Posted on 09/02/2010 9:49:56 AM PDT by Qbert
President Obama is playing “Watch the Birdie” with Americans over the age of 50, diverting their attention with handouts and scare tactics to hide in plain sight the enormous damage his policies are doing to the retirement safety net.
First it was Medicare. The ObamaCare legislation drops a few free goodies like breadcrumbs in front of Medicare recipients (such as free diagnostics and annual checkups) to draw their attention away from the enormous cuts in Medicare being used to help pay the freight for the new national healthcare system...
[Snip]
Now the president is coming after Social Security.
In his Saturday radio address on August 14, President Obama revealed he is already moving on to cut Social Security.
But again, he is playing "Watch the Birdie," this time using scare tactics rather than sweeteners.
In that address, he denounced the idea of solving Social Security’s problems by allowing young workers the freedom to voluntarily choose to save and invest some of their taxes in their own personal retirement accounts, an option federal employees already enjoy. The president rejects fixing the Bernie-Madoff Ponzi scheme currently used to finance Social Security with some form of personal accounts to begin pre-funding Social Security with real saving and investment. Instead, he rails about “privatization,” an incendiary (and false) characterization of voluntary personal retirement accounts intended to scare the bejeebers out of the American people.
[Snip]
So the question remains: What is the president up to?
[Snip]
Leaks indicate that among the options being considered are delaying the retirement age (sounds like a panacea to bureaucratic pencil pushers who never did a day of hard labor in their lives), changing the basic benefit formula to reduce future benefits, and delaying or slashing COLAs...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. For years, I’ve known that SS was unsustainable and that the Gen X and Yers were going to get a huge screw job if the government tried to maintain SS benefits at current levels.
I wouldn’t lose ANY sleep if SS were terminated now, even though I am broke and quickly closing in on retirement age. The culprits in this theft of astronomical proportions is every Congress since the 60s who spent SS into insolvency.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it to my dying day - the largest collection of white collar criminals is in the US Congress. If we put bars on the Capitol Bilding, we would have approximately 90% of the criminal element in America locked up!!
Of course. Kill the old folks and there’s more money to give to obama’s friends, the people who vote democrat.
” maybe allow people are are over a certain age to still receive it, but something needs to be done. id rather put money away int omy savings that i control.”
I agree. If memory serves correctly, President GW Bush suggested to do that/tried doing that a few years ago and the Dims came unglued.
“These programs need to be addressed, that’s for sure. The only problem I have with the government doing this now is that they want to take more and more money away from the general public to finance their other programs...”
Good points. And anybody who believes that the Libs are somehow going to get serious about cutting the other programs is delusional.
Giving money to people who did not contribute is socialism.
Before any SS dollars are touched we have to force our government to stop every penny being given to those in this country illegally.
Before any SS dollars are touched we have to force our government to stop every penny being given to foreign countries.
Get our troops out of Germany, Japan, S. Korea and save some more money.
If SS needs to be modified/eliminated, and I think it sure does, it must be done for those entering the labor force not for those who have had money forcibly taken for SS for over 45 years.
If they touch my money, which was to be in a trust fund and is not, they will realize why we have a 2nd Amendment.
this is creating a really entertaining meltdown over on the Libtard side of the blogs
>social security and welfare is unconstitutional. it is not the roll of the federal government to provide charity and welfare,<
Sounds like the product of the public schools, but your point does not take into consideration that people are forced to pay into Social Security all their lives, so it is not charity. I agree, the Fedeal Government under FDR had no business putting SS into law, forcing the private sector to put money into an account that the Federal Government (need I say under a Socialist parading as a Democrat?) installed with no lock box. In other words, the Feds have been using those moneys for whatever they wanted. If there had been a lockbox, our money would have grown in that saccount, and SS would not be in trouble today.
Careful, don't tell those wonderful folks over at AARP that, they spend a lot of their members dues money telling everyone how solid the "trust fund" is.
Democrats are attacking Republicans like Sharon Angle and Boehner (R - OH) for proposing cutting/privatizing SS when this is EXACTLY what Obama plans on doing (cutting it anyway) after the election. I never can figure out why Republicans let the democrats get away with this. Why would you cut SS (or raise taxes as democrats will propose) while leaving retired federal employees living like kings at our expense? Their retirement is a huge unfunded deficit that buys us nothing.
Social security TOOK my money for 50 years!
The politicians STOLE my money out of social security!
Now it is said that social security is BROKE and it is MY FAULT????
The sad thing is that over the course of my working life, I paid in far more on social security than I’ll ever get out of it. If I had been permitted to put it into a private investment account, the return would have been much larger.
Only problem was that there is actually no social security trust fund. Instead, Congress spends it all on greasing their supporters’ palms and other current expenses.
Now the bill is coming due. So, we have paid in all our lives, and now they will proceed to screw us.
In fact, Obama is already screwing us, since there was no COLA increase this year since Obama swore there was no inflation this year.
Yeah, sure. Just check out the prices at the local supermarket.
There's NO WAY China would lend us that much money.
Social Security (and I’m eligible, altho perhaps foolishly waiting ‘til my benefits are larger) is too big a part of the total budget. Medicare is even worse from an actuarial point of view.
That said, I don’t want Obama deciding how to fix it. There is some relationship between the SS benefits and the work contributions made. Obama wants to redistribute it to people who haven’t contributed, but whose votes he thinks can be permanently bought (illegals, chronically unemployed, etc).
I suppose the AARP will jump on board with this too, since they were in favor of the healthcare takeover.
Anyone who listens to AARP is someone who has not outgrown his need for a daddy. Exactly who the Socialists love and the public schools have Bren promoting for decades now.
“...Cut the E.P.A. , I.R.S., the Department of Education ( the states should only have the authority for this ), HUD, so on and so on.”
Yep. Start with cuts to those agencies (although, cutting the IRS would be a hard sell at this point given declining tax revenues, etc.) and go from there.
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