Social Security Under Attack: Senator Simpson: Obama's Lead Social Security Attacker tells press: "Older People are Lesser People" SS is Paid and Solid for the next 75 Years but Obama wants the money for his Banking Cronies
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>
>Social Security Under Attack: Cuts Proposed, Higher Retirement Age
>Suggested
>
>The attacks on Social Security have steadily intensified in the past
>few months. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently called for a
>higher retirement age, and House Minority Leader John Boehner
>suggested raising the retirement age to seventy. Meanwhile, President
>Obama’s bipartisan eighteen-member commission dealing with the
>nation’s public debt is due to come out with a report in November that
>is expected to recommend cuts to Social Security. We speak with Dean
>Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. [includes rush
>transcript]
>
>Dean Baker, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and
>Policy Research
>Rush Transcript
>This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help
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>AMY GOODMAN: Next month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Social
>Security, the government’s cornerstone program for tens of millions of
>retirees and people with disabilities. But in recent months, the
>attacks on the program FDR initialed on August 14th, 1935, have
>steadily intensified, and Republicans aren’t the only ones calling for
>cuts to Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age. Last
>month during a speech on reducing the budget deficit, House Majority
>Leader Steny Hoyer called for a higher retirement age. A week later,
>House Minority Leader John Boehner suggested raising the retirement
>age to seventy in a meeting with editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune.
>And in February, President Obama created a bipartisan eighteen-member
>commission to deal with the nation’s public debt. The commission’s
>report is due in November and is expected to recommend cuts to Social
>Security.
>For more on this issue, we’re joined by economist Dean Baker. He’s the
>co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and he co-
>authored a report called "The Impact of Social Security Cuts on
>Retiree Income." Dean, where are we headed with Social Security right
>now, and what do you think needs to be done?
>DEAN BAKER: Well, it’s very troublesome turf. Just to be very clear,
>absolutely nothing needs to be done. If we look at the projections
>from either the Congressional Budget Office or the Social Security
>trustees—they’ve yet to come out with their new ones, but in any case,
>the one from last year—the program could pay all scheduled benefits
>well into the future, at least twenty-seven years into the future. And
>even after that, it could still pay the vast majority of benefits,
>assuming nothing is ever done. Now, somewhere down the road, we’ll
>probably make changes in the program as we’ve done in the past. But
>the idea that somehow something has to be done anywhere soon, this is
>crazy. People have paid for those benefits. So, in effect, what we’d
>be doing is defaulting on the bonds that are held in the trust fund to
>pay people their benefits that—when they come due. So, nothing has to
>be done.
>Now, what’s going on is that you have this real craze about the
>deficit, because the reason we have the deficit, of course, was we had
>a collapse of the housing bubble. But there’s this obsession about the
>deficit—"we have to do something"—and you have people running around
>Washington saying, "Well, you know, we can’t do anything on
>healthcare, because we tried that and the insurance industry was too
>powerful, the pharmaceutical industry was too powerful, so therefore
>we have to cut Social Security." It’s close to a non sequitur and
>should have people absolutely fuming at their representatives in
>Congress. But that’s where we are in Washington.
>AMY GOODMAN: What about this commission? This is President Obama’s
>commission.
>DEAN BAKER: Well, a commission is very, very worrisome. It’s chaired,
>you know President Obama picked Alan Simpson, former senator from
>Wyoming, who’s made a career out of beating up on old people—he thinks
>it’s cute. I don’t know if he’s delusional or what, but he talks about
>how old people drive into their gated communities in their Lexuses.
>Maybe his friends do. We have the data. Very few others do. And then
>the Democratic co-chair was Erskine Bowles, who’s getting—he’s a Wall
>Street guy. He gets over $300,000 a year as a director of Morgan
>Stanley, a firm that should be famous to everyone, because it would be
>out of business without the taxpayers’ support. And he, right off the
>bat, said, "Well, we’re going to have to cut Social Security." So,
>President Obama’s two lead appointees, his co-chairs, are both on
>record saying they want to cut Social Security. This should have
>people very, very worried. That isn’t a balanced commission.
>AMY GOODMAN: Simpson was also recently quoted talking about older
>people as "lesser people."
>DEAN BAKER: Yeah, Senator Simpson is quite a character. I mean, this
>whole commission is really fishy in any number of different ways.
>Among other things, they’re holding their meetings in secret. But they
>even went a step further, because you had a reporter, Alex Lawson, who
>works with the group Social Security Works, who interviewed Senator
>Simpson as he’s going in or out of one of the meetings, and Simpson,
>you know, could not control himself, made this comment about "lesser
>people," and it was rather insulting, used several curse words. And I
>guess to avoid having Senator Simpson embarrass himself again, they
>now not only have the meetings in secret, but they actually do not
>disclose the location, so that you won’t have another occasion where a
>reporter asks Senator Simpson questions and then he makes a fool of
>himself, essentially. So, again, this should be disconcerting.
>AMY GOODMAN: Andy Stern, a key member of the deficit commission, is
>pushing to invest a significant portion of the Social Security Trust
>in private companies through the stock market on Wall Street.
>DEAN BAKER: Well, what Stern—again, I don’t know the full reference,
>but the way this is usually talked about, and I assume this is what
>Stern meant, was that he would—that he would put some of the funds in
>an index fund, which, given that the stock market has plunged, people
>have asked me about it. I go, I don’t see a risk there, so I’m not
>particularly concerned about that one. I’m concerned about individual
>accounts. I’m concerned about cuts in benefits. But that you would put
>some of the trust fund in the stock market, I mean, you’d almost have
>to come up with like a story like the moon hitting the earth to say
>how that would give us worse returns than what we would otherwise get
>at this point. So, that one really doesn’t have me concerned.
>AMY GOODMAN: Dean Baker, what about lifting the retirement age to
>seventy? What would be the effect?
>DEAN BAKER: Well, this is a cut in benefits. And, of course, this
>disproportionately hits those who are at the bottom, who have shorter
>life expectancies, and also who don’t have the ability to make this up
>by working longer because they don’t have the health or they have
>harder jobs. It really is infuriating. You go around Washington, all
>the people talk about this. They’re all—you know, they have jobs like
>I do. I sit at a desk. I’m hoping I can work 'til seventy, maybe much
>longer. I like my job. I'm, you know, in good health. But you go
>around, you’ve got people working in a factory, people working in
>restaurants, you know, waiter, wait people. You look around at the
>jobs people have throughout society, the vast majority of those are
>not jobs where people could really look forward to working 'til age
>seventy. So this is really kind of a cruel joke on people. And again,
>one other point I just think we can't emphasize enough, people have
>paid for these benefits. So, we’re talking about taking away benefits
>people have paid for. Let’s use the word "tax." Let’s call it a tax. I
>know that sends the right wing nuts. Let’s say they want to tax Social
>Security benefits, because that’s, in effect, what they want to do.
>AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there, but we’re going to
>continue our conversation online just after the show. So people can go
>to our website at democracynow.org. Dean Baker, economist and co-
>director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Part two on
>the web.
>http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/19/social_security_under_attack_cuts_proposed
Adding to the confusion-----