The loony Senator wants to reduce the disability rolls, because too many people are on them and because they’re gateways to “social plagues…such as heroin or meth addiction and associated crime.” “When a county hits a certain level of disability usage disability becomes a norm. It becomes an acceptable way of life and alternative source …
In a sensible world this statement by that oh-so-admired Paul Ryan, R-WI, would disqualify him from consideration as a serious man. Told that Senator Harry Reid said yesterday that he wouldn’t consider any changes to Social Security because the program isn’t broken and doesn’t contribute to the deficit (true statements, both of them), Ryan said …
In light of this post at Washington Monthly, where Steve Benen discusses some poll results which show that Americans generally don’t want spending cuts. The problem, of course, is that much of the public tends to approve of spending cuts in the abstract — and only in the abstract. Prior to the State of the …
Sound advice: The same people who won votes in 2010 by (falsely) accusing Democrats of tampering with Medicare would love to run in 2012 claiming that Obama and his party are the ones who cut Social Security and Medicare. That’s so blindingly obvious that it’s hard to believe the political mavens in the Obama Administration …
Pete Peterson and his henchman David Walker keep shrieking that entitlements will kill us all unless the middle class gives them up. It’s instructive to see what he really thought of them as far back as 1994: To Peterson, the Concord Coalition, “Lead . . . or Leave,” and others, Social Security is an expensive …
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Updated below As far as I know this is the first time any President of either party has reduced the FICA tax. From the NYT article on the deal Obama and the Republicans have made. It would reduce the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax on all wage earners by two percentage points for one …
If Obama goes along with this set of proposals from the Bowles-Simpson Commission, thereby gutting Social Security in exchange for very little, I’m going to conclude that not only is he not a liberal, he’s not even a Democrat. As Digby says: If he ends up signing on to deep cuts in social security in …
The “Deficit” Commission’s chairmen issued a set of draft proposals (I put that in quotes because the proposals do not make any sense if the goal is to reduce the deficit). They suggest a whole string of things that are politically impossible or ridiculously small: cutting earmarks (less than 1% of the federal budget) Send …
In its annual report the trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund announced that “pension and disability payments will exceed revenues for this year and 2011, reflecting the deep recession.” Predictably, politicians who want to get rid of the program immediately pounced, saying the retirement age should be raised to 70 (it went from 65 …
Updated below If all goes well, in a couple of hours the House of Representatives will pass a bill that essentially declares that all American citizens have a right to health care. This action will sit alongside FDR’s establishment of Social Security: “. . .we have tried to frame a law which will give some …