Nothing punishes the elderly more than keeping interest rates at NEAR ZERO when MOST of them planned to stretch their retirement savings by living on interest..
Nothing punishes the elderly more than STEALING the premiums from Soc Sec FICA taxes so that Obama can play Robin Hood.
Nothing punishes the elderly more than BORROWING money to write soc sec checks because current taxpayers are paying interest TWICE for the same dollar that goes to Grandma. Because before Obama invented STEALING THE PREMIUMS, the COngress invented stealing the surplus. From WHO --- the current "elderly".
Nothing punishes the elderly more than playing loose and fast with all the Medicare providers and presenting them as sources of graft and fraud and inefficiency.
Nothing punishes the elderly more than keeping all aspects of the economy hostage to indecisions on budget, spending, energy, healthcare, and taxes -- thus reducing the ability of their retirement funds to grow.
And speaking of retirement funds -- nothing punishes the elderly more than PROMISING outrageously generous govt pensions that are unsustainable and only MANAGING that problem when it gets to crisis proportions..
'bout covers it -- don't it?
And FDR, New Deal and the 30's??? NONE of that is relevent. We don't live in that world any world anymore. Those tactics aren't even a CHOICE anymore. Get over it...
If the concepts and policies of the New Deal are no longer relevant, then we face a very bleak future, not only for senior citizens but all citizens.
It invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."
The biggest threat we face as a nation is privatization, and the religious like belief that private entities and only private entries can serve the interests of We, the People.
The American people are
stakeholders in our economy and public policies. Private entities can only serve stockholders...BY LAW.
Sadly, the arguments
for the New Deal public policies were made, won and agreed to by what was rightly called the Greatest Generation and the parents of that generation who lived through the Great Depression. We now live among an Ayn Rand social Darwinist generation that does not have even a shred of human understanding of why those policies were essential or the conditions that existed before the New Deal, not only for senior citizens, but all citizens.
There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations.
Edmund Burke
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
That's a fact of life.. You can't beat up on biz and expect it to cower in a corner.. They WILL leave to serve other markets that didn't exist when FDR became a tyrant. You can't stimulate an economy like feeding a squirrel and expect consumerism to create jobs HERE in this country. You can't pass MORE UNIVERSAL programs that turn into welfare in just one lifetime and go broke. You can't place bets on the markets that reflect policy -- not reality because the US is NOT an isolated market anymore. And the dollars invest don't just stay here or dissuade GLOBAL competition..
You can't repeat a history that doesn't exist anymore.
And I don't have a stake in this economy just because I vote for clowns to do my bidding and feed me Scoobie snacks.
We have become a nation of beggars and whiners. And your revolutionaries are carving us into competing factions. Our UNITY comes from a realization that MILLIONS of folks get up each morning to FREELY SERVE OTHERS..
I gave you a succint list of the harm that current policy is doing seniors above.. You ignored it.. Don't think you have the ability to claim a higher moral ground anymore --- just because you live for the past...
You gave me a list of excuses, obfuscation and accusations that are not directed at the guilty parties.
Social Security is not very difficult to fix. Medicare will be more difficult. But it MUST be fixed, and burdening the elderly with a lot more out of pocket costs is not acceptable or moral.
You mean to tell me that America, the 'city upon the hill', the most prosperous nation on this planet CAN'T offer a minimum social safety net for it's elderly citizens? While other industrial nations with much smaller economies offer a more comprehensive social safety net than America? Then what this country stands for is truly in question. 'City upon the hill'? Hardly.
People like Paul Ryan are a fraud. If he is truly interested in 'saving' Medicare, then the first step is admitting that the efficiency of the current public enterprise can't possibly be matched by private insurance corporations. There is no 'invisible hand' that can fix Medicare. At the time Medicare came to be in 1965, about half of the elderly had no health insurance—they were too old and too likely to get sick, so the private market simply wouldn’t insure them.
Here is a history lesson from the father of Reaganomics.
Wall Street Targets the Elderly
Looting Social Security
by
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.
Wall StreetÂ’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.
As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”
Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.
Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social Security retirees to other uses.
We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford, an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.
Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.
Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.
Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.
Years ago with stagflation defeated and a rising stock market, I favored privatizing Social Security as a way of creating a funded retirement system and producing greater savings and larger incomes for retirees. At that time Wall Street was interested, not for my reasons, but in order to collect the fees from managing the funds.
Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.
After the latest crisis brought on by Wall StreetÂ’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyoneÂ’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make.
Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the elderlyÂ’s old age security.
Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now “unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables–a pre-1929 unregulated financial system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror–are the new untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.
"The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, Government ought not to interfere."
President Abraham Lincoln
