Posted on 07/20/2010 4:46:25 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
With little fanfare, Congress has begun preparing to rewrite Social Security to shore up its creaky finances.
It’s an about-face of sorts for Democrats, who during the Bush administration avoided all discussions of overhauling Social Security.
But given the nation’s worsened fiscal situation, and the difficulty of raising taxes or cutting Medicare, fixing Social Security is beginning to look relatively easy by comparison. It could become a focus of President Barack Obama’s efforts to address deficits.
The activity surfaced on Thursday in a couple of committee meetings, one in the House and one in the Senate. The discussion comes as politicians get ready to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the program for retirees and those with disabilities. Social Security – a cornerstone of Democratic orthodoxy – was signed into law on Aug. 14, 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ironically, Roosevelt praised it as a program that would protect the country from the need to go deeply into debt to provide relief to needy retirees during times of economic crisis. Now, Social Security faces eventual insolvency because of the retirement of the baby boomers and other factors, and threatens to add substantially to the government’s debt load.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
No, it faces insolvency because Democrats and Republicans have been busy looting its surplus receipts for the last forty years.
Wasn’t it Johnson who opened the SS accounts to pay for his War On Poverty and The Great Society?
Gotta love the socialist left...Tax the Rich!!!!! but there are no Rich,,, Tax them anyway!!!!!!!
Make the young communists pay. They seem to love Socialism anyway. Tax the young!!!
Easy fix, the Democrat solution is going to be yet another bailout. Might be called something else- like the Social Security Reformation act or the Retirement Benefits Preservation act but it WILL be a bailout.
You say “Dems and Republicans.” That is misleading. The Dems provided the leadership that got us into this mess. As Hillary herself pointed out, the GOP opposed social security. They tried to block it. They tried to repeal it. They tried to cut the benefits. They fought against the Dems every step of the way. But the Dems won and used it as a springboard to additional power.
Social security can’t be fixed at this late date. All they can do is delay the day of reconing, while shifting the burden to the younger generation.
The GOP should hold the Dems’ feet to the fire. Make them do the heavy lifting, and remind the voters, “We told you so.” Since it can’t be fixed anyway, there is no point in helping the Dems avoid the blame by pitching in to get it done.
The GOP’s position should be that “We tried to stop them. There is no point in us trying to fix the mess the Dems created at this point. It can’t be fixed. We’ll support anything they pass—provided that it actually fixes the problem. But the burden is on them to propose the fix.”
Bernie Madoff is a piker compared to the Social Security Ponzi Scheme.
SS is a pay as you go system. It is now in the red meaning that instead of being a cash cow, it is now a black hole. When SS went into the red in the early 1980s, Reagan and Tip O'Neill struck a Faustian bargain that resulted in decreased benefits including raising the retirement age for full benefits from 65 to 67 and increasing taxes. The system is unsustainable as currently structured.
I said, "for the last forty years."
How else do you think Democrat and Republican deficit spending was financed?
The Republicans who fought the original passage of Social Security were not responsible for this charlie foxtrot, but the ones who guzzled at the trough of deficit spending and the unified budget over the last forty years are complicit.
I thought it was Carter who did that.
It was also Carter that add something that required all government departments to get yearly 10% increases for budgets. That is where the “cutting budgets” malarkey came from.
I’ve got a win-win idea - let’s invest the Social Security trust fund in subprime loans for “diverse” home buyers. That’ll work!
“Now, Social Security faces eventual insolvency because of the retirement of the baby boomers and other factors, and threatens to add substantially to the government’s debt load.”
The social security fund is not going into debt “because of the retirement of the baby boomers”.
It’s going into debt because the U.S. Congress with the cooperation of the U.S. Presidents spent all the money that the baby boomers paid in for social security on general federal government expenses, leaving a bunch of I.O.U.s in their place, and never actually invested a dime of it. A trust fund filled with I.O.Us is not a trust fund.
Had the baby boomer’s social security money been invested, outside of the government, even with all the recessions over the years, the trust fund would still be substantially sound for paying the baby boomers benefits, with no new government debt or new social security taxes needed.
Instead, the baby boomer’s benefits are already beginning to exceed what current workers are paying in, leaving some combination of increased federal debt, increased taxes and reduced benefits inevitable.
Well since it was Johnson before Carter ... and it was Johnson’s War on Poverty (Forty years ago today in his first State of the Union speech, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War On Poverty.” Johnson’s declaration came just weeks after succeeding to the White House upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) - then came his Great Society in 1964 ... I don’t think Carter had anything to do with that ... and again, it was Johnson who cracked open SS to pay for all that ...
Regardless of what a previous post to me states, you are definitely correct :O)
I expect they will raise the age you can claim YOUR money will be raised to 70, or more......
You are right it was Johnson who started putting SS taxes into the general fund while at the same time stting up welfare. Our social security was paid out to finance welfare babies.
Well you know when social security was set up the average life expectancy was 63 and age of full collection was 65. So since life expectancy is now 74+ 70 is still a better deal than the way it was originally structured. Still I think people who have collected for more than 20 yar need to take a cut too and not just us younger folks!
yar=years
Privatizing of retirement savings can't be passed when the control of money-flow would be out of the hands of the politicians, who just re-distribute it to buy their votes and their jobs. So long as there are those who LIVE off the income of OTHERS, and they are nearly the majority now, there will NEVER be a way to survive as a Democracy or Republic. The game is over, as we can't all go on welfare at the same time, and that's almost where we're at. NO INCOME PRODUCERS means the funds are gone, and borrowing cannot last much longer to keep all these handouts going.
B.S. Bush campaigned on SS reform. He had a Republican House in his first term. He did zip. The Republicans are as guilty.
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