LET'S LOOK AT SOCIAL SECURITY FACTS!

 SEVENTY FIVE YEARS OF SOCIAL SECURITY

“LET'S LOOK AT SOCIAL SECURITY  FACTS”

First a Belated  75^th Birthday Party!

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, stated in a recent column in the New York Time,  that the 75^th birthday in 2010 of  Social Security  “should have been a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate a program that has brought dignity and decency to the lives of older Americans.”     Today, some 53 million Americans  have a good reason to celebrate what President Franklin D. Roosevelt and those in Congress and the American public who supported this critical social security legislation in 1935.   However, the celebratory candles are in danger of being snuffed out by opponents such as former Republican Senator Alan Simpson who referred to Social Security  as   “ a milk cow with 310 tits!”     and  the American Association of Retired Persons  as “greedy geezers of America.”     I wonder if Simpson is collecting his  overly generous federal pension package or if those eligible  Simpson  family members have forfeited  their Social Security benefits?   Among those joining Simpson in weaning away the 310 million Americans from the Social Security  milk cow is  his soul mate, Wall Street billionaire, Pete Peterson.  He has committed $1 billion  to promote his rants about shrinking the sole retirement system available to millions of American working people and other economically disadvantaged who qualify for benefits.  His mantra like many others in the financial world is “Let them invest in the Stock Market!”  However, before we scuttle Social Security for the benefit of the “greedy geezers of Wall Street” let us  review some Social Security facts.

Do you know that Social Security currently:

• Pays benefits to roughly 53 million Americans
• Covers 6.5 million children annually from the Social Security benefits program.                                                                                               
• Covers spouses and children of workers who have died or have become disabled.
• Covers grandparents raising grandchildren.
• Covers severely disabled children.
• Covers families of fallen service members.
• Covers  25%  of single or widowed Americans over 65  whose total income is derived from Social Security

(Many of the above would be living in poverty without Social Security assistance. 49% of workers 55 years and older report less than $50,000 saved for their retirement excluding Social Security retirement benefits)

Current financial status of Social Security.  (It is not broke!)

• The Trust Fund has $2.5 trillion in United States government bonds that are sufficient  to keep the program solvent for the next three decades without any meddling by Congress!
• The Social Security Trust Fund will run a surplus until 2027 when it will accumulate $5.5 trillion.
• If no action is taken by Congress, the Trust Fund will begin to withdraw its cash out of the U.S. Treasury obligations it holds that will let it pay all outstanding benefits until 2041 based on the annual 2010 Trustees’ Report.
• Wage earners pay 6.2% on their salaries until $106,800 is reached which amounts to $6,622 annually. Employers match the worker’s contribution.  Under this wage cap system, those making the most money stop paying into Social Security when their salaries reach $106,800. 
• In 1983, President Reagan and  the GOP Congress increased Social Security taxes  on the working class well above the needed revenues to support projected retirement data.   The plan raised in 2007, $175 billion more than the program spent in that year alone.
• Today’s retiring workers have already paid for their benefits because they have paid a higher payroll taxes for the past twenty-five years thanks to the 1983 meddling by President Reagan and his GOP Congress members.
• Social Security Trust Fund has had a surplus revenue annually since the early 1980’s until 2010 & 2011 when high unemployment reduces payroll collection but did not endanger benefits.  Any shortfall can be covered by the Social Security Trust Fund.
• Social Security  expects contributions again to support benefits from 2012 to 2041.

SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND OWNED BY AMERICAN WORKERS

The Trust Fund does not belong to the federal government but to the American workers who have paid their FICA taxes all their working lives.

• The monthly benefits belong to the American worker not the U.S. Treasury
• or any branch of government.
•  In the next ten – twelve years,  the U. S. Treasury will have to begin paying back  the trillions  it has borrowed from Social Security Trust Fund – the American workers’ money.  The surplus funds and all future revenues are  placed in U.S. Treasury securities.
•  The U.S. Government each year borrows Social Security surplus( about $200 billion annually) to operate the government programs.   
•  The Social Security Administration consists of   three members appointed from the president’s cabinet and two members representing the public sector Social Security Commissioner.
•  The Social Security Administration  and Trustees release a comprehensive report annually describing the financial status of the program and its services to the American  people. 

ATTACKS ON SOCIAL SECURITY

• IT IS NOT TRUE THAT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS COLLECT SOCIAL SECURITY:  The estimated 12 million illegal immigration  living and working in America pay into the Social Security system through the FICA tax.  The  Social Security Administration receives millions of W-2  earning reports with  incorrect Social Security numbers and names. The FICA taxes are  placed in an “EARNING SUSPENSE FILE”   It is estimated that the FICA taxes paid by illegal workers subsidize the Social Security system as much as 10% of its annual surplus.   Illegals will not be able to collect any of the amount they have paid in because of false credentials submitted to the Social Security Administration.  Undocumented workers pay FICA taxes during their working lives in the United States but will not collect benefits later.
•  President George W. Bush  in 2005 proposed  to borrow $2 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund to privatize the system.   President Bush rationale was that the system would cost less in five or six decades as a result of privatization.  We just have to reflect on the current real estate market and our economic recession and the colossal failure of the private pension system during the financial turmoil of these last few years.  Social Security’s seventy-five year track record  versus  the economic fluctuations of  Wall Street  is a no-brainer except for the voracious greed of the financial sector.  
• Political ideologues the right and the anti – Social Security  Republican Party  cannot accept the fact that a government program can be a solution and not the problem.
• The anti- Social Security coalition consisting of almost all Republicans  in Congress and a few Democrats want to replace the Social Security system  with a program that would invest the American wage earners’ Social security taxes in global markets-weighted index of stocks, bonds and real estate. 

Fortunately, the American public knows better than to have the birthday candles snuffed out of the long-lived 75 year-old Social Security Program.

TEA PARTY CANDIDATES, MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS - VICTIMS OF THE GREATEST SCAM IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY!

As I observe the Tea Party movement across the American political landscape I often ask myself, “what is the mindset that makes people vote against their own best interests?"

Who among the battery of FOX News  “pundits” is going to explain to these angry Tea Party members that they are victims of a political hoax perpetrated by the likes of Karl Rove, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity,  Russ Limbough, Bill O’Reilly and  their ilk, and the  corporate CEOs and their wealthy board directors  who pull the strings of their Republican Party puppets for their own welfare and not that of the American people?  The Tea Party members scramble about without a creditable plan to address those critical issues that keep them awake nights and spend their time at rallies and on the street corners reciting the mantra of lower taxes and smaller government with no indication that they understand the relationship between government and the benefits they enjoy.  I can understand their anger over the recession, home foreclosures, job losses, etc., but I can’t understand how they don’t realize they are being duped by the top rung of corporate bosses through their spokespersons - the Republican Party, the Tea Party, third party anonymous major donors and their highly paid messengers of doom and gloom and negativity in the media world.

When will the Tea Party members:

• discover  that the Republican Party is ready to once again sacrifice middle-income Americans by  employing the now disastrous  “trickle down economic theory”  foisted on the defenseless public by Ronald Reagan?  
•  realize that the Republican Senators are unanimous in their insistence that the present Bush tax legislation be extended to continue including the 2% of the wealthiest  Americans? 
•  understand that extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the  2%  of the wealthiest American  will  incur a federal government  loss of over $700 billion in revenues for the next ten years  which will add to the  already record deficit?
•  accept that handing more tax breaks to the wealthy will have minimal stimulus effect on the economy because they can save it  - unlike the middle and lower income earners who have to spend their marginal income on basic needs, thus returning the dollars to stimulating the economy?
•  recognize the fact that under Obama’s proposal, as reported by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, 97% of small businesses would receive a cut in their taxes that will improve their ability to re-hire workers and create additional jobs?
•  see through the emptiness of the “emotional appeal” of the Republican leadership  and Fox “news” carriers and realize that the tax cuts at the high end do not produce jobs but only add to the deficit?
• recognize that we are all vulnerable, interdependent beings and that a worthy goal is to foster diversity and reconnect people within the environment?
• reflect seriously on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s view that, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”?

Will they turn back their Social Security monthly stipends, and their Medicare cards, as they vote to “get the government off their backs”  and follow the economic canons of a long deceased author made popular by Glen Beck  - Frederic Bastiat in his book The Law published in1850, where he stated that taxing people to pay for schools  or roads was government sanctioned theft (we could  add police, fire and hospital services too!)

How can we get through to them that they are working against their own interests? It baffles me.

ROGUE'S GALLERY

Negative advertising, whether deemed effective or not, dominates the political climate as our nation prepares for the November election. In trying to sort out the facts from the many attack ads, I collected “snapshots” of candidates from a wide array of articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals that reveal at the very least, some shortcomings, and at the most frightening, downright dangerous positions.

Listed below are snapshots of a few of the candidates seeking positions of political power at the national and state levels.

I have observed that so many of these candidates exhibit values that are far from being in the best interest of the average American family and have demonstrated character flaws that raise my fear that they can’t and won’t represent what is best for the American people.  Shouldn’t character count in a member of Congress, a senator, or a governor of a state? This partial list of Republican candidates, if successful, will promote measures that will allow corporate greed to continue to spread unabashed, unbridled, and unprecedented.

As I review the qualities of the candidate list the Republican Party is presenting to the electorate this fall, I am at a loss to understand why, according to recent polls, American voters’ may likely choose the candidates who would return us to the failed policies of the past that led us to the current financial and international problems.

I hope that readers of this blog will carefully examine what those candidates are saying and promoting, and will not be swayed by slick attack ads, many paid for by anonymous donors who really don’t care about the welfare of the public, but are front organizations serving corporate and Wall Street interests.  This is not to say that many Democratic candidates don’t have issues; however, their flaws do not compare with some of the “off the wall” characteristics of the candidates below.

Senator Daniel Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but not to his or her own facts!”   Intelligent voters will compile the facts before November 2. Here are the snapshots.

SHARRON ANGLE (GOP candidate, U.S. Senate, Nevada) stated that the cities of Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas were governed under Sharia,  Islamic law and that  Departments  of Education and Energy  should be eliminated along with Social Security. She has suggested that autism is a phony rubric and that people are taking advantage of such maladies to obtain extra health benefits.

BILL RAGGIO (GOP leader, State Senate, Nevada) in a recent response to Angle candidacy – said he could not accept “… her extreme and often even radical ideas and positions.” and  “ … her record to be totally ineffective as a four-term assemblywomen, her inability or unwillingness to work with others, even within her own party, and her extreme positions on issues such as Medicare, Social Security, education, Veterans affairs and many others.”

DEMA GUINN (wife of former GOP governor Kenny Guinn, Nevada) stated that U.S. Senator Harry Reid, Nevada, shared her late husband’s commitment to education and he would have supported Reid in the current campaign.

JOHN RAESE (GOP  candidate, U.S. Senate, West Virginia) owns a home in Palm Beach where his wife and children live in a $2.9 million 7000 square foot home with a driveway of pink marble, and he has his “residence”  in West Virginia. He told an interviewer, “I made money the old fashion way. I inherited it.”  As a businessman he he “wants to eliminate the minimum wage” and it was reported he “has failed to pay workers’ compensation for on the job injuries.”

PAUL LePAGE (GOP candidate for governor, Maine) has homes in Maine and Florida; each gets tax breaks as the family’s principle residence.  A correspondent asked, “If elected will he be governor of both states?”

JOE MILLER (GOP for U.S. Senate, Alaska) joins Carl P. Paladino (GOP candidate for Governor, NYS) in wanting to outlaw abortion even in the case of rape or incest. Miller also denies climate change and favors abolishing Medicaid & Social Security.   He pointed out that Social Security is unconstitutional because it wasn’t in the Constitution when it was written. Mr. Paladino, who was found to have sent pornographic emails, wants to control internet pornography.

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL (GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, Delaware) believes that allowing women to attend our military academies cripples “the readiness of our defense” and wives should “graciously submit” to their husbands  while her web site exhorts her “commitment to the women’s movement.” Rick Santorum, (former GOP U.S Senator, Pa.), calls her the “Clarence Thomas for feminists.” She told Bill Maher on his TV show that, “American scientific companies are crossbreeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.”

MEG WHITMAN (GOP candidate for governor, California) spent a record shattering $145 million of her own money as of October 1 on her campaign but recently fired her housekeeper  who worked for her for 9 years because she “discovered” she was an illegal immigrant.  Correspondence dated 4/22/03 between the housekeeper and the Whitmans indicated they were informed of her status at that time. The Whitmans had received notices from the Social Security Administration about the housekeeper’s illegal status in 2003.  Meg Whitman  “immediately terminated Nicky’s employment” when the news broke.  Mrs. Whitman said she considered Nicky, “a friend and part of our extended family.” The housekeeper  might be deported.

MICHELLE BACHMANN  (GOP Congresswoman – re-election, Minnesota) urges Minnesotans to get “armed and dangerous” to “fight back” against cap-and-trade legislation and be concerned about the “death panels” in the recently passed health care reform legislation.

TOM GANLEY, (GOP candidate, House, Ohio), a car salesman, has been “… sued more than 400 times for fraud, discrimination, lying to customers and overcharging them about repairs,  and endangering their safety.”

DAVID SCHEIKERT (GOP candidate, House, Arizona) Is accused of being “a  predatory real estate speculator who snatched up nearly 300 foreclosed homes, been cited for neglect and evicted a homeowner on the verge of saving his house, just to make a buck.”

RICHARD HANNA  (GOP candidate, House, New York), a millionaire who  “got rich while his construction company overcharged taxpayers thousands, was sued three times for injuries caused by faulty construction and was cited 12 times for health and safety violations.”

DAVID VITTER (GOP U.S. Senator, Louisiana) was involved in a sordid prostitution scandal in Washington, D.C. and Louisiana in 2007 but easily won his party’s primary and now leads his opponent Charlie Melancon (Democrat, Louisiana).