Bill Buckley on Social Security
I received this email:
I found an article at National Review Online that I thought you'd like to see: "The Impossible Reform: The Social Security Fix."You may or may not hold President Reagan in the same high regard that I do, but since the problems affecting Social Security affect both of us, I thought you might find this interesting.
That's an interesting article, but Buckley's "obvious solution" of raising the retirement age shouldn't be the first option considered. The truly obvious solutions - obvious to everyone without a vested interest in regressive taxation, anyway - are to eliminate the income ceiling on SSA contributions, and eliminate the exemption for unearned income.
A 1996 book, Take the Rich Off Welfare, had this to say:
"The extra money doesn't just sit in the trust fund; the government borrows it to pay for other things, like military waste and corporate welfare - making Social Security tax, in effect, just another form of income tax. Over a trillion dollars, plus interest, will have to be repaid in order for Social Security, and other trust funds like Medicare, to meet their obligations in the next century. Can you guess who's going to repay it?"
I'm appalled at the thought of tomorrow's children paying for today's governmental follies because today's elected officials can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar.
William Greider writes about Social Security in "Greenspan's Con Job"
"...the trust fund, despite what right-wingers like to claim, is not an accounting gimmick. The government is legally obligated to pay back the money (as surely as it is obliged to repay Treasury bonds). The borrowed trillions, in fiduciary terms, belong to the "beneficial owners"--every worker who has paid higher payroll taxes for the past twenty years. Greenspan is familiar with the accounting because he was chairman of the bipartisan commission that supposedly "fixed" the Social Security problem back in 1983 by imposing a huge increase in FICA payroll taxes--extra revenue that produced the still-growing surpluses. This historic tax shift (I think of it as the "crime of '83") was most convenient to the Reagan Administration because Reaganomics had just created huge budget deficits by cutting income taxes for the monied interests and pumping up the military budget. The burgeoning surpluses from the Social Security payroll tax would help offset the economic impact of the deficits. Hardly anyone noticed at the time, since Democrats cooperated in the "solution." Now Bush Jr. has done the same thing. And Greenspan is proposing another "fix": Double-cross the workers who paid the extra trillions; don't disturb the new monster tax cuts delivered to the rich. Any con artist would appreciate the bait-and-switch as a nifty piece of work."
By the way, when we started planning our retirement, I had our planner run the numbers as if SSA will no longer exist. (I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist in bad times...)
As far as Reagan goes, I have about as much regard for him as you do for Bill Clinton.