(edited for copyright purposes proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)
Et tu, Sheila Bair?By: Scarecrow - FDL
Friday November 26, 2010 10:50 am
<snip>
Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is supposedly one of the few at least halfway sensible federal regulators who actually warned about the banks’ risky behavior and maintains a healthy skepticism of the laissez faire ideology that shielded their predatory behavior both before and after it tanked the US and Western economies.
So it’s disheartening to see her provide cover for the Peterson-type deficit hysterics who would impose Irish-type austerity on the US as the price the already plundered public must pay to give unneeded “confidence” to banksters, already flush with cash, and their protected bond holders.It’s bad enough Ms. Bair repeats hysterics’ propaganda about out of control “structural deficits,” without explaining our long-term deficits are almost entirely driven by escalating health care costs affecting the whole economy, not just the federal budgets for Medicare/Medicaid. The solutions lie in changing the health care delivery system and how we pay for it, not cutting benefits to meet some arbitrary federal spending limit.
It’s worse that she lumps together, as Petersonians always do, Social Security with Medicare and Medicaid. And for some unexplained reason, these folks can never remember that the 1983 reforms anticipated and planned for the baby boomers. As Dean Baker reminds us (for the umpteenth time) in debunking the same discredited arguments from CBS:
<CBS claims,> “. . . The system won’t be able to handle the strain without an overhaul.”
Well, no that is not true. The projections from the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) show that the system can pay all benefits through
the year 2039 with no changes whatsoever. The Social Security trustees
are somewhat more pessimistic showing that full benefits can be paid
through the year 2037 with no changes at all. By 2039 the oldest baby
boomers will be age 93 and the youngest will be 74. By 2037, the oldest
boomers will be 91 and the youngest 73.
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