If yesterday’s Social Security and Medicare funding revisions worry you, go read Fred Clark. We do know, for certain, that 2037 is 28 years from now, and that little bit of arithmetical obviousness allows us to extrapolate a few other certainties. We know, for instance, that all still-living children born in 2007 will be turning …
Go look at the graphs Ezra Klein has in this post. They clearly show that Social Security has no financial problem going forward and that it’s health care costs which are ballooning out of control. The really good news is that the guy whose think tank produced the charts is giving the keynote at President …
If you’re self-employed you know all about Social Security and Medicare taxes; that 15.3 percent of gross income you have to pay to the Feds on top of any income tax you might owe on your adjusted gross income each year. Everybody pays into it either through payroll tax deductions or when you file. Unless …
Remember Social Security privatization? The proposal Bush put forward last year (with no details)? The one that got shot down by the public? It’s in the new budget. Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs …
The Center on Budget Priorities and Policy has published a summary of what Mr. Bush proposed last night. In last night’s press conference, President Bush endorsed a proposal that would result in substantial cuts in benefits for middle-income families and deeper cuts for higher-income families. While the proposal was described as reducing benefits for the …
In the great Social Security debate there’s been some discussion of converting from wage-indexing to price-indexing. This is the best explanation I’ve seen so far: Using the term “indexing” to describe what is being proposed creates confusion and makes a simple proposal seem complex, so let me try to clarify it. Right now, Social Security …
Jonathan Chait has an excellent explanation of the reasons why Bush’s SocSec plan needs to be defeated. Privatizers portray Social Security as a kind of low-performing 401(k) plan. But the program was never intended as a personal retirement plan. It’s a form of social insurance, designed to spread risks throughout the population. One such risk …
In light of these remarks from Chairman Greenspan, it’s instructive to read this article by Greg Anrig, Jr., pointing out that on Social Security, Alan Greenspan (Maestro, as Woodward’s book called him) has no clothes. Over the past two decades, Greenspan has repeatedly argued that Reagan’s “ironclad commitment” should be broken. Year after year, he …
Senator Diane Feinstein in the San Francisco Chronicle: Half of all American workers today are not covered by retirement plans. For them, Social Security is it. More than 4.3 million people receive Social Security benefits in California, including 860,000 of them with no other source of income. We have the highest cost of living in …
Here’s a question for Mr. Bush: if your (asinine) plan for private accounts went through, would the payouts from those accounts be taxable income? …while the retirement account might be “money that the government can never take away,” the government usually “takes away” some of citizens’ income through taxation. Would retirees’ withdrawals from their retirement …
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