FDR-Style Politics: the Truth About Social Security and Silly Big Bird Offensive

 

 

WHEN I FIRST SAW THIS PHOTO, I truly thought these guys look like a couple of old guys lined up on a stage in wheelchairs, kind of like FDR. Just my imagination? Maybe, but Biden has always reminded me of an old-style political operative/hack from a bygone era--- totally faithful to ye ole party narrative and staunchly loyal to his fuhrer.

Take for instance the continued myth-making about social security perpetrated in the first presidential debate:  our president assured us that it was 'fundamentally sound' with a straight face.  Read what Tom Blumer writes @ PJMedia on the social security crisis which is NOW, not in the future:

Though both members of the GOP ticket won their respective debates on substance, each wasted an important opportunity to more fully inform the public about how the Obama-Biden administration’s historically awful economic stewardship has hastened the arrival of Social Security’s currently dire circumstances, and how partial privatization can still, even at this late date, be a factor in saving it. Contrary to what the president claimed, Social Security is not “structurally sound.” Vice-presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz, who apparently never told the presidential debate commission which selected her that Obama attended her 1991 wedding, and who to absolutely no one’s surprise ended up being a de facto third debater Thursday, probably thought she was making a daring statement when she said that it’s “going broke.” No ma’am; it already is. Five years ago, Social Security was taking in over $180 billion a year more in taxes than it was spending on benefits and administration. Though that annual surplus was doomed to dwindle as the wave of baby boomers began to retire, Social Security’s trustees estimated that surpluses would continue for another decade, and that triple-digit cash deficits wouldn’t arrive until many years after that. That’s before the Community Reinvestment Act-driven, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fraud-accelerated recession kicked in, followed by the worst so-called recovery since the Great Depression. Just a few years later, the system began running annual cash deficits. The trustees now estimate that the calendar year 2012 cash deficit (i.e., “the deficit of tax income relative to cost”) will be $165 billion. The only reason it won’t approach $300 billion is that the rest of the government is kicking in about $120 billion to offset the current-year effect of the two-point reduction in payroll tax withholding which took effect in 2011. Team Obama dishonestly demagogued against allowing that unsustainable reduction to expire earlier this year. Regardless of who wins the presidency for the next four years, and despite the soaring national debt which threatens to swallow the entire economy, restoring Social Security withholding to its prior 6.2% level will be extraordinarily difficult.

So SS ain't going broke, it already IS broke. As it currently stands, we're putting such financial stress on our children and grandchildren who still haven't completely awakened to this reality. When they do, it may be too late for them to fix and see prosperity of any kind in their lifetimes. Still Blumer assures us it's still barely fixable if we act now.

Michael Barone takes issue with me a bit on the 40s-style political machine the Obama guys are running. He opines it's running A Campaign Fit For the 80s: If social security myth-making isn't enough, then how bout the massive Big Bird campaign they've mounted again the Romney-Ryan ticket. It was supposed to be devastating but turned out to be pathetic and absurd for the president.

Back later.