The House Ways and Means Committee has invited members of the public to comment on the Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin plans to restore solvency to Social Security.
But there’s a glaring omission: from reading the committee’s description of the two plans — and its draft bills — you’d never know that both Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin urged significant increases in Social Security taxes.
4 comments:
Wow! This just keeps getting better and better. So they keep the part of the recommendations they want (the cuts to S.S.), and ignore what they don't want (the increased taxes).
We are surely witnessing the death of our democracy. We The People, the 99 percent, are being ignored.
The nub of the Social Security "problem" is that the federal gov't has borrowed every dime of the $2.8 trillion trust fund (our FICA contribution money), and don't want to pay us back.
Despite the recession, Social Security revenue has only suffered relatively minor cash shortfalls of about 6 percent per year over the past few
years, easily handled by the trust fund. But the feds don't want to pay that approximately $50 billion per year- they'd rather cut the program.
So far, massive lobbying efforts by numerous senior advocacy groups all the way down to grassroots efforts by people accross the country-
are being flat ignored by Obama. He wants and fully intends to cut Social Security.
This has all literally come down to hitting the streets by the public. I fear only a mass-occupation of the Capital Hill/White House areas by many thousands of us can stop our fraud of a President from beginning the process of killing Social Security.
If ever there was just cause worth fighting for- this is it.
I share your anger and concern.
The crux of the problem is the borrowing of the Social Security trust fund money.
The excess FICA and SECA taxes were to go directly to the trust fund to be invested in special-issue Treasuries, intended solely for Social Security beneficiaries. Before those taxes were invested, however, as you said, they were borrowed to pay for other government expenses. How special are those special-issue Treasuries, if the money that was supposed to go into them, paid instead for battleships, education, etc.
Don Levit
Rep Paul Ryan(a Republican) is the guy behind the cuts, current and future, the Repubs/baggers are interested in cut, cap and balance and have been pushing that in His proposed Federal budgets since 2011, with cuts ranging from a mere 12.5% to 31%, I can understand the anger, but the President is not a dictator, though He is too interested in a grand bargain and trying to get a budget done with a bunch of deficit hawks that want to spend more money on War and lots of New unneeded tanks and a trillion Dollar P35 fighter program and of course on general obstruction, the planes are built like expensive race cars one at a time(Ferrari anyone?), instead of on an assembly line like in WWII where B24 bombers were built by FORD at their converted willow run auto plant on an assembly line...
If Obama was interested in getting a budget done, why didn't he do it the first two years when he had the House and the Senate? He was too busy with his Obamacare to take care of business. Also the unneeded tanks and fighters are going to the Muslim Brotherhood thanks to obama.
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