"Social Security Is The Soft Underbelly Of The Welfare State"

[Strelnikov_]

Gee Grandma, I didn't know you were a welfare queen.

Since when is retirement insurance you, or your spouse, paid into welfare?

As Krugman notes, Federal revenue is the problem. It is also my understanding that it were not for the magnitude of the current SS surplus, in contrast to the 80's, we would also be running up record deficits relative to GDP.

Spearing the Beast
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/opinion/08krugman.html?oref=login&hp

. . .

"Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

"By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932."

. . .

"To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's."

"Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels."

. . .

[K-W]

1. Paul Krugman, unabashad liberal economics

Its nice to know some people still remember them.

[Warpy]

2. Social security is an example of how socialism WORKS

even when the rich tried to sabotage it at the very beginning by exempting their own incomes from it. It's why they despise it over and above any other government program. It works. And it didn't need THEM to make it work.

The only reason there is a problem NOW is that Congress has gotten used to considering 40% of our insurance premiums to be theirs to waste on pork projects and to hide the true cost of dropping all the taxes the rich and the corporations have had to pay in the past.

So to HELL with the lot of them. Any bastard in Congress from either party who votes for this continued theft should be targeted for defeat. Any Congressman who sides with the junta over this piratization scheme should be destroyed in his own district by any means available.

This is WAR.

[K-W]

3. I literally think these people just want to relive the cold war,

so they are trying to spark another communist movement by abusing the working class.

[Cleita]

4. I am so tired of this.

I just applied for my widow's benefits from SS and I am being made ashamed to collect them because they are welfare???

Excuse me! Both the husband and I have worked all our lives, paid into the fund all our lives, and beyond retirement did a lot of volunteer work that institutions would have had to pay for if we hadn't done it for free!

A pox on all of those who say we are a bunch of old people with our hands stretched out!

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. How come these idiots can't see that the 'welfare state'

the social programs that offer a modicum of security, are all that stand between them and a violent revolution of the underclass?

Undermine SS and medicare and medicaid, and the South Central rioters will be burning mansions in Beverly Hills next time. As Lincoln said, a nation divided against itself cannot long stand. If we devolve into a two class system, a small wealth class and a huge underclass, they will come to understand what class warfare really means.