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The Republican proposal to pay for Social Security
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| MisterOpus1 |
"Don't count all that new borrowing."
Holy , did I read this right?
Is there no ing accountability with these guys?
| quote: | Republican budget writers say they may have found a way to cut the federal deficit even if they borrow hundreds of billions more to overhaul the Social Security system: Don't count all that new borrowing.
As they lay the groundwork for what will probably be a controversial fight over Social Security, Republican lawmakers and the Bush administration are examining a number of accounting strategies that would allow the expensive transition to a partially privatized Social Security system without -- at least on paper -- expanding the country's record annual budget deficits. The strategies include, for example, moving the costs of Social Security reform "off-budget" so they are not counted against the government's yearly shortfall.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...v22.html?sub=AR |
I'm sorry, but this is nothing shy but absolute lunacy to even think of such a plan with our deficits right now. Do these guys have no shame? They want to place their Republican name tag so damn badly on SS that they're willing to simply cook the budget books? This is ing ridiculous.
And to think all the freakin' hoopla that was created by the Republicans when Clinton rode off SS funding in his books in the late '90's. How's that cup of contradiction there fellas? |
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| Busy Child |
| the ppl behind the washington post are as left as you can get. |
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| Tranceporter99 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Busy Child
the ppl behind the washington post are as left as you can get. |
no, they broke that barrier, they went even more left |
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| NeoPhono |
What does G. Gordon Liddy call it? The Washington Compost? :D
Anyway, as soon as we all come to the realization that Social Security is beyond being saved, and that it's downfall was mathematically inevitable, we can move on and find a solution to this mess. |
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| Ek0nomik |
| Yeh it doesn't sound too credible. Even so, they still need to come up with a plan as NeoPhono stated. |
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| occrider |
Ummm instead of trashing the source to refute the evidence, why don't you guys come up with alternative evidence to refute the source. I have no idea where you get the idea that it's a leftist rag, since I read it every day and find it to be far more informative than most other papers when it comes to politics ... particularly since the Washington Post has a lot more government sources than most other papers.
At any rate, if you had bothered to read the article in full, it quotes direct sources from the administration that supports the Washington Post's statements of collosal increases in deficit spending and the source that relates the accounting maneuvering:
| quote: |
But Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said concerns about the deficit should not be allowed to stand in the way of an overhaul that would put the ailing Social Security system on the path to solvency.
"You cannot look at Social Security in the context of a five-year budget," the window that current White House and congressional spending plans cover, Gregg said. "To do so is naive and foolish. . . . If this is simply scored as a five-year exercise, we're never going to solve the problem."
Gregg's thinking mirrors sentiments within the White House, according to administration officials and White House advisers. "The budget should reflect that this is an investment, a down payment that will have very positive implications," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy
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To cope with the cost, while still helping the White House at least appear to be moving toward its goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, White House and congressional budget experts are looking at a variety of accounting mechanisms, said Michael Tanner, a Cato Institute Social Security expert who has worked closely with the White House.
They include treating the cost of Social Security reform not as a present-day expenses, but more as a prepaid benefit for future retirees that should not be counted against current deficits. Or they may take the costs "off-budget," meaning Social Security spending would not be included in the calculation of the annual budget deficit.
"How they label it is going to be somewhat of an exercise in creative budgeting," Tanner said.
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So in what way is the Washington Post spinning the story when the accounts are coming directly from Senate Republicans, White House officials, and those who are working with the white house on the social security issue? |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Busy Child
the ppl behind the washington post are as left as you can get. |
| quote: | Originally posted by Tranceporter99
no, they broke that barrier, they went even more left. |
| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
What does G. Gordon Liddy call it? The Washington Compost? |
What a lovely diatribe ad hominem trio we have here! And as Occ said, I really wonder if any of you actually read the article, considering it actually cites Administrative officials here. For you to dismiss the Post simply on terms of foolishly branding is as a "leftist" newspaper, despite it's highly regarded credibility on both content and sources, is nothing shy of obnoxiousness and foolhearty partisan bull.
But I suppose I could easily return the favor and question the source that Neo has given - one of my favorite Right wing slimeballs, G. Gordon Liddy:
| quote: | | "Environmentalism is a form of pagan fundamentalism. These green wackos are fanatics like al-Quaida. Just like them," he quivers. "Osama believes there are 72 virgins waiting for him. The environmentalist believes human beings cause global warming. They both want to wreak havoc because of their mad beliefs. What's the difference?" I am lying on a hotel bed in New York City listening to Liddy's radio show and trying to figure out how I can possibly interview this man in half an hour. "Why should we listen to these fulminating feminists, proselytizing poofters, the environmentally ill, these multilateralist UN one-world government worshippers and other politically correct castrati?" |
Whew! Excellent comparison Uncle Fester! What's next?:
| quote: | The town was full of ethnic Germans who idolized Hitler. Liddy was made to salute the Stars and Stripes Nazi-style by the nuns at his school; even now, he admits, "at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm." His beloved German nanny taught him that Hitler had -- through sheer will-power -- "dragged Germany from weakness to strength."
This gave Liddy hope "for the first time in my life" that he too could overcome weakness. When he listened to Hitler on the radio, it "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before," he explains. "Hitler's sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body." He describes seeing the Nazis' doomed technological marvel the Hindenberg flying over New Jersey as an almost religious experience. "Ecstatic, I drank in its colossal power and felt myself grow. Fear evaporated and in its place came a sense of personal might and power." |
Just lovely, ain't it? How 'bout Vietnam?
| quote: | "I wanted to bomb the Red River dykes [sic: dikes]. It would have drowned half the country and starved the other half. There would have been no way the Viet Cong could have operated if we had the will-power to do that."
But what about the millions of innocent people who would have been murdered? "Look at Dresden. Millions of people died there too." And it hits me: he just can't see them. They are un-people, specks of red dust on a distant map, obstacles to his Will. Their suffering is as irrelevant as that of the chickens he decapitated with such glee sixty years ago in New Jersey. "Once you start a war, you have to win," he continues. "Look at the time some of Julius Ceasar's emissaries were sent into Gaul, and they were killed by bandits. Caesar sent Roman troops to slaughter all the men who were left alive in Gaul. He sold all the women and children into slavery. From that point on, nobody touched a single one of Caesar's emissaries." I pause. Let me get this straight -- you are advocating the selling of women and children into slavery as US policy?
"No. What I'm saying is we had better embrace the horror of war. If you aren't tough, if you don't pull out all the stops, you lose." So all of the conventions created in the wake of the Second World War - the Geneva Conventions, the very concept of war crimes - these are all just polite fictions to be crumpled? "Of course. The Seventh Infantry Division in 1945 used to drive their tanks around with the heads of defeated Japanese solders displayed proudly on the front. That's what we need to train our present-day soldiers to be." Returning to Vietnam, he adds that the French -- the colonial power preceding the Americans -- succeeded in Vietnam because "they were using the Foreign Legion, then manned almost completely by veterans from the most disciplined, ruthlessly efficient practitioners of all-out warfare in history: the Waffen SS."
...We had to get the people who wanted America to lose." Including killing columnists? "If they were traitors as Jack Andersen [sic: Anderson] was, directly helping the enemy, then yes." |
Alright! Now what about child rearing?:
| quote: | | And so we are back to Him, the dictator who hangs over Liddy's life like an old, angry ghost. Liddy's seems to believe -- as his childhood icon did -- that life is an eternal war against Absolute Enemies. There are no rules. There can be no restraint. Kill them or they kill you. This mindset is revealed neatly in the advice he gave to his children from the time they were toddlers. He told them to start fights or they would be beaten. When the kids' school explained that they had a strict non-violence policy, Liddy replied, "In the late 1930s French children were taught that philosophy while German kids were taught to be fierce in battle. Given the destruction of the numerically superior French armies by the Wehrmacht in about thirty days, I prefer the German approach. The school will just have to live with it." |
And what about his lovely revisionist history of his role in Watergate?:
| quote: | Does he regret burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and setting in chain the resignation of a President?
A vein twitches angrily on one of his scales, but he replies in a level voice, "No." He has a bizarre revisionist take on Watergate that places the blame for the disaster entirely on another Nixon henchman called John Dean. "The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet," Liddy says, referring me to a conspiracy-theory book called 'Silent Coup: Removal of a President' by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. Its thesis is stark. The Watergate burglars - including Liddy - believed they were breaking into the offices of the DNC to plant a bug so the Republicans could hear the election plans of George McGovern. They were duped. The book's authors claimed John Dean -- Liddy's immediate superior and the man who gave the orders to commit the burglary -- ordered the burglary for his own reasons, nothing to do with Nixon. The DNC had evidence that linked Dean's then-fiancee with a prostitution ring -- and Dean wanted it back. So -- hey presto! -- Nixon was innocent, and the victim of a wicked coup d'etat. Liddy has convinced himself he served five years in jail for nothing. |
And last but not least, what should you do with BATF agents?:
| quote: | Liddy urges his listeners to show similar 'strength' in their own lives. He was condemned even by most of the American right in 1994 when he advised his listeners to deal with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (a strange, obsessive focus of hate on the American right) with "head shots, head shots ... Kill the sons of bitches ... Shoot twice to the belly and if the does not work, shoot to the groin area. Arm yourself. Get instructed in how to shoot straight. And don't register [your weapons] either." His caller replied, "And I'm aiming between their eyes." Liddy replied, "There you go. That way their flak jackets won't protect them."
Liddy's philosophy is a strange mixture of an anarchistic hatred of Government in the abstract and a cult-like worship of government when it is in the hands of the right. How can he be so fanatically patriotic yet believe in killing the agents of his democratically elected government? He claims he was only advocating the killing of agents if they illegally broke into somebody's home. "All I was doing is stating the US law," he says. "I never counseled anybody to shoot a BATF agent or anybody else who did not need shooting." His fans hear his clauses. For example, J.J. Johnson, the head of the far-right Georgia Republic Militia, welcomed Liddy's comments, disagreeing only about the head-shots. "With the right kind of ammunition, it doesn't matter where you hit 'em." After the Oklahoma bombing, many Hate Radio hosts toned down their statements. Liddy stepped them up: he declared that he used a cardboard cut-out of Hillary Clinton for target practice. |
http://news.independent.co.uk/peopl...sp?story=585368
I'm sorry, what did this piece of say about the Post again? |
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| occrider |
Well, it really doesn't matter how the white house tries to hide it if they do indeed intend on "solving" social security with more deficit spending. The financial markets won't overlook it:
| quote: |
US Treasury selloff sends yields to 4-month highs
Mon Nov 29, 2004 11:08 AM ET
(Adds details, updates prices)
By Wayne Cole
NEW YORK, Nov 29 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury prices tumbled on Monday in wild, rumor-driven trade as a sudden wave of speculative selling swamped major chart levels, triggering added technical sales.
Traders reported particularly heavy selling of the 10-year note (US10YT=RR: Quote, Profile, Research) from leveraged funds, sending it down 24/32 in price. Its yield jumped to 4.33 percent from 4.24 percent late Friday, breaking above the 4.28/4.30 percent barrier for the first time since early August.
"The market started steady enough but then a wave of selling came through the futures pit and swept prices lower," said one trader at a primary dealer. "Doesn't seem to be any news behind it, rather a leveraged speculator trying to ambush a sleepy market and break 4.28 (percent)," he said.
Analysts noted 4.28 percent had been the ceiling for yields for the last three months and the break opened the way for a retracement to at least 4.41 percent.
The rest of the Treasury curve followed, with the 30-year bond (US30YT=RR: Quote, Profile, Research) dropping 1-8/32 in price, lifting yields to 4.97 percent from 4.89 percent.
Traders noted one of the more fanciful rumors in the market was that Treasury would have to start reissuing 30-year paper to meet the costs of Social Security reform.
In the same vein was talk foreign central banks and/or private investors were losing their appetite for U.S. assets. The latest scare began on Friday with a report, later denied, that the Chinese central bank had sold some of its mountain of Treasuries.
Foreign central banks have bought over $200 billion of Treasuries this year and, while there has been no sign of them turning active sellers, the pace of buying has clearly slowed.
Analysts also noted that the spread between 10-year Treasury yields and the equivalent euro yield (EU10YT=RR: Quote, Profile, Research) had widened to four-year peaks around 52 basis points Monday morning, perhaps suggesting investors were finally demanding a higher rate to hold U.S. debt.
Shorter-dated debt suffered a lot less as some investors booked profits on curve-flattening trades, which have been all the rage in recent weeks.
Two-year notes (US2YT=RR: Quote, Profile, Research) only dipped 2/32 in price, nudging their yield up to 3.07 percent from 3.03 percent on Friday. The two-year had sharply underperformed the market recently as investors bet spreads between short- and long-term yields would continue to narrow.
In contrast, the gap between two- and 10-year yields widened six basis points to 125 basis points early Monday.
In the belly of the curve, the five-year note (US5YT=RR: Quote, Profile, Research) lost 11/32, taking yields to 3.71 percent from 3.64 percent.
The speed of the selloff took many traders by surprise as they had thought funds would need to buy to match a large extension in month-end index benchmarks.
"The dealer community was long in anticipation of the usual month-end demand and had to exit in a hurry. Painful start to the week," added the trader.
Others reported rate-lock selling as dealers hedged what is expected to be a heavy slate of corporate issuance in the next couple of weeks. Rumors are that around $35 billion to $40 billion in corporate paper might be issued this week and traders often hedge such issues by selling Treasuries.
Further pressure was added by a rally in global stocks, though U.S. equities were struggling to follow suit. Retailer reports of strong sales over the Thanksgiving weekend seemed to bode well for consumption in the month and quarter.
Traders assume much of the U.S. economic data due this week will be upbeat enough to allow the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates for a fifth time this year when it meets on Dec. 14.
The major release of the week is the November payrolls report on Friday and analysts are looking for a healthy rise of around 180,000 jobs, with talk it could be much higher.
http://www.reuters.com/financeNewsA...storyID=6943627
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I'm not sure if anyone else caught that scare on Friday about the Chinese central banks, but that illicited an "oh " reaction from me before the reports were denied by Chinese officials. I'm not sure if the trend in treasury selling is going to continue, but that's bad news. If soemthing like a chinese sell-off does happen, you can watch those yields skyrocket ... and that's VERY bad news. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Back to topic, this article in the NYTimes (oh God, not ANOTHER leftist citation!!!!!) describes the troubles of the SS agenda. It touches a bit on Senator Gregg's cooking the books scheme at the end.
The emphasis throughout are mine:
| quote: | November 28, 2004
Bush's Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - The White House and Republicans in Congress are all but certain to embrace large-scale government borrowing to help finance President Bush's plan to create personal investment accounts in Social Security, according to administration officials, members of Congress and independent analysts.
The White House says it has made no decisions about how to pay for establishing the accounts, and among Republicans on Capitol Hill there are divergent opinions about how much borrowing would be prudent at a time when the government is running large budget deficits. Many Democrats say that the costs associated with setting up personal accounts just make Social Security's financial problems worse, and that the United States can scarcely afford to add to its rapidly growing national debt.
But proponents of Mr. Bush's effort to make investment accounts the centerpiece of an overhaul of the retirement system said there were no realistic alternatives to some increases in borrowing, a requirement the White House is beginning to acknowledge.
"The administration hasn't settled on any particular Social Security reform plan," Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, said in an e-mail message in response to questions about overhauling the system.
"The president does support personal accounts, which need not add over all to the cost of the program but could in the short run require additional borrowing to finance the transition," Mr. Bolten said. "I believe there's a strong case that this approach not only makes sense as a matter of savings policy, but is also fiscally prudent."
Proponents say the necessary amount of borrowing could vary widely, from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars over a decade, depending on how much money people are permitted to contribute to the accounts and whether the changes to Social Security include benefit cuts and tax increases.
Borrowing by the government could be necessary to establish the personal accounts because of the way Social Security pays for benefits. Under the current system, the payroll tax levied on workers goes to benefits for people who are already retired. Personal accounts would be paid for out of the same pool of money; they would allow workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into accounts invested in mutual funds or other investments.
The money going into the accounts would therefore no longer be available to pay benefits to current retirees. The shortfall would have to be made up somehow to preserve benefits for people who are already retired during the transition from one system to the other, and by nearly all estimates there is no way to make it up without relying at least in part on government borrowing.
Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress have paid little political price in the last four years for the swing from budget surpluses to deficits. But some polls show that Americans consider reducing the deficit to be a higher priority than many other goals, including cutting taxes, and embracing a new round of borrowing could pose political as well as economic risks.
A reasonable amount of borrowing now, the proponents say, would avert a much bigger financial obligation decades later. They say personal accounts would yield higher returns for individuals than the current system and could be a catalyst to broader changes that would bring the benefits promised by Social Security into line with what the system, which is also about to come under intense financial strain from the aging of the baby boom generation and the increase in life expectancies, can afford to pay.
Mr. Bush has vowed to push hard to remake Social Security. Republicans in Congress say the White House has signaled to them that Mr. Bush will put the issue at the top of his domestic agenda in the coming year.
But the White House has never answered fundamental questions about Mr. Bush's plan. In particular, it has not explained how it would deal with the financial quandary created by its call for personal accounts.
Some conservative analysts and Republicans in Congress say a portion of the temporary financial gap that would be created by personal accounts could be closed through measures like holding down the growth in overall government spending. But nearly everyone involved in the debate over Social Security agrees that some borrowing will be necessary.
The main Republican players in Congress on the issue say they expect to endorse an increase in borrowing to finance the transition to a new system. But they remain split over whether to back plans that would include larger investment accounts and few painful trade-offs like benefit cuts and tax increases - and therefore require more borrowing - or to limit borrowing and include more steps that would be politically unpopular.
"Anybody who thinks borrowing money for the transition to personal accounts is going to solve the problem of the long-term solvency of Social Security doesn't understand the size of the problem," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over the retirement system.
Mr. Grassley said Congress would also have to put benefit reductions and tax increases on the table, in part to hold down the need for borrowing and in part to assure that any changes restore Social Security's long-term financial stability.
Under current projections used by Social Security's trustees, the government will have to begin drawing on general tax revenue to pay benefits to retirees in 2018, the first year in which scheduled benefit payments will exceed revenues from the payroll tax dedicated to the retirement system. By 2042, the government will have exhausted the Social Security trust fund - its legal obligation to pay back to the retirement system the temporary surplus in payroll tax revenues it has borrowed over the last several decades to subsidize the rest of the budget - and after that Social Security would be able to pay only about three-quarters of promised benefits.
Opponents of Mr. Bush's approach say that Social Security's financial problems can be dealt with more easily without the addition of personal accounts, and that any large-scale borrowing would erase the presumed economic advantage of establishing the accounts: spurring more national savings, a goal that nearly all economists agree is worthy and important. Any increase in private, individual savings, they say, would be partly or wholly offset by an increase in public debt. National savings are what is left after counting up everything the nation spends. This pool of money goes to investing in the expansion and modernization of business. It is a vital component of economic health.
"To the extent that the transition is debt-financed, the ostensible macroeconomic benefits from individual accounts are undermined," said Peter Orszag, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has been critical of personal account plans. "In particular, you do not get an increase in national savings. It's engaging effectively in accounting gimmicks to make it look as if you're doing something when you're not."
In an effort to pressure the White House to acknowledge some of the financial trade-offs in its approach, Democratic leaders in Congress this week asked Mr. Bush to include in his next budget an accounting of the money that would be needed for his Social Security plan.
Only by including such figures in the budget, the Democrats said in a letter to Mr. Bush, "will Congress and the American people be able to weigh the difficult trade-offs between large-scale borrowing, Social Security benefit cuts, tax increases, and other spending reductions that may be required to fund your Social Security private accounts proposal. "
The White House, which has promised to cut the deficit in half while making Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, has signaled that it does not intend to include the figures in its budget, since the administration has not endorsed a detailed plan.
The budget deficit in the year ended Sept. 30 was $413 billion. The total national debt is about $7.5 trillion, including $3 trillion owed by the government to itself, much of it in the form of the Social Security trust fund. Rising debt forces the government to pay out more of its revenue in interest payments, and can put upward pressure on the interest rates paid by businesses and consumers.
Some Republicans in Congress are concerned that too much borrowing would carry large economic and political costs. Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who will be chairman of the Senate Budget Committee next year, said he would support borrowing money for Social Security if it was part of a plan that also included modest benefit cuts and tax increases.
But he said the additional debt might have to be accounted for on the government's books in a way that would not technically show an increase in the budget deficit in coming years.
"You've got to look at this as a very significant long-term fiscal policy decision where you're going to have a loss in the first 10 to 15 years and a significant move toward solvency in the last 20 to 30 years," Mr. Gregg said. "That mitigates against doing it in the context of a typical budget resolution."
To critics of personal accounts, Mr. Gregg's suggestion amounts to relying on budget gimmickry to hide the true costs. But supporters of the accounts say borrowing even a few trillion dollars now would be worthwhile, because it would help wipe out the retirement system's long-term unfunded liability - the difference between what it will owe retirees under current law and the amount it will take in - of around $11 trillion.
Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, both Republicans, have sponsored legislation that would allow workers to contribute more to their personal accounts than most other plans proposed by members of Congress and outside groups and would not require tax increases or benefit cuts. But by some estimates it would require nearly $2 trillion in borrowing - and, in the view of its critics, much more - and even then would rely on the idea that the new system would create so much more economic growth that it would partly pay for itself by generating additional tax revenues for the government.
Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, said the government could probably keep new borrowing to $800 billion over 10 years, but only if Congress and the administration are willing to back tax increases and benefit cuts as part of a broad overhaul of the retirement system.
"People do not understand that tough choices need to be made," Mr. Kolbe said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/p...print&position= |
So here's the questions that need to be asked-
1. Is SS really on life support, as the GOP is attempting to depict? Does it need "saving" at this current time, considering we're talking about critical dates at 2018 and 2042 here, and considering that this effectively does the opposite in addressing the deficit problem that Bush promised to cut in 1/2?
Or is this a mere attempt for Bush to try to put another stamp on his Presidential legacy, damn the actual consequences? I'm all for revamping a system that needs to be addressed, but there's a time and place for everything. Is this truly the time and place to revamp SS?
2. Anyone out there really believe that Bush and his fiscally irresponsible GOP will actually consider tax increases or trimming the tax cuts in any way? If you are, what are you smoking and can you pass it over?
Or do you think it's more likely that fiscal restraint will likely take place in the form of effectively choking the various federal funding programs such as in education?
Added in edit: Oops, just posted after your Treasury article Occ, which kinda addressed Senator Gregg's scheme pretty well. That leaves tax increases and fiscal restraint as the only viable means of paying for this in any "responsible" manner. I'm bettin' no tax increases, considering this president "says what he means and means what he says", esp. regarding his stance on tax cuts. I'll bet the house that the squeeze on a great many federal programs will take place here. |
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| NeoPhono |
Okay, let me clear up something here. I listened to G. Gordon Liddy in high school as I was making the half hour trip from my high school to the University of Dayton to take classes. That's something I remember from him (besides his introduction of "crass commercial messages) that I found funny. After a guy has been on the radio for so long, I'm sure that it's not hard to find ammunition against him. However, my point was not to support G. Gordon Liddy or even be against the Washington Post, merely to give a reference to something I had known in the past. I realize that sarcasm/jest is easily missed on the internet, but I don't want anyone going overboard.
The main point of my post, and a contention I have stated numerous times before is that Socical Security is doomed one way or another and nothing we do will save it. If any of you can find a feasible way of fixing Social Security, I urge you to share it with me to quench my pessimism, but I am yet to find one. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
What does G. Gordon Liddy call it? The Washington Compost? :D
Anyway, as soon as we all come to the realization that Social Security is beyond being saved, and that it's downfall was mathematically inevitable, we can move on and find a solution to this mess. |
Alright, admittedly I did miss the sarcasm a bit, though I still stand by my feelings that Liddy's a douchebag.:D
Regardless, I'd like to ask about some options in possibly helping SS. One that I've heard is increasing minimum wage, which hasn't been done in quite some time and I believe is under it's inflation-adjustment rate anyways. Would this not help push back the red-ink dates of 2018 and 2042? And what about the deficit itself - if we actually do something about it and let's just say that off in la la land, our GOP led Congress and Administration decide to balance the budget and we somehow miraculously get out of the red ink - does this not help SS as well? And finally, about that date of 2042 - even when we reach it we're still talking about 75% still going to the retirees.
I suppose one could be cynical and state that by having such incredible deficits, Bush can easily make the case for revamping SS considering how much he has been borrowing from it to subsidize his tax cuts and war. I'm not quite ready to go there just yet, but it is an interesting thought. On those same lines one could also be cynical enough to believe that Bush wants to keep the deficits in order to make deep cuts in federal programs like education, and thus push the case to privatize such programs even further. To be honest, I really don't need a tin foil hat to surmise such a scenario, whether it be for better or worse.
I won't start being pessimistic about privatizing a federal sacred cow system such as SS because a great deal of the money being subsidized towards the stock market will only go to profits of stock brokers and their associative companies. That's easy to do, and it's also easy to state that the higher risk of more than 2-3% returns is self evident, though potentially more profitable. But isn't that what 401Ks are all about?
Regardless, I'm inclined to agree for now that a revamping of the system is necessary, but one must ask whether or not the timing of revamping, considering our huge deficit, fiscally irresponsible spending, and current war spending, is best addressed right now. I believe that the red alert warning lights on SS have not gone off yet, and we need to seriously address our budget, our dollar, and our deficits before any talk on any other economic issues like SS and revamping the tax code take place. |
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| BigManwithaPlan |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
"Don't count all that new borrowing."
Holy , did I read this right?
Is there no ing accountability with these guys?
I'm sorry, but this is nothing shy but absolute lunacy to even think of such a plan with our deficits right now. Do these guys have no shame? They want to place their Republican name tag so damn badly on SS that they're willing to simply cook the budget books? This is ing ridiculous.
And to think all the freakin' hoopla that was created by the Republicans when Clinton rode off SS funding in his books in the late '90's. How's that cup of contradiction there fellas? |
I'm a Business Student who got through my lower level Accounting Classes with A's (barely).
"I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals…" S. Watkins of Enron.
Off-sheet accounting (mixed with a little greed) is precisely what sent Enron off a cliff. Taking up this solution to simply white-out the debt on paper while we borrow at a faster rate than the current $1.13 Billion a day is outrageously RECKLESS. It sends the message to the world market which finances most of our debt that we could care less about fiscal restraint. If these entities stop buying our debt (or worse still start selling the bonds) we'd have no choice but to sharply raise interest rates here, a move that would send shockwaves through our economy.
We'd be doing this all in faith that Bush's Social Security plan would work. Given that it was done by the same people who told us their plans would produce millions of new jobs for the first 4yrs... I remain skeptical. |
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