Greed is good meme

“…passionate post on Pete Peterson, Alan Greyson, and Erskine Bowles regarding…”

I think you mean to say Alan Simpson, or more aptly put Simpleton.

Lynn,

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

but you make two mistakes. one serious.

the not serious one is your statement that “the Trust Fund” will still be able to pay 75% of SS benefits. It’s not the Trust Fund that will pay the benefits. It’s the payroll “tax” (it’s really an insurance premium).

The more serious mistake is calling for an increase in the cap so “the rich” can pay their “fair share” for SS.

Roosevelt created SS “worker pays” because he was smart enough to see that would protect SS from the rich. He was right. Only today even the left has forgotten that.
The tragedy here is that by calling for the rich to pay for SS, not only do you shoot yourself in the foot politically, but you are endangering SS in order to “save” the workers what amounts to an extra eighty cents per week.

By raising the payroll tax one tenth of one percent per year…. for essentially 20 out of the next 70 years… while wages are projected to rise by more than one full percent for all of those years… SS would be made fully “solvent” and fully “funded” forever….. as far as we can see.

It is politically shortsighted and bad policy to call for making the rich pay for Social Security. If I were starving I would be glad to get a handout, foodstamps, or welfare. But if I can pay for my own groceries, I do not want to be forced to take welfare. This is what forcing the rich to pay for my… and your… retirement amounts to.

Social Security prevents poverty in old age by making it possible for workers to save their own money safe from inflation and safe from bad days on the market, and it allows the workers to insure each other against a lifetime of wages too low for them to save enough to be able to retire.

It is insurance. It does no one any good except Mr Peterson to talk about it as if it were, or ought to be, welfare.