Posted on 08/03/2014 2:20:26 PM PDT by Kaslin
Question: How can you tell it’s a difficult campaign season for Democrats?
Answer: They are already running ads accusing Republicans of wanting to destroy Social Security and Medicare.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is financing an Iowa ad saying that GOP nominee Joni Ernst has “proposed privatizing Social Security [and] gambling our savings in the stock market.”
In Arkansas, Senator Mark Pryor accuses his opponent, Representative Tom Cotton, of trying to “undermine the integrity of Medicare and Social Security.”
And in Kentucky, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes has ignored press criticism to launch a new round of attacks on Mitch McConnell for supporting the Ryan budget, which Grimes falsely claims “increases Medicare costs and privatizes Social Security.”
House campaigns are also featuring their share of Social Security and Medicare demagoguery: In Arizona’s second congressional district, Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Majority PAC has run ads accusing GOP candidate Martha McSally of wanting to “raise the retirement age” and supporting “a plan that the AARP says privatizes Social Security in the stock market.” Similar ads are running in Florida and elsewhere.
As the election gets closer, we can undoubtedly expect still more.
In fairness, of course, it should be noted that it’s not just Democrats who peddle this nonsense. In Montana, the Republican senatorial candidate, Representative Steve Daines, is running an ad claiming that embattled Democratic incumbent Senator John Walsh “believes that privatizing Social Security should be on the table.”
Unfortunately for those candidates, the trustees for those troubled programs just injected some inconvenient truths into the debate.
Start with Social Security. Last year, the program spent $75.6 billion more than it took in. This year’s gap is expected to be more than $80 billion. This cash-flow shortfall is being covered by interest payments on the bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund.
Soon the interest payments will not be enough, and Social Security will have to make up any shortfall by redeeming bonds from the Social Security Trust Fund. But the Trust Fund holds no actual assets — it’s only government bonds held by the government itself, essentially an accounting measure of how much the system is owed out of general revenues. Thus, when the Social Security system redeems bonds in order to cover its deficit, the money to redeem them. like today’s interest payments, comes from general revenues, meaning that it simply increases our annual budget deficits and growing national debt.
This accounting gimmick will be irrelevant anyway after 2033, when the Trust Fund will be exhausted. By then, Social Security will have redeemed $2.8 trillion in bonds. Of course, you may have noticed that the federal budget doesn’t really have $2.8 trillion to spare.
From there on out, Social Security’s unfunded liabilities top $24.9 trillion. Add that to the $2.8 trillion needed to redeem the Trust Fund, and Social Security is running roughly $27.7 trillion in the red. That’s $1.8 trillion more than last year. It’s not getting any better, folks.
Yet Social Security’s finances actually look pretty good compared with Medicare’s. According to the trustees, Medicare’s Trust Fund will run a deficit this year as it has for the last six years. The program may briefly return to solvency next year, as a result of Obamacare tax hikes, but will be running deficits again by 2021.
Medicare’s Trust Fund will remain technically solvent until 2030, which represents a four-year improvement over last year’s projection. But, as we saw with the Social Security Trust Fund, this is a meaningless accounting measure that doesn’t affect the nation’s overall finances. The program’s total unfunded liabilities exceed $48.1 trillion, an increase of $5.2 trillion since last year’s report.
It should also be noted that the trustees estimate that the total cost of Medicare will increase from approximately 3.5 percent of GDP in 2013 to 5.3 percent of GDP by 2035, and thereafter to about 6.9 percent of GDP by 2088. At that point, Social Security’s costs will consume an additional 6.1 percent of GDP, meaning that these two government programs alone will eat up one-eighth of everything produced in this country. Medicaid and Obamacare will consume another 4.6 percent of GDP. With interest on the debt equaling 9.9 percent of GDP at that point, government will consume 27.5 percent of our economy before it does anything else … national defense, human services, infrastructure, anything. By way of comparison, all federal spending today amounts to 20.8 percent of GDP, and the post–World War II average has been just 19.3 percent.
In the face of this undeniable crisis, proposals to give future seniors more choice of Medicare plans or to allow younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts hardly look radical.
None of this seems to matter to candidates who think they can find a little temporary advantage by frightening senior citizens. Perhaps they are right when it comes to the politics, although such attacks have proven less and less effective in recent years. But when it comes to the future of the country, such irresponsible demagoguery should be all but disqualifying.
Documentation File on the 2014 Impeachment of B. Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro a former Foreign Student from Indonesia, and still a legal Citizen of the Sovereign Nation of Indonesia.
Funny thing about gambling; in an honest game there is a chance you can win.
With Social Security you are guaranteed to lose.
Social Security is already broke.
“undermine the integrity of Medicare and Social Security.”
Socialist schemes continue to undermine the United States of America.
$15,000,000,000,000+, $21,000,000,000,000+, $81,000,000,000,000+…here...
Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat
It’s a Piven that the Democrats would take the Clowardly way out.
Cotton has inched ahead of Pryor. His campaign has not been much in evidence.
Thank God for the real men who founded this country,
and for the real men who continue to sustain it
Please join the 300 by donating $100
"...nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society." - John Adams"This was a favorable moment to shut and bar the door against paper money." [This statement referred to a proposed provision in Article I, Section 8, that would have read 'and emit bills of credit (paper money) of the United States,' which the Founders rejected by an overwhelming vote.] - James Madison- Notes of the Federal Convention 1787
"...there have always been those who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government. There is but one safe rule...confine (it) within the sphere of its appropriate duties. It has no power to raise a revenue or impose taxes except for the purposes enumerated in the Constitution....Every attempt to exercise power beyond these limits should be promptly and firmly opposed." - Andrew Jackson's Valedictory
"...experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government), those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate...the minds of the people...to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth. History, by apprizing them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future...it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views...." - Jefferson's Bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge for Virginia
"Although all men are born free, slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?...the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it....It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently free." - James Madison
"These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety." - Thomas Jefferson-First Inaugural Statement of Principles of Good Government
It should help that so many takers aren’t even Americans anymore; no politician can say it without ending his/her career, but these “da-me-esos” (Hispanic gibsmedats) are filling most population centers pretty quickly here.
If only libs told the truth. “You are too stupid to be trusted with you money so we will take it from you your whole life and give you a few crumbs when you get old. Conservatives want to let you keep your money.”
I think we can say that. We should hammer dims with the truth. Every chance we get. An honest conservative will win big on the national stage.
It's impossible for them to tell the truth, because lying comes natural to them.
BTTT
Social Security was already undermined when millions of Americans were given ‘SS Disability” when they haven’t put hardly a dime into the fund.
Moving people who used up their 99 weeks of unemployment onto Soc Sec Disability under the radar has busted Soc Sec.
Welfare increases far exceeded the COL increases those on Soc Sec RETIREMENT have received under Obama.
Is is intent on destroying America at every bend of the road.
“I think we can say that. We should hammer dims with the truth. Every chance we get. An honest conservative will win big on the national stage.”
For several election cycles the Dems have controlled the media; the truth will never be broadcast to the general public in the same manner as they can spread their message through TV, radio, movies, political “churches” and classrooms.
Can’t disagree with that. We need to state it in our speeches, on the stump, TV Shows etc. Every chance we get. Bypass the media.
“Bypass the media.”
That is the key; while I understood Obama’s initial election (Juan McCain never presented himself as anything other than Bush II’s third term, which might have been fine if the economy hadn’t collapsed), the re-election of Obama has to go down in history as an absolute masterpiece of propaganda in action. He did buy re-election with food stamps, welfare, class & race warfare, etc., but there still should have been enough opposition to unseat him. The media successfully splintered the center and right enough to squeeze him back in...
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