Posted on 06/18/2005 12:49:55 PM PDT by FairOpinion
RALEIGH, N.C. - President Bush's proposal to allow taxpayers to invest part of their Social Security taxes would have an amplified, negative effect on farm families who depend on the government program in retirement, Rep. Bob Etheridge (news, bio, voting record), D-N.C., said Saturday.
"Farm families have tight budgets, and most don't have access to employer retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans. In fact, three out of four farmers fund their own retirement. They depend on Social Security when the crop yield is low or the weather is bad," Etheridge, a member of the House Agriculture Committee and a part-time farmer, said in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address.
Etheridge, who co-chairs the Democratic House Rural Working Group with Rep. Stephanie Herseth (news, bio, voting record), D-S.D., spoke as public polls show tepid support for Bush's call to allow younger workers to create voluntary personal accounts funded out of their Social Security payroll taxes.
Democrats accuse the White House of seeking to privatize the Depression-era program, while supporters of the accounts argue they are needed to modernize it.
Etheridge said rural Americans usually are older and more likely to rely on the Social Security benefits.
"Take my mother-in-law, for example," he said. "She lives in rural North Carolina and relies on her monthly Social Security check to help pay her bills. Across the country, women like her find it harder to make ends meet than most other Americans. Under privatization, thousands of women like my mother-in-law would tragically fall into poverty."
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll earlier this month found 37 percent of Americans support Bush's handling of Social Security, while 59 percent disapprove. Those numbers hadn't budged after more than four months of the president barnstorming the U.S. to sell his plan to create private accounts in Social Security.
IF they depend so much on Social Security, than they will be hurt WHEN social security will go bankrupt and when benefits will keep decreasing using the guise of extending eligibility age so fewer and fewer people live long enough to collect for more than a few years.
Private accounts ARE the ONLY REAL solution to solve the Social Security problem.
Famous Dem Algore said his gov't is phasing out the family farm and would continue when he became Pres.
Well at least the thought is rather original. It reminds me of the time Bush pere bitch slapped Pierre Dupont by noting that while his idea may be a new idea, it is a dumb idea. Whatever the merits of privitization of social security (I think they are limited), that has nothing to do with the issue of cutting back benefits over time. Bush is backing into means testing lite (the obvious solution); nobody is suggesting that poor geezers need to go out on the street with signs, "will work for food." In fact nobody is suggesting cutting benefits at all for the current crop of geezers. The field of play is with nascent boomer geezers.
Of course being able to cash rent your land at $110 to $140 an acre guaranteed. Has no impact whatsoever on retired family farmers.
Just how does "allowing" ,not forcing, people to invest part of their money in private accounts hurt farmers? SS is not going to be eliminated, though it should be, the Dems are lying, cheating and stealing again to get their own way, once again. Anything to block the Bush administration.
Farmers here are selling to developers.
Farmground= $3,000-4,000/acre
Developers= $10,000-25,000/Acre
Sorry 'bout the memories John Mellencamp, Grandpas selling the farm and moving to Florida with a huge portfolio.
Well then...gall dang it...make it so it doesn't hurt the farmers...stop the whining and FIX it.
"Take my mother-in-law, for example," he said. "She lives in rural North Carolina and relies on her monthly Social Security check to help pay her bills. Across the country, women like her find it harder to make ends meet than most other Americans. Under privatization, thousands of women like my mother-in-law would tragically fall into poverty."
What a crock! Bush has already said that current retirees WILL NOT see any change. Do the democritters think we are all stupid? Waitaminute! They do, why else have they been steadily losing ground for the last 12 years?
"Whatever the merits of privitization of social security (I think they are limited), that has nothing to do with the issue of cutting back benefits over time. "
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Sorry -- that is not what I meant. Some were suggesting that INSTEAD of private accounts, they should just increase the age for social security eligibility, without mentioning that effectively THAT is a cutback in benefits.
Private accounts are not the deus ex machina to a painless exit from social security insolvency. The math and the theory simply are not there. Pity.
So the FUND THEIR OWN retirement and get Social Security when there is a bad crop.
Sounds like a gravy train to me.
Where can I sign up..?
since when have democrats been concerned about farmers?
Since they signed on to repealing the "death tax" that forces so many family farms to sell just to pay again for what they already own.
No, wait, they oppose that too.
(Maybe this helps explain why so many farming states voted for Dubya.)
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RAT Rep. Bob Etheridge's memory needs to be refreshed (if that's possible):1. Private accounts will be VOLUNTARY.
2. Existing geezers have been promised their benefits will not be affected by private accounts.
These two realities pretty much refute everything he said. Of course, lies repeated often enough...
phasing out the family farm and would continue when he became Pres.
Regardless of the issue here, that is one of the things that has bugged me--the family farm being phased out. While I didn't grow up on a farm, my dad was in agriculture and we always had a big garden with plenty of jobs to do on the weekend. Try finding that much in any neighborhood any more. We should give thanks (I'm just saying simple thanks) to those who supply us with food. Sometimes, it seems to me that we just think it magically appears at the grocery store. Rural America with good down-home country folk is the "real" albeit nostalgic America to me.
Sky high withholding taxes will hurt everyone if nothing is done.
The original USA economy was based on agriculture. I don't know what our present economy is based on, but it doesn't seem to be anything basic like ag, mining, or manufacture.
No we're definitely NOT based on agricuture. It's more like service industries and technology. I lament that someday we may lose the capacity to supply ourselves (i.e. self-reliance) with all the manufacturing going other places or closing down. I do think we're in okay shape for now, but who knows about the future?
Next headline, "Farmers Forced to Eat Catfood"
There should be an IQ test administered to anyone running for public office. These people don't even make sense. Maybe we could just ask for their college board scores or something.
Don't help the demonRATS spread the lies, at least not here.
The two concepts are conflated, and Bush is a prime facilitator of same. I call them as I see them.
What theory?
There is historical evidence, PROOF, that private account are the solution. Chile is an excellent example. They were in worse shape than we are in this regard, and pulled themselves out of it by private accounts.
In Britain and Chile, lessons for revamping Social Security (success with private accounts)
in Chile, things were even more dire. The military government, facing what was by all accounts an unsustainable retirement program and a possible default on its obligation to retirees, replaced the state-run pay-as-you-go system with a three-pillared, largely private one. Twenty-five years later, Chile is looked to as a model of how to retool Social Security.
At least 20 countries have added some kind of private component to their traditional pension systems, with seven more in the process of implementing them.
Chile has what economists call a fully funded system, containing enough money to cover all retirees if they simultaneously decided to cash out.
The first pillar is the state's responsibility, which covers workers who retired before 1980 and guarantees minimum pensions for poor workers.
The second and main pillar is the obligatory monthly payroll deduction of 12.3 percent. Ten percent goes into the worker's own account, administered by one of six private pension funds, while 2.3 percent covers administrative fees.
The third pillar is a voluntary, tax-deductible savings plan administered by banks. "We have to be proud of Chile's system," says Guillermo Arthur, who runs Chile's pension program. He says that pensions have grown an average of 10.4 percent since 1981, far exceeding the 4 percent that he says they need to be profitable.
Today, Chile has more than $60 billion in pension investments, equivalent to more than a third of the country's gross domestic product. Mr. Arthur says that these funds have been crucial to economic growth in the 1980s because pensions were invested in Chilean companies.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1362251/posts
The problem here is that private accounts don't do anything to solve the actuarial deficit, and if the investments don't pan out, the government will cut checks to the poor geezers in any event. It is what is called the "moral hazard" problem. I have checked the numbers, and posted them, and the actuarial deficit can be closed without horrific major surgery. Case closed. Now on to the biggest game of all, that insatiable hungry beast, called medical services and subsidies. Oh the horror. On that one, we are headed to socialized single payer medicine, or something not far from that. It is the only politically acceptable to way to ration medical care.
And there you have it.
I always laugh when I drive by two developments in the next county over....one is named "dunfarmin" the other "dunteachin". I swear the yuppies who live there have no clue that the names of their developments are not scottish in origin.
"...we may lose the capacity to supply ourselves with food..."
It was Bill Clinton's aim to ship food production over to Africa so we could convert our farmland to housing for immigrants.
The success of Robert Mugabe's agricultural policy in Zimbabwe shows that this concept has a limited utility.
It was Bill Clinton's aim to ship food production over to Africa so we could convert our farmland to housing for immigrants.
Most of the farmland here is used for housing for citizens. BUT I would say that things got pushed along by Clinton and society as a whole. We don't even thank the farmers anymore. We should.
The success of Robert Mugabe's agricultural policy in Zimbabwe shows that this concept has a limited utility.
I assume that you are being sarcastic on your use of the word "success" here. Mugabe is hardly worthy of mention.
This is SO dumb.
The farming subsidy has always been questionable and debatable. Look how the Dems are using the very things they helped create (bad policies) and furthering their chant. Classic emotional battering..
"Farm families have tight budgets, and most don't have access to employer retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans.
Very true that they don't have acess to corporate sponsored 401ks. But he opposes giving them access to what is essentially a 401k plan?
In fact, three out of four farmers fund their own retirement.
In some sort of savings plan that pay dividends in investments or in coffee cans burried on the back 40? Above, he indicated that "most" farmers don't have retirement plans, now he says that most do?
They depend on Social Security when the crop yield is low or the weather is bad," Etheridge, a member of the House Agriculture Committee and a part-time farmer, said in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address.
I again don't get it. Are they retired, or are they still farming?
They must be putting into SS now. Can't they be disciplined an dput there money into private accounts?
Does anyone get AARP magazines? I swear, it's a constant barrage of "you're going to go broke under Bush's plan." It's incredible.
Good analysis. Farmers can have IRA's, just like anyone else. If they don't, who's to blame? (Hint - it's not G.W. Bush.) The farmers I know work until they die, anyway. If they wanted to sit around and do nothing, they wouldn't be farmers.
On a different issue, I wonder if writers like this realize what creeps they appear: "If it weren't for a government handout, my mother-in-law would starve to death, because I'm certainly not going to do diddly-squat for the evil old broad!"
You nailed it square, Tax-chick.
I don't recall anybody saying the transition would be painless. I'm assuming by 'painless', you mean cost-free. All the discussion I've read does show a large transition cost.
Before you get to that, it has always been discussed that this would be a choice, not mandatory.
In fact, if private accounts become an option (again, by choice)and all Dems choose not to use that option, then we'll have to listen to them all whine in a few years. They'll be whining that we Repubs who chose to use it are buying up all their property cheap because they can't afford to pay the taxes with their SS.
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