Who Stole Your Social Security and Why?
Date: Tuesday, 13-Oct-2020
In Response To: Trump: While I Am President, Nobody Will Touch Your Social Security.. Again (RumorMail)
Then came George W. Bush, considered by most Americans at this point the worst President in the history of the country. He may not have been the worst President. He may not even have been President. But he looted us as well or better than the rest of them. In 2001, despite knowing that the surpluses were mostly coming from the increased taxes being paid to insure the solvency of Social Security, Bush announced more tax cuts, this time a reduction in federal revenues of more than $1.25 trillion. To pay for tax cuts, one of the things he did was tap into the Social Security surplus, just like Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. In 8 years, the Bush Jr. Administration spent every single penny of the Social Security surplus, using it like a piggy bank to give huge tax breaks to individuals and to corporations, to start wars, to give lucrative government contracts…far beyond their value…to friends and associates. During that time, the Bush Administration drained $1.4 trillion dollars, the entire surplus and used it to write down their additional national debt, which turned out to be…without the Social Security funds…a grand total of $3.4 trillion. In addition, the Bush Administration’s lax and incompetent management of the financial community added another $750 billion in a late 2008 bailout to keep the financial community from completely dissolving. To keep the recession that came as a result of the partial collapse of the financial and housing markets from becoming a huge depression, has added $1.2 trillion more. So the funds from personal tax deductions paid by workers–the amount of money we call Social Security–has been completely looted. And, by the way, we currently have additional debt from the last 8 years of $5.3 trillion dollars. So does it mean that we have no money to pay Social Security benefits? No it does not. It means that we must either find a way to repay the “trust fund” and restore the amounts that will be needed or we must reduce benefits. Economists differ as to when the real crunch will come but most think that it will be sometime around the middle of the century, perhaps as soon as 2040. At that point, as far as we know today, we would be able to pay only about 75% of anticipated benefits. Some economists recommend we have a “means test” solution in which those who do not need Social Security will not receive it, even though they have paid in all their lives, and those who need Social Security will receive it according to their needs but with some caps on benefits as we have them today. But no one really knows what will happen. Who knew that a succession of Presidents of both parties would forfeit the trust and faith of the American People for political gain? Simply to make a budget deficit seem smaller in order to win an election, these cruel and cynical politicians spent the retirement savings of the elderly as surely as if Bernie Madoff had conned them into one of his schemes. Bernie Madoff is going to jail. What should we do with these equally guilty tin-horn, felonious politicians?
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