(The following is a rough draft of a blog post. I'm esp. interested in feedback with facts or supportable actuarial numbers, esp. with sources, w.r.t. people who've been paying in to SS and Medicare for many years, and how they would have fared if they'd invested the same $$ in Treasuries or the like. Thanks!)
I'm pretty old. I've worked all my life, stayed out of debt, saved, invested carefully--everything I was "supposed" to do.
During the last six months, I've lost at least a quarter of my retirement fund.
Now they want to cut Social Security and Medicare. (Several DU posts have brought this up; v. sorry I don't have the post URL's handy; but see
http://firedoglake.com/2009/02/12/obama-social-security-and-the-diamond-orszag-plan/ and
http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_11674580 and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryhnB4bjQNY&eurl=http://www.ourfuture.org/video/2009020710/new-effort-steal-social-security )
They've never yet missed an opportunity to try; they succeeded in large degree when they pushed through the "baby boomer" increase on SS taxes and changes to the CPI to which benefits were pegged; they're certainly not losing focus now.
WHO SHOULD PAY for our current deficits/disaster
I really DON'T want to saddle younger people with the burden. But I and my employers have been paying into SS and Medicare for decades, and I just PAID (lost) half a million bucks in my 401(k) etc. So if someone has to pay extra to bail out our economy, who should it be?
1. Old people who worked hard and saved, just lost a lot of their savings, and have no prayer of recovery before they die, let alone before they retire (and many of whom, let's also mention, have no prayer of finding a job in this economy)?
2. Young people who haven't yet lost much and may still have time to recover? A lot of younger people who have not been affected by the crash. They had not saved, they have not (yet) lost their jobs, they at least theoretically have time to recover before they retire. (I'm NOT saying this is what should happen.)
3. The wealthy top 2% who've benefitted the most by far from the regime of tax cuts and deregulation inaugurated under Reagan (remember the S&L debacle enabled by deregulation, and the subsequent bailout at taxpayer expense, which monstrous though it seemed at the time was apparently just a test-run for the much larger-scale looting now underway?), including but not necessarily limited to the Wall Street and military-industrial types who've most recently and visibly helped create this mess??
4. Esp. including the *ssholes who've made/are still trying to make a bundle on credit derivatives and naked shorts???
Personally, I'm voting for a new benchmark in public accountability: not one taxpayer should lose one dime before every one of the *ssholes who've made/are still trying to make a bundle on credit derivatives and naked shorts have LOST every dime.
HOW IT SHOULD BE PAID
1. We can cut Social Security and other "entitlements" to the people who contributed the most and who need it most, the elderly and the poor.
2. We can inflate the dollar, so everyone suffers equally in proportion to the dollars they hold. (I think this is inevitable/already happening, even despite strong, ongoing deflationary forces.)
3. We can tax the sh*t out of everyone with assets or income greater than $2 million. 'Cause if you have more than that, you don't really need it, esp. not compared to the rest of us; and at least some of anything over $2 million was probably ill-gotten anyway.
4. We could confiscate the assets of the *ssholes who've made/are still trying to make a bundle on credit derivatives and naked shorts. They just confiscated a quarter of my life-time savings.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
