Commissioner Martin O'Malley gave an interview to the Dallas Morning News. Nothing earth shattering but it's still interesting that he's talking about Social Security's long term funding problem and the President's budget in a much more open way than prior Commissioners. You can tell that he's working for the President rather than trying to be scrupulously above even the hint of politics. The whole "Independent Agency" claptrap is fading away. It never worked. A government agency that pays money to one American in five is inherently part of the political system.
Next step, make Social Security a cabinet level department.
3 comments:
SSA, due to the extreme level of its expenditures, should have been promoted to become a cabinet-level agency as soon as it was made independent.
Only, doing that would come with a catch -- the politicians from both parties wouldn't be able to continue their usual cycle of ignoring Social Security until election time, making wild promises during election season that they had no intention to follow through on, and then return to ignoring it as an issue until the next election cycle.
So, no cabinet level position.
Martin J. O'Malley: "Please help us Congress we're running out of funding!"
Also Martin J. O'Malley: "Let's bring everyone back into the office at considerable expense to employees and the agency, and pay to open new offices that no one wants to go to."
Like I tell my teenage son, I'm not going to give you more money if you keep blowing it.
@10:18
What do you mean by "no one want to go to" new offices? Do you mean FOs? Because you are dead wrong if your talking about the public/beneficiaries (aka the people FOs are supposed to serve). And its not like they are opening hundreds of new offices, so how would new lease costs be a significant line item?
The real waste has been on new IT and software that adds zero efficiency to processing claims. More offices with more bodies would at least guarantee some productivity increase -- though I am still in favor of IT automations and regulation changes to reduce tedious manual inputs
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