The Sad Situation In Kentucky

     The Lexington Herald-Leader has an op ed from Ned Pillersdorf, the attorney who has brought class actions both against Eric Conn seeking damages for his representation of claimants before the Social Security Administration and against the Social Security Administration for its efforts to cut 1,787 of Conn's former clients off disability benefits. 

      It's a sad situation. It's surprising that we're still waiting for a decision from a federal District Court Judge. It's surprising that Social Security has started holding hearings in these cases. It may only be days before some benefits are terminated. Without intervention from the federal courts within a few months hundreds will have lost benefits.

Senate Committee Schedules Hearing

     The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled a hearing for October 20 on Understanding Social Security’s Long-Term Fiscal Picture. Here's the witness list:

• Stephen C. Goss, Chief Actuary U.S. Social Security Administration 
• Jagadeesh Gokhale, Ph.D.,  Director of Special Projects Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative 
• Dean Baker, Ph.D., Co-Director Center for Economic and Policy Research

Andrew Biggs Is Still Annoying -- And Wrong

     When George W. Bush campaigned for the partial privatization of Social Security, Andrew Biggs, a Social Security employee, was at his side. That rankled me. I felt it was deeply inappropriate for a Social Security employee to take on such a politicized role. Bush later nominated Biggs to become Deputy Commissioner of Social Security. Senate Democrats blocked that nomination, suggesting that I wasn't the only one rankled by what Biggs did.
     After his stint at Social Security, Biggs landed a job at the American Enterprise Institute, a Koch brothers front organization.
     Biggs has a blog at the Forbes website on which he's posted a response to the Social Security discussion at the Democratic Presidential debate Tuesday night. The ideas of expanding Social Security and lifting the cap on wages covered by FICA both came up in the debate. Biggs makes the point that lifting the FICA cap wouldn't generate enough revenues to fund an increase in Social Security benefits. This is accurate but it's also rich coming from someone who campaigned for completely undermining Social Security's finances. President Bush never released a plan for partially privatizing Social Security but he was promising to keep paying benefits to everyone already drawing benefits or near retirement age, to not increase the FICA tax and yet to divert much of the FICA tax receipts to private accounts. Put all of that together and it would cost trillions of dollars. Did Biggs and Bush ever put forward a plan for paying for this? Of course not. Republicans never have to pay for their Social Security plans. Only Democrats have to pay for their plans.

     Biggs points out that raising the FICA cap wouldn't be enough to assure that no further change would have to be made anytime in the next 75 years to protect Social Security's funding. He seems to believe that means there's no point in raising the FICA cap. Right. Lifting the FICA cap would only assure program funding until 2080 so obviously that idea is worthless. In fact, if you remove the FICA cap, you could do some modest benefit increases and still assure the future of the Trust Fund well into the future. That was what the Democratic Presidential candidates were talking about.
     I think that Biggs will have to come up with some better arguments to convince the American people that it's a bad idea to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to give higher Social Security benefits to many.

No COLA This Year

     As expected, there will be no Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) this year for Social Security recipients. This is the third time this has happened since 2010. It had never happened before 2010.
     Unfortunately, unless there's a change in the law, Medicare premiums will be increasing dramatically for almost one-third of Social Security recipients. Since the Medicare premiums are deducted from Social Security benefits that means that a lot of Social Security recipients will see a significant drop in the payments they receive.

Colvin Heading To Florida

     Carolyn Colvin, the Acting Commissioner of Social Security, will be in Sarasoto, FL for a town hall discussion on Thursday. Representative Vern Buchanan invited her. Buchanan, a Republican, is a member of the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.

GOP May Demand Social Security Cut

     From CNN Politics:

... [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell privately wants the White House to pay this price to enact a major budget deal: Significant changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and funding the government. ...

McConnell is seeking a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security recipients and new restrictions on Medicare, including limiting benefits to the rich and raising the eligibility age, several sources said. ...

Editorial On Hearing Backlog

    The Des Moines Register recently ran an editorial decrying Social Security's enormous backlogs of hearings on disability claims. The paper said that "Congress needs to give the SSA the resources it needs while resisting the urge to strong-arm judges who appear to be too productive" but also said that the agency needs a "long term strategy" for reducing its hearing backlog. The problem with calling for a "long term strategy" for reducing the backlog is that no long term strategy can succeed in the absence of an adequate agency operating budget. 

     Iowa is represented in Congress by two Republican Senators, three Republican representatives and one Democratic representative. Congressional Republicans are the sole reason this hearing backlog problem exists. They stand in the way of Social Security getting an adequate administrative budget. Backlogs went up rapidly when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives while George W. Bush was President. They started going down once Democrats took control of the House in 2006 and gave the agency a bigger operating budget. The backlog continued to decrease until the 2010 election which put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives. At that point, the agency's operating budget went to hell. The hearing backlog did a U turn and started shooting up. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is so deeply entrenched in gerrymandered districts that it is hard to imagine any change in the control of that body for many years into the future. The hearing backlog is rapidly heading to two years. These is nothing to prevent the backlog from going far higher than that. Claimants are losing their right to a hearing.

Benefits Began In 1940