Posted on 08/29/2015 7:34:15 PM PDT by WilliamIII
Republican presidential candidates. who have had to seek contributions from a handful of wealthy contributors, want to cut Social Security. Average Americans love the program; the superwealthy don’t.
Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why. The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing. But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program, and what Bush learned was that the underbelly wasn’t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum from the GOP’s victory in the 2004 election, despite support from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security as it is and don’t want it cut.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
Attempt? I remember a couple of weak speeches without specifics and then a quick retreat when he got some pushback.
Doesn’t matter whether Americans like SS or not.
In it’s current form, it’s unsustainable
Unsustainable? If they hadn’t been spending the surplus on other government programs, there’d be money in the bank to sustain it
Means testing against your IRA/401(k) balances are in the cards. Congratulations for saving for your retirement instead of spending it on hard assets, i.e., something where more effort than a Power Shell script is needed to erase your wealth.
The Rat bastards that created it and bled it dry may just find out that theft begets punishment.
I get it, I need it, I worked for it, without it,I’m F@@##@cked.
They’ve been treating Social Security taxes as a general revenue source rot the government. The program ran a surplus for decades, but they spent the money instead of saving it in a Social Security trust account.
I agree...I worked 51 years straight with no lapses in employment...I paid into it...I earned it...
Just so. I paid far more into the Social Security program over a lifetime than I’ll ever get back in SS payments. Plus I paid income taxes on the money I put in in later years, and then have to pay income taxes on the same money again when it is returned to me.
Yes, the system is broken, but because the politicians have used our contributions to make presents to their friends, given it to illegals, and all the rest of their law-breaking crimes.
The solution is not to make people pay into the system for a lifetime, and then to rob them of their return.
GOP bled it dry as much as the Dems. Bush ran huge deficits - and the Social Security surplus was used to help pay them
The “surplus” was always a fiction. It was always tax and spend. There never was any “investment” other than empty government promises.
What a crap article.
I retired on the cheap, no big house or golf course, but, I do have a small place paid for in the country, I like it, no frills but we eat well.
We may always have a “Social Security” program but the payments will eventually need to be cut. Death panels for SSI recipients, as it were.
So when they say “We will always have social security” the lying leftists may actually mean “we will have a program called social security and through that program you will get a check for $50 a month”. And they will claim they’re telling the truth, of course.
If they had used it just to pay down the debt we’d be way better off now.
But they wouldn’t even do that much- it all had to be thrown away as fast as they got their hands on it.
Well dope, if you had seen who wrote it, you would have saved yourself that 5 minutes of your life.
I heard today that Ben Carson wants to raise the retirement age. That’s fine if you work a government desk job. Try telling a waitress or a roofer that they have to work until 70 before they can start to get some of their money back.
You never hear about welfare running out of money.
Excuse me, but there was a sustantial yearly surplus for about two decades beginning in the mid 80s. SS taxes brought in more than was needed to make curren SS payments. But instead of saving the surplus, govt - D and R - used it for general govt programs
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