Free Republic

President Obama is facing a deepening dilemma about whether to abandon cuts to Social Security in his next fiscal blueprint, which is due out in March. Obama touched the third rail of American politics last year when he proposed a new formula for Social Security and other entitlements that would result in benefits being cut over time. Now congressional Democrats and unions are ramping up their pressure on Obama to drop the proposal, which many fear could become an albatross for the party in the midterm elections. “We want the president to make very clear that he is going to...

Over the course of their 60-year marriage, Bernard “Bernie” Karpinkski and his wife, Violet, took few chances when it came to their retirement. “From the time we were married, we started saving,” says Bernie, 89, who lives in Pueblo, Colorado. “We lived much more conservatively than most people. We had three cars our entire lives and drove them until they had close to 200,000 miles on them before we bought another. We didn’t buy our second home until we had enough saved to pay cash.” While their friends moved into bigger homes, took vacations and put their life on plastic,...

A “blind” Wisconsin man’s $175,000 Social Security disability fraud scheme ended when federal agents caught him driving a speedboat, according to the inspector general. Lawrence Popp, 58, was sentenced to one year in prison on Tuesday for defrauding the Social Security Administration... Popp, a wealthy businessman, continued to work and go on lavish vacations in the Cayman Islands while collecting disability benefits for five years. A record 10,988,269 people received federal disability benefits in December 2013, according to the SSA. A 2012 report from Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) found that more than 25 percent of benefits are awarded with...

Saying that life is hard is kind of like saying the sun is hot, water is wet, or noting that politicians lie a lot. It's so obvious that anyone who's paying attention already knows that it's true. That being said, life's even harder when you're working under false assumptions that have been drilled into you by your teachers, college professors, Hollywood, and politicians in D.C. Much of what liberalism drums into the young skulls full of mush simply isn't true and millions of lives have been ruined by people finding it out the hard way. The good news is that...

It took years for Watergate to unravel fully. The controversy over Barack Hussein Obama and his past, along with fraudulent documents continues to make headlines. Yet, the items needed to actually verify who Obama is continue to be kept from the public eye. Well, that all may be about to change. Attorney Orly Taitz may have just found a chink in the federal government’s armor in protecting Barack Obama from scrutiny, following a judge’s ruling over her Freedom of Information Act request from the Social Security Administration.

Democratic senators are pleading with President Obama to abandon his proposal to trim Social Security benefits before it becomes a liability for them in the midterm elections. The president proposed a new formula for calculating benefits in his budget last year, in hopes that the olive branch to Republicans would persuade them to back tax increases in a broader fiscal deal. But Democratic lawmakers say Obama should shelve the idea now that they are facing a difficult midterm election where they need to turn out the liberal base to preserve their Senate majority. “I’m not sure why we should be...

For the 202nd straight month, the number of Americans receiving disability benefits rose. The end of 2013 saw another record set - 10,988,269 Americans now on disabilty, up 6,000 from the end of November. CNS News: The average monthly benefit paid to a disabled worker also hit a record of $1,146.43 in December, up from a previous high of $1,130.34 in December of last year.Spouses of disabled workers also got a record average monthly benefit of $308.13 in December, up from a previous high of $304.31 in August. Children of disabled workers also received a record average monthly benefit of...

Barack Obama and the Republican House have a New Year’s greeting for you that you might not have heard about. The thieves in Washington are hitting us with a series of taxes that will take a noticeable bite out of your income. Here are some of these increases. The amount we pay for Social Security will jump from 4.2% to 6.2%. If you earn just $50,000 a year, this will mean an additional $1000.00 bite out of your wallet. The top marginal rate will rise to 39.6% from the previous 35%. This will impact couples earning over $450,000 and singles...

Uncle Sam, always generous to a fault with taxpayers' money, doled out about $108 billion in Social Security benefits to the dead in 2012.  Give or take a few billion, over a decade that's about $1 trillion going to folks who crossed the River Styx.  Or more likely their kin, who may or may not take portions of the proceeds to decorate their loved ones' graves.     The Washington Times reported on Friday that the Social Security Administration does a spotty job tracking Social Security recipients' deaths, hence the dollars for the dead.  Reports the Times:      "Because SSA does not verify death...

Federal auditors said Friday the Social Security Administration still struggles with a basic problem — figuring out who is dead and who is not. The question is a crucial one, since federal agencies rely on the administration to cross-match data on deceased persons and avoid paying out federally funded benefits to people who aren’t alive, or to establish accurate benefits for survivors. The administration also maintains a “Death Master File” that is available to the public. “SSA’s methods for processing death reports may result in inaccurate, incomplete or untimely information for users of its death data,” the Government Accountability Office,...

As someone who is constantly researching retirement, I find the recent funding cuts to military retirees very disheartening. Worse yet, I see this as a move to establish ground zero for the testing of changes to Social Security benefits. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a bipartisan budget that scales back cost of living adjustments for working age military retirees starting in 2015. Several sources including Military.com suggests that qualified participants could lose between $3,700 and $6,200 per year, or an aggregate between $83,000 and $124,000 before they retire based on rank, age and years of service. Despite some protests, a...

A new study just published by the National Institute on Retirement Security – “Race and Retirement Insecurity in the United States”- presents a dismal snapshot of the state of retirement savings of minority American families. It reports that 54.3 percent of blacks work for employers that offer retirement plans compared to 62.3 percent of whites. And 43.9 percent of blacks participate in those plans compared to 53.9 percent of whites. Among Latinos, 37.8 percent work for employers with retirement plans and just 29.7 percent participate. Only 37.9 percent of non-white Americans have assets in a retirement account compared to 63.4...

We are locked in a generational war, which will get worse before it gets better. Indeed, it may not get better for a long time. No one wants to admit this, because it's ugly and unwelcome. Parents are supposed to care for their children, and children are supposed to care for their aging parents. For families, these collective obligations may work. But what makes sense for families doesn't always succeed for society as a whole. The clash of generations is intensifying. Last week, a federal judge ruled that Detroit qualifies for municipal bankruptcy. This almost certainly means that pensions and...

In a message to its members, MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, hailed the Social Security “expansion movement” launched by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). In a speech on the Senate floor, and in television interviews, Warren recently declared, “The era of fighting about cutting Social Security is over, and now it is time to talk about expanding Social Security.” According to MoveOn.org, “Our progressive champ (Warren) isn’t alone—more than 150,000 MoveOn members have already backed Senate and House plans for increasing Social Security benefits, not cutting them.” …

Goldilocks wrote: The statement is quoted out of context. NY Times Musters Hillary Defense Of O’Care “What Difference Does It Make?” Dear Comrade Locks, Ok, so let me put it in context for you. Ambassador Chris Stevens, Tyrone S. Woods, Glen Anthony Doherty and Sean Smith died on or shortly after September 11th, 2012 in a terrorist attack on the embassy in Benghazi, Libya by supposed allies of the Obama administration. The administration was supposedly acting on behalf of the American people. But yet, no one really knows why this terrorist attack happened. Still. At the time Obama said that...

Submitted by Gary Galles of the Ludwig von Mises Institute,“We paid our Social Security and Medicare taxes; we earned our benefits.” It is that belief among senior citizens that President Obama was pandering to when, in his second inaugural address, he claimed that those programs “strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers.”If Social Security and Medicare both involved people voluntarily financing their own benefits, an argument could be made for seniors’ “earned benefits” view. But they have not. They have redistributed tens of trillions of dollars of wealth to themselves from those younger.Social Security and...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Juan, fasten your seat belt. The federal government should stay within the confines of the constitution. The constitution does not authorize the federal government to have anything whatsoever to do with healthcare. So, Obamacare should be abolished along with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but the people who are on those programs should be grandfathered in because they paid money to be in there and they've ordered their lives to stay there. The states should regulate healthcare because the states retain that power under the constitution. So, if you want if you want mandatory healthcare, go...

There’s more to the deceit and dishonesty about Social Security and Medicare discussed in my recent columns. Congress tells us that one-half (6.2 percent) of the Social Security tax is paid by employees and that the other half is paid by employers, for a total of 12.4 percent. Similarly, we are told that a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent is levied on employees and that another 1.45 percent is levied on employers. The truth of the matter is that the burden of both taxes is borne by employees. In other words, we pay both the employee and the so-called employer...

Throw-away track phones bought at a nearby dollar store. Private investigator hired to trail working mom. Massive document shredding days. Bashing of hard drives. Office Chaos. Wow. Is this the latest fiction novel on a crime themed best seller list? No. These are actual references in US House of Representatives hearings on the massive Social Security Disability Fraud Scandal. Honest and dedicated federal employees, sickened and disgusted over the theft of money and services of US taxpayer dollars filed a whistleblower lawsuit to blow the lid off of a scandal that looks to bankrupt a federal agency founded for the...