1994...Petersen Foundation tries to get Clinton to Privatize Social Security instead of doing HCR!

[KoKo]

Just Think! The more things CHANGE...the MORE they REMAIN THE SAME!) How much longer does this battle go on? Will Petersen WIN this time? :shrug:

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A Word for Entitlements
April 05, 1994 By Robert Kuttner

Mr. Peterson admits that thanks to the Clinton deficit-reduction program the deficit will decline to just 2.2 percent of gross domestic product in 1998. But he uses very pessimistic economic assumptions to show the deficit rising to an improbable 10 percent of GDP by the year 2010, and the debt rising to 112 percent of GDP by 2020.

In truth, nobody has a clue what the national debt will be 25 years into the future. There are simply too many variables -- including whether Congress passes health reform. But while Mr. Peterson acknowledges that inflation in health costs is a prime culprit in the rising deficit, he opposes universal health insurance even though countries with universal coverage spend less on health care.

Mr. Peterson's main remedy is to dramatically slash entitlements by taxing all benefits received by households with incomes over $35,000. Mr. Peterson calls this policy an "affluence test."

What we have here is really an ideological assault on social insurance, masquerading as budgetary concern. If we value Social Security and Medicare but desire greater deficit reduction, there is an alternative to singling out social insurance benefits for extra taxation. Let's just raise top tax rates on high income taxpayers generally -- like Mr. Peterson!

Social insurance -- most notably Social Security and Medicare -- is part of what binds us together as citizens rather than as merely winners and losers in a free-market lottery. Since FDR, social insurance has also helped bind the Democrats to the wage-earning electorate, and in a way that transcends divisions of race and class. Not even Ronald Reagan dared attack Social Security, though his aides wanted to privatize it.

And Social Security is our most effective program of income redistribution. It and Medicare are responsible for the dramatic reduction of poverty among the aged. Social insurance, in short, is the political and moral high ground of American liberalism.

It is no mystery why Republican conservatives would mount an attack on entitlements. Slashing entitlements comports with the GOP free market philosophy, and has the political virtue of dividing Democrats from their electoral base. But it is harder to fathom why the Clinton White House would provide the vehicle for this assault.

More of the article at..

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-04-05/news/1994095201_1_entitlement-programs-clinton-national-debt/2

[704wipes]

1. If that was Pete Petersen then it was the devil incarnate

speaking.

I think he is still alive and kicking at Blackstone Group.

Hundreds of thousands of American working people for over 30+ years have lost their jobs when his equity group bought them out, diced and sliced them off any number of ways, laid them off and/or sold them off for other vultures to lay them off and ship their jobs and livelihoods overseas or south of a border/

His day to ROT in HELL will come...