Don't make Tax cuts Permanent & Social Security is not bankrupt until 2200

[cidliz2004]

Social Programs don't have to be cut, like food stamps, veteran benefits and Education Incentives!

George Bush has chosen tax cuts for the wealthy and George Bush wants to make those tax cuts PERMANENT - while he is telling us that Socical Security is going to go bankrupt! Excuse me, but where is the money, In the wealthy's pockets and is still being taken from the aged and from the poor children.

[leftyandproud]

1. BUT..

social security was never meant to be funded with general tax revenues. That's what the FICA tax was created for...and it was raised in the early 90's. Even with the tax hike under Clinton, it won't be enough when the flood of boomers retires.

[tk2kewl]

2. right, but

gaps from budget shortfalls are often filled by borrowing from SS trust fund.

To the thread poster: I don't think you can be credibly predict anything 200 years out

[cidliz2004]

4. Not my prediction

"I don't think you can be credibly predict anything 200 years out"

Kerry said this on Imus this morning

[tk2kewl]

7. that is a stupid thing of him to say IMO

[cidliz2004]

3. According to Kerry if the tax cuts were not made permanent

we could fund Social Security until 2200, there would be no crisis.

What has happened is that the surplus is being spent by the Federal Government. THAT IS THE CRISIS. Our Social Security has been dipped into over and over and over.

[Metrix]

5. Social Security crisis? Not if wealthy pay their way

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0127/p09s01-coop.htm

Then, beginning in 2018, instead of raising payroll taxes to pay for baby-boomer retirement benefits, Social Security would begin selling its bonds back to the government.

To pay for those bonds, income taxes would be raised - high earners would begin paying higher income taxes.

In other words, the fact that income taxes will eventually need to be increased in order to cover Social Security benefits was part of the Greenspan/Reagan plan from the start.

That's the real meaning of the trust fund: It's an implicit promise that high earners will keep their part of the bargain and begin paying their share of Social Security's costs when the baby boomers retire.

[Scout Finch]

6. SS

In an address to Congress on January 17, 1935, President Roosevelt foresaw the need to move beyond the pay-as-you-go financing of the current Social Security system. "For perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions," the president allowed. But after that, he explained, it would be necessary to move to what he called "voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age." In other words, his call for the establishment of Social Security directly anticipated today's reform agenda: "It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans," FDR explained.

"What Roosevelt was talking about is the need to update Social Security sometime around 1965 with what today we would call personal accounts," says one top GOP member of the Ways and Means Committee. "By my reckoning we are only about 40 years late in addressing his concerns on how make Social Security solvent."

[Pepperbelly]

12. Scott, Scott, Scott ...

that is so much baloney ... a Rush Limbaugh-RNC distortion and outright falsehood. Why would you go spreading garbage like that in your new home?

[kodi]

8. 9/11...Now shut up and get in line.

.

[BlueInRed]

9. Krugman has a new article out on SS; pulling no punches

And he pulls no punches in saying Bush's real goal is to dismantle SS and the new deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/opinion/08krugman.html

[Disturbed]

10. Rethugs are..

Robin Hoods in the reverse.

Have I said how much I loath these scumbags? Yes, I have.

[sadiesworld]

11. Pretty freakin' obvious solution...

but virtually ignored in bizarro world.