The right's smoke and mirrors scam about Social Security--it ain't broke (unless China is too)
We've noted in these postings the growing inequality between rich and the rest of us in America, and that is the appropriate backdrop against which to investigate further the right's smoke-and-mirrors scams about tax policy and earned benefits. Let me remind you with Kevin Drum's Mother Jones article on The Price of Plutocracy: "For all practical purposes, every year about $700 billion in income is being sucked directly out of the hands of the poor and the middle class and shoveled into the hands of the rich." (That sentence is illustrated with a great chart, with data drawn from Joseph Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley, the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics, a book I highly recommend.)
The national debate about deficits has been part of a relentless push by the right to reduce as much as possible the New Deal earned benefit programs of Social Security and Medicare. The right twists the facts to suit the arguments it wants to make...
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...The right uses "personal responsibility" and "entitlements" as though they refer to two non-intersecting worlds, whereas in fact the opposite is true.
Workers pay into Social Security to support current workers who paid into it in the past. The trust fund was established, and amended with a good deal of actuarial research under Reagan in 1983, with the knowledge that the baby boom generation would be passing through and create a bulge of benefit needs and that US birth rates tended to be smaller now than they were a century ago. In other words. what is happening now in terms of the baby boomer population reaching retirement age and the decline in US birthrates was exactly the information on which the Social Security changes made in the 1980s were predicated. Either we believe that these kinds of predictions are reasonable (in which case it is utterly silly to raise nightmare scenarioes about bankruptcy, because there is nothing of the sort) or we believe that it is impossible to predict for sure what will happen (in which case it is utterly silly to raise nightmare scenarios about Social Security bankruptcy, because GDP could grow just a little faster than predicted, easing all future problems, or boomer needs could grow just a little less than predicted, easing all future problems). Either way, the crisis-bell ringing being done by the right as a way to attribute deficits to Social Security is a smoke and mirrors scam.
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