Dan here…Via the LA Times and LA Times and Common Dreams comes information on the first day of the new Congress on Social Security. Old ideas re-emerge in the variety of coverage in media.  Here is an excerpt on the issue. According to: Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, authors of the book Social Security Works! and […]

Holiday present for you via Congress and the Cromnibus. Tucked into the massive spending bill Congress passed this weekend was legislation that reversed 40 years of federal law protecting retirees’ pensions.  The change will allow benefit cuts for up to 10 million workers, many of them part of a shrinking middle-class workforce in businesses such […]

While I was reading an article on the web this morning from my phone, up popped one of those incessant anti-Obama/anti-Obamacare “take-a-survey” ads—one of those little square red-and-white-bordered things with a goofy-looking picture of Obama on it.  My laptop software blocks these things, so I was lucky enough to have not seen one of those […]

Highlights: There was this at the Senate debate in Iowa on Sunday: “I will fight hard to protect Social Security and Medicare for seniors like my mom and dad because our Greatest Generation has worked so hard for the American dream for our families,” said Republican Joni Ernst. Like many conservatives, Ernst supports some sort […]

Barkley Rosser at Econospeak writes an op-ed on the Washington Post’s reporting: Dana Milbank Joins Parade Of WaPo Hysterics Over Social Security And Medicare Dean Baker has posted on this more completely and effectively than I shall do here (and his url is so long on this one, I shall not link directly, sorry), but […]

by Dale Coberly FINANCING SOCIAL SECURITY A BOB BALL APPROACH Bob Ball proposed in 2007 (www.robertmball.org quoted in NASI “Fixing Social Security” Reno and Lavery, 2009, p 14) a “balancing rate increase.” This is the way his idea was described in the NASI publication: Acknowledging the uncertainty of 75 year projections, former Social Security Commissioner […]

The above is an extract from a 2012 National Academy of Social Insurance publication entitled Social Security: What do Americans Want. There is much to see and read in this publication and I urge people to take a look at this longish PDF of 57 pages and many Tables, of which this is just one. […]

2014 Long Term Budget Outlook (pdf 64pp) While we are still waiting on the 2014 Social Security Report we do have today the release of CBO’s annual Budget Outlook which among other parts does include a chapter on Social Security. I plan to extract and post some Tables from it but in the meantime people […]

Stay with me here. Because I am almost serious about this proposal. Or at least it highlights the contradictions (while not Heightening the Contradictions). The Border Crisis: tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border. Social Security ‘Crisis’: per ‘Reformers’ one that is driven by pure demography – too few future workers to […]

by Dale Coberly For some time now the Social Security Trustees have been reporting in the “media” using scare tactics like this: “Social Security Going Broke Sooner Than We Thought! Faces [fill in the blank] Trillion Dollar Deficit!” And I have tried to explain that what those numbers mean is that we need to raise […]