluses. This money was set aside by purchasing U.S. treasury notes to cover Social Security in times when intakes didn’t match outputs. To the hoot and holler of many this most recent shortfall means doom for the system. It’s a scare tactic that’s been around almost since the inception of the program back in 1936.

Wealthy financial corporate interests in this country have been jealous of the fact that so much money has alluded their grasps all these years and have attempted to squeeze the life from this program so that they can access such funds for their own self-interests. And though there is something to be said for the larger returns many might see over the years by investing this money in private financial markets, there is also much evidence to weigh that shows how such a move could actually hurt more people than it helps.

“You can trust me with your retirement funds”

Social Security sets a specific amount aside and let’s simple interest enable it. It is not put into risky investments that may show high returns one year but then go belly up the next year. Organizations like the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation and wealthy individuals like Peter Peterson who want to privatize Social Security like to point out that “despite recent declines in the stock market, a worker who had invested privately over the past 40 years … would retire with more income than if they relied on Social Security.” What is concealed here however is that if you retired in January 2008 you would have lost half of that retirement in just a few short months as a result of the stock market crash that saw the Dow Jones go from an all time high of 14,100 on October 9th, 2007 to hit a a low of 6,547.05, a 53.78% loss over a period less than year and one that had not been seen since November 25th 1996. Social Security recipients on the other hand saw no change in their benefits.

Herein lies the devil within the details. Those who seek to end Social Security as we know it do so NOT because it’s an unworkable system but because it is so effective and they are losing out on money that their capital ventures would create for them. But under this Superman Cape of “free markets” is the reality that the values of your stock are subject to the volatility of the markets and if they collapse as they did in 2001-02 and 2008 at the time you decide to retire, then your net worth may in fact be much less than someone who is collecting social security. They don’t call it Social “SECURITY” for nothing.

Now, are there problems that could prevent benefits from continuing as they have for 75 years, including COLA increases each year? With a poor economy, a continuing high war debt, large numbers from the baby boom generation retiring and revenue cuts from lower tax rates, of course there is. The fact that the government decreased the amount of the payroll tax by 2% in 2011 to help struggling income earners hasn’t helped either.

But killing this system as we know it and turning it over to private venture capitalists and their cronies in those banks too big to fail is a gamble that will ultimately hurt many low and middle-income families whose wages will never reflect what their parent’s did in the 1950′s, 60’s and 70’s. Unless we address the serious issue of income disparity in this country, the belief that the free markets prop us up in our retirement years is as unlikely as it is to believe that homeownership is more of a reality now than it was a generation ago. Both possibilities have suffered at the hands of people whose self-interests are focused on profits – not your long term needs.

Congress can fix Social Security in one of two ways long before it reaches a state where full benefits have to be cut back in 2036.

Eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000, or
Reinstate the Bush tax cut on the top 2% of American income earners.

Either one of these quick fixes would eliminate any real or imagined threat to Social Security. As for the deficit – President Obama has put forth a budget that would reduce annual deficits, “through his proposals to raise $1.5 trillion over 10 years mostly from the wealthy but also from closing some corporate tax breaks, chiefly for oil and gas companies.”

There is plenty of room to find resources necessary to reduce the deficit without touching the Social Security trust fund, especially during these economic hard times. By making deficit reduction the focal point of their 2012 campaign on the backs of the elderly and dependent children while job losses remain high, the Republican Party has informed low and middle-income retirees and wage earners who their real constituency is.

RESOURCES:

Experts: Contrary to Mainstream Myth, ‘Social Security is Strong’ and Could Be Made Stronger

Breaking the Social Security Glass Ceiling: A Proposal to Modernize Women’s Benefits

Posted by lbwoodgate in Climate Science/Global Warming, Social Discourse Tags: gambling with social security, Government budget deficit, privatizing social security, retirement security, Social Security, social security benefits

38 comments

One Conservative at Least is Hearing the Complaints Coming From the OWS Protests.

November 16, 2011

“From tax write-offs for gambling losses, vacation homes, and luxury yachts to subsidies for their ranches and estates, the government is subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Multi-millionaires are even receiving government checks for not working. This welfare for the well-off – costing billions of dollars a year – is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate, many who are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and IOUs to be paid off by future generations.”

It might come as shock to those on the right who read this that these are not the ramblings of an anti-Capitalist, left-leaning Democrat. They come from a report recently released from the office of ultra-conservative Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. Coburn states in his report entitled Subsidies of the Rich and Famous, that as “families across the country [are] struggling to make ends meet during these economically trying times, many are left with few options so they are turning to the government – some very reluctantly – for assistance.” Some may recall that it was Coburn who single handedly blocked the efforts of the full Senate in 2010 to extend unemployment benefits to the millions of people who had lost their jobs as a result of the financial collapse of the free-market.

Coburn is also part of the Republican bloc in the Senate where minority leader Mitch McConnell has stated that the “single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Thus, every effort where the Obama administration has attempted to alleviate the plight of “families across the country struggling to make ends meet”, has been blocked by Senator Coburn and the rest of the GOP.

Coburn’s report is not testament to any shift in political views regarding government aid. He still lamely claims that taxing the rich because they “are getting too much of the economic pie … is no different than taking a dollar from one pocket and putting it into another in the same pair of pants.” That would only be true if the wearer of those pants was also a millionaire. Entitlement programs and aid grants that provide a safety net for the poor and unemployed during tough economic times is hardly money that goes to people who really don’t need it.

But unlike many of his Republican/Tea party colleagues, Coburn appears to have seen the writing on the wall from the ever growing and popular Occupy Wall Street movement that has brought home the reality of the vast income disparity between the wealthy 1% in this country and everyone else.

His report is a worthy attempt to show that “welfare for the well-off – costing billions of dollars a year – is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate, many who are working two jobs just to make ends meet, and IOUs to be paid off by future generations.” His report aptly demonstrates that billions have been going to millionaires over the last decade for things like tax write offs in the form of farm subsidies to people who neither actively work or even live on a farm to some 60,000 wealthy individuals who have filed for Medicare Part B with modified adjusted gross incomes of $1,000,000 or more.

He also makes a great case for means testing of all entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Unemployment benefits. In 2009 over 38,000 people with adjusted gross incomes of $1 million or more, collected $1,142,204,000 in Social Security benefits, an annual average of $30,780 for each recipient. Though that’s a wapping amount for most income earners it is only about 3% of those who made $1 million each year and about 0.30% for those who made over $10 million.

Granted, even some millionaires paid into the social security trust fund during their lifetime as wage earners. But with high unemployment rates today where there are fewer workers available to contribute their share through payroll taxes and the aging baby boom generation starting to retire, the strain on the trust fund has created a deficit in receipts for the first time in nearly 30 years. The system is capable of paying 100% of benefits until 2036 but if we don’t make necessary adjustment it will only be able to pay 75% of benefits after that. Means testing would reduce the payout to millionaires and even eliminate benefits for some, providing needed revenue for those wage earners who depend on Social Security benefits as their sole source of retirement funds. “Returning the purpose of the program to a need-based service instead of one available universally may help keep Social Security solvent for future generations”, says Coburn

Medicare/Medicaid is in even worst shape than Social Security because of the increase in high health care cost and fraud abuses by health care providers. For millionaires to apply for this entitlement program when their resources allows them buy some of the best health care coverage that the private sector offers is ludicrous. According to Forbes reporter Janet Novack last month, a “couple on Medicare with a $428,000 AGI will benefit from a 13 percent decrease in their Part B premium payments. At the same time, the majority of Medicare Part B participants who pay the lowest premiums will see their monthly premiums increase slightly, offsetting the first cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) increase recipients have seen in about 3 years.”

To deplete these vital resources for low income and handicapped individuals in order to prevent a millionaire’s resources from diminishing is ludicrous. How many of these very wealthy people have referred to Medicaid/Medicare as a “socialist” program that is depleting tax payers of their hard-earned wages?

Fraud is apparently rampant within the Unemployment Insurance (UI) Program too. This entitlement program that also receives contributions from wage earners through their payroll taxes as well as employer contributions, serves to alleviate the loss of wages when workers have been laid off for reasons other than poor performance. Without these benefits many families would be strapped to pay for food and rent until they can find other work. Yet Coburn’s report showed there were those collecting unemployment benefits who were “also earning millions of dollars in the same year. In 2009, the Internal Revenue Service reported that 2,362 millionaires collected a total of $20,799,000 in UI. Eighteen individuals reporting an adjusted gross income of $10,000,000 or more also received $12,333 on average in UI in 2009, for a total of $222,000.”

Angela Wade, who has also reported on this at her Blue States blog has broken the benefits down cited in Coburn’s study to show just how much revenue is being lost for essential social programs to people who are far from being in need.

$18.15 million in child care tax credits

$74 million in unemployment checks

$89 million for preservation of ranches and estates

$316 million in farm subsidies

$608 million in business entertainment deductions

$9 billion in retirement checks

$21 billion in gambling losses

$28 billion in mortgage breaks for mansions, vacation homes and yachts

Though it is encouraging to see Senator Coburn present such a detailed outline of the waste of needed government revenue going to people within the top 2% of income earners in this country, it will be interesting to see if this just a head jerk to feign concern about the need to correct such abuses that occur through federal subsidies and policies that neglect to prevent unethical practices by those in the top tier income groups.

His conservative creds are still locked into the notion that “government policies intended to mainstream wealth redistribution are undermining these principles” that expects “everyone to contribute and to demonstrate personal responsibility”. Yet the expectations one sees coming from this study suggests that Coburn is not in the same camp with other Republicans who see the removal of existing tax subsidies as onerous “tax cuts”.

Coburn has boasted that this study is the first comprehensive effort that has revealed how nearly $30 billion in giveaways and tax breaks has fleeced the American taxpayer. We can only now hope that he will step up to the plate and vigorously defend this data and convince his fellow Republicans to step away from their pro-corporate entrenched view of supporting the haves to the detriment of the have-nots in our country. Or will we see him wilt in the face of the strong opposition from the right-wing extremists who have taken over the Grand Old Party of Lincoln?

Posted by lbwoodgate in 2012 Presidential Elections, Budget Crisis, Economy, Financial Reform, Health Care Reform, Jobs, Medicare/Medicaid, Occupy Wall Street Protest, Society and Politics Tags: billions in subsidies for millionaires, Coburn, fleecing American tax payers, gop gaming the system in favor of wealthiest 1%, Medicare, Mitch McConnell, Republicans, Senate, Social Security, Tom Coburn

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There’s Hope in the Numbers

November 5, 2011

I’m encouraged by the OWS grass roots movement to see today’s youth attack the major source of our current economic ills and a potential threat to their own futures. It appears after all that many of them are not being overwhelmed by the snake oil sells pitches of Wall Street regarding their retirement concerns.

I like to check the polls over at pollingreport.com every now and then just to get an idea which way the wind is blowing on various issues. Some of the figures on Social Security caught my eye that were encouraging as they were weighted heavily in favor of the trust fund by those who were polled. But to listen to some, Social Security is a “monstrous lie”. (Yes, I’m talking to you Rick Perry) Many others among conservative ranks think it’s a failure. Yet overall, 72% of all those polled thought that such characterizations of this social safety net program were inaccurate.

Broken down into age groups we find that the older a person gets the more they feel such claims are not accurate with 84% of those 65 and older asserting this. The surprising age group for me was the 18-34 age group who were polled. This is the age group that people who make such “inaccurate” claims are seriously focused on, hoping to convince the younger generation that their payroll taxes are depriving them of funds they could better use elsewhere. 58% of these young people stated they thought such claims were wrong.

That’s a pretty wide margin with a generation who’s fearful that this minimum retirement benefit will not be there for them when their time comes to cash in on it. Equally striking was another poll by the same people (CNN/ORC) two weeks later, where similar people were asked if they thought Social Security had been good or bad for them or had had no effect on them personally. 38% thought it had been good for them personally with just 12% saying it was bad, but half of those polled (50%) said it had no affect on them at all.

Now maybe I’m reading these numbers wrong, but even with the misinformation that’s coming from those people who want to siphon off the billions that go into the social security trust fund in to private investments that rely on the risky and often volatile stock market to generate funds, most young people are still secure with Social Security’s existence, if not its purpose. Apparently too, most people see the payroll tax deduction as something that is either good or that they are willing to tolerate for the benefit of their own generation or their parents and grandparents’ generation.

The notion put out there by people like Rick Perry that Social Security is a “ponzi scheme” has been around since the system came into existence in 1936 yet to this day that bogus comparison has not garnered any serious traction. Why? I see two factors coming into play here

First and foremost, because such a claim itself is a “monstrous lie”. The ONLY similarity between Social Security and a ponzi scheme is that payouts depend on current investments. Ponzi-scheme originators take those investments and spend them rather than investing them to secure assets for future payouts to investors. Payroll taxes that cover Social Security payments have been invested, creating extra revenue, that allows the system to make reliable payments during any shortfalls periods that may occur. True ponzi-schemes survive a few years at best. Social Security has been solvent for 75 years as a reliable source of retirement funds for low income working people and a healthy supplement for those who have also been able to tuck some away in private retirement accounts like 401ks.

Secondly, the mood today towards special corporate interests is acutely aware that there are those who have and will continue to exploit the savings of people for their own personal gain. Many young people may be leery as to whether Social Security will be there or not for them but they are at least equally leery of the promises made by private financial interests who usually support the notion that Social Security is a failure. They are also acutely aware that the volatile, speculative stock market is no place for amateurs. The Dow and NASDAQ have been all over the map in the last few years and many young people have watched their parents and grandparents’ retirement funds depreciate dramatically, some to the point where they have lost virtually everything they put away.

In a previous article I wrote on this topic I shared that Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities tells us that “Retirement security must be a goal of a civilized society in an advanced economy. And in fact, this is the case in every advanced economy. A guaranteed pension is essential to meeting that goal; private plans that depend on stock market returns can surely complement a basic guarantee, but they are simply not compatible with the goal of retirement security.

These polls are hopeful for my generation who once shared the same fears that today’s youth culture are experiencing about Social Security. The prevailing wisdom though appears to be sustained too that this trust fund, though no plentiful resource to retire with all of our creature comforts being met, is an important entitlement program that needs to be continued.

Clearly we need to make some corrections with the system to accommodate the retiring baby boom generation today that I’m a part of along with the economic impact that has forced many to retire before age 65. But transferring our 6.2% payroll tax entirely into a a stock market account is not a suitable substitute. Equally erroneous and hurtful is the belief that we need to lower benefits and increase the age limit to offset projected problems with Social Security.

Currently the Social Security trust fund is capable of paying 100% of benefits until the year 2036. If measures are not taken by then to correct estimated shortfalls from the current economic recession and our baby boom fallout, there will still be enough in the system to pay 75% of benefits through 2085. Perhaps one of the simplest solutions to make this needed adjustment is to simply raise or even eliminate the income amount of $106,800 on which payroll taxes are taken from so that those in the higher income tax brackets can pay there fair share for this social benefit. This increase won’t impact the vast majority of wage earners.

For those wage earners between the ages of 18 and 34 who are being tempted by the purveyors of Wall Street to dump Social Security, I would advise caution. Your best plan of action is to do a combination of a private savings account in the form of a mutual fund through your job or individually AND continued investments each pay check into the secure social security trust fund. There are great expectations from contributing to a private source of retirement but there is greater security in the social security benefits that you pay into over the years. Continue to support the system and encourage your representatives in Washington to insure its solvency and it WILL be there for you too.

A Warning to the Economic and Political Elites: Listen Now

Common Sense on Social Security

12 Fixes for Social Security

5 myths about Social Security

Posted by lbwoodgate in Corporate Influence, Occupy Wall Street Protest, seniors/aging, Social Discourse, Society and Politics Tags: Jared Bernstein, occupy wall street movement, Ponzi scheme, private plans for retirement, privatizing social security, Retirement, retirement concerns of today's youth, retirement security, Rick Perry, Social Security, Social Security Trust Fund, volatile stock market, Wall Street

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Self-Interests, Special Interests and the General Welfare: Whose Holding Who Hostage?

September 10, 2011

“Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care”. – Mike Lofgren, former GOP Congressional staff member and his analogy of Tea Party members of congress who literally want to hold the US and global economies as hostages unless they get everything they want while they compromise with no one.

It has become clear to me as I’m sure it has to many of you that much of what we haggle over in the social and political debates of our time evolves way too often from extreme views that are often unrealistic. In times past extremist views would have been repudiated by their Party, but for the sake of a common alliance with those fringe elements, many now either do one of two things; 1 – remain silent and hope it dies a quick natural death or 2 – get on board with it to strike a blow, any blow, at their adversaries, even if they know it could well have adverse affects down the road.

The battle tends to be centered around how much we can hurt the other guy rather than trying to convince thoughtful people that solutions abound and can be found in open-ended dialogues with practical and experienced people. The silly notions that get carried too far, which only an unstable person would latch on to, get more attention than they deserve. To push the absurdity even further some of these extremists invoke God in ways that question whether there is indeed a compassionate deity almost all of us have been raised to believe in. Advanced media technology has aided this freak show tremendously, making people who have little critical thinking skills vulnerable and exploitable to the protestations and postulations of charismatic mad men and women.

The harm that this effects on our ability to make smart choices in the short and long-term ought to be apparent. It is human nature that once we have locked in to something, changing our minds about it is much more difficult, especially if some rational alternative is not presented quickly and with equal or greater force.

The campaign that can get out the timeliest, shortest message to a public looking for answers will be able to plant a seed that can be nurtured over time as an issue grows naturally or is force-fed by those who planted the seed. The messages’ credibility is often less important to the message managers than getting some people to think in ways that defy logic. Too many spectators are already susceptible to wild conspiracy theories and ghost stories. Some of the nonsense will prevail just enough to make the difference in close votes for candidates and issues, which is the goal these message managers work towards.

Take for example the attitude people have about government regulations. Those on the extreme right think they are always bad in a capitalist economy and those on the extreme left think they are always necessary to constrain man’s natural greed or what is often referred to in free-market vernacular as “self-interests”.

In a conversation about tough economic times and religious faith, Rebecca Blank, a labor economist and the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution shows us how you can bridge such gaps in terms that speak honestly to the issues while not reneging on your own set of values. Here she addresses the need for government regulations on the private sector.

“[T]here are regular business cycles. And business cycles are in many ways embedded in the way in which the economy functions. … Moral failure strikes me as probably the wrong term here. It is a failure of appropriate business analysis inside a lot of these firms, but it’s also clearly a failure of appropriate regulation by the public sector. … But anyone who knows the history of economics knows that we have a serious(sic) of price bubbles and enthusiasms and that people get caught up in the promise of something that is just going to work wonderfully and make them a lot of money. It’s part of human greed and enthusiasm.

One of the big questions of economics is how do you mitigate business cycles? How do you try to prevent bubbles and crashes? I think we have learned quite a bit in the economics profession. Some of that is being put to use right now in the Federal Reserve Bank, the Treasury, and Congress—and hopefully it will be effective. It is clearly a moral challenge, but also an economics and political challenge as to how you put together the regulatory system that protects people.

Extreme views always eliminate those possibilities that don’t prop up their own agitated views. Everything is either black or white. There are no gray areas, no middle ground, no room to negotiate and compromise. While those on the right believe this is their sworn obligation to their ideological supporters those of us on the left are concerned that a centrist view has been moving more toward the right where a new center is constantly changing.

I make no bones about it, I hold liberal views. It is who I am after many years of first being raised as a conservative christian and slowly evolving over time to come to the point where I’m now the progressive, non-religious individual some of you have come to know me as. But the conservatism I was raised under was not the harsh and mean-spirited style we see today and my conservative Catholicism exposed the hypocrisy of those who treated blacks inferiorly in Texas during the 1950;s and 60’s.

When the radical McCarthyites became an embarrassment to the GOP back in the 1950’s, Party leaders stood up and denounced their lack of decency. Today if anyone dare challenges the fanatics in their Party they are brow-beaten to recant or make public apologies after being publicly flawed by their corporate disciplinarians like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Grover Norquist.

I’m not unaware that there are some extreme views in my own political and social sphere that cross the line too often. Such efforts often entrench a non-compromising attitude that ultimately hurts more than helps. But I can see without bias that the right has taken the lead lately on views that have isolated us from each other to a degree not seen in quite some time.

[B]oth parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpotoutliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. SOURCE

The extreme fringes on the social and political right have accosted the public viewer, reader and listener with an intensity that resembles the Church’s dominance in western culture in its medieval heydays. With growing control of the sources of information today, pro-corporate messaging with its fundamentalist christian alliances are likely to exceed the Roman Catholic Church’s complete authority they once had over most of the European continent 500-600 years ago.

One might argue that the left once had the edge in areas that influence people greatly, specifically the national media. If that were true it no longer is. Many a wealthy tycoon who seeks to attain greater wealth by opposing regulations that impact their businesses’ bottom line have invested heavily over the years into media sources to a point where they now dominate. They control the message delivery system and they use it to their advantage. An entire new network, FOX, has arisen that claims to be “fair and balanced” but whose owner and president have openly stated that they lean to the pro-corporate right to balance what they feel has been a liberal bias in the media. Meanwhile the traditional networks and many new cable stations also give time to a false equivalence of important issues.

The problem is when you assume everything other than what you produce is the opposite of that, you lose sight of objectivity and soon begin to manufacture things from the barest of real time data and reality. Such powerful voices are able to persuade what Mike Lofgren calls the “low-information voters”. These are the people who most of their waking hours deal with the daily grind of life and follow very little of what goes on in Washington or real science. They are easily manipulated when they become vulnerable from what’s going on in the larger, complex social and economic world they reside in.

They have been researched by special interest groups like conservative pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz to learn what their hot-button issues and socio-political leanings are so those special interests’ views can be presented in ways to accommodate low-information voter bias and preferences for manipulative purposes. Luntz himself is credited with creating the misleading image of the “death tax” to replace the vague notion of an estate tax; a tax that only the very wealthy are affected by. But to these low-information voters it is intended to be seen as a tax that negatively impacts all tax payers. And now we have Rick Perry muddying the waters about the Social Security Trust fund, conveying a false image of this reliable self-financing pension system as a ponzi-scheme.

We slowly erode our democratic-republic, what there’s left of it, when misinformation takes precedent over the facts. We hurt only ourselves when people who we once considered friends are no longer considered such because they hold “radical” political views we oppose. Those who claim to support the Constitution, which was hammered out in only about four months back in 1787 with multiple compromises being made, are unwilling to give the same consideration to their perceived political adversaries today.

Examples of this could be found on the blogosphere following President Obama’s “job speech” to the nation last Thursday. Here are but two examples from the MSNBC blog.

This one from someone who uses the screen name Independent Republic of Texas -“Sounded like he was just elected and this was a repeat of bad ideas. The federal government needs to get out the way”

Or this even more incoherent one from Radical 1 “Blah, Blah, Spend, Spend, Blah Vote for me, Blah Spend, Spend, Blah Blah, Spend Spend”.

These are expressions of closed minds that heard only what they wanted to hear and painted them in terms of what they have always thought. How can you have dialogue with people like this? Does this reflect the state of mind of GOP/TeaParty congress people ?

Such people would rather help no one at all who truly need it if it means they have to make a sacrifice involving federal assistance. They form such opinions on the erroneous notion that all government is bad at worst or government intervention of any kind is simply not constitutional. Both are flawed concepts but both are fed by the self-interests of a wealthy powerful few who know how to use the means of disseminating information to their advantage without it being so conspicuous.

Some of the evidence that indicts the right for misleading the low-information public can be found in fact-finding web sites like Politifact where right-wing ideologues have dominated the “pants-on-fire” rulings for most of this year. The same can be found on theFactCheck.org website that has been scrutinizing talking points for both sides. Again the right tends to occupy most of the corrections here also.

This isn’t a fight we should be losing. We’re not talking about doing irrational ruinous things. We are talking about contributing to an effort that is well-founded in the constitution and the decades of Supreme Court interpretation that justify programs that enable the “general welfare” of Americans. Through tax incentives for industry that creates new start-up jobs to the financial assistance to the most vulnerable in this country, government enables people and the economy when used appropriately to benefit us as a nation, not as a tool to enrich those who already own a lion’s share of the wealth.

These efforts are embedded in a christian ethic too that says those that help the least of us do it for a higher purpose rather than our own material well-being. We can’t save everyone but we should try to help those that we can and at some sacrifice to ourselves with our aim being to improve the quality of life for as many people as possible. The precepts of good government can aid in this along with a system of entrepreneurs that ethically work with those who make their products and provide their services to the public.

The worst thing people can do today is hide in their own “self-interest” caves hoping that free-markets will make it all go away. Perhaps it would if the principles of capitalism were honestly and faithfully followed. But we know that is not nor has it ever been the case. And until it does too may people will suffer needlessly from the “hands off” approach that the lunatic fringe on the right insists must occur.

Posted by lbwoodgate in 2012 Presidential Elections, Corporate Influence, Social Discourse, Society and Politics, Wedge Issues Tags: corporate interests, extremist views, Glenn Beck, GOP lunacy, Mike Lofgren, partisan bickering in Congress, political misinformation by the right, Politics, Rebecca Blank, Rush Limbaugh, Social Security, United States Congress

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In an attempt to present himself as someone who is courageous and manly, House Speaker Boehner tried to cast the President as a coward, afraid to make the necessary spending cuts Republicans want with entitlements programs.

You know, when you want to talk tough in politics first you must have a set of policies that engender the people to your point of view. The GOP already has a strike against them in this category.

But then you have to select someone who reflects this tough mindedness who can convince the country that they are the strong leader that will put this country back on the path to recovery.

So why would you send this guy out to browbeat the President on budget issues?

Strike Two

If you’re going to send someone in orange skin out to challenge the commander-in-chief, the orange M&M is likely to be more intimidating than the crybaby-in-chief.

And how would such an encounter wound up between these two?

Booyah! STRIKE THREE