From: "Sid Shniad" <[email protected]> http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/8197-privatizing-social-security-again.html
Privatizing Social Security Again? By Helen Thomas Falls Church News-Press: January 07 2011 This year, 2011, marks the beginning of baby boomers receiving Social Security checks and they should be alerted of past perennial Republican attempts to partially privatize the program. Heaven forbid that plans prevail to invest a certain amount of those checks in the stock market, as many pension plans have taken a bath in the current meltdown. While there have been past GOP plans to partially privatize the program, fortunately they have all failed. So far the Social Security trust fund remains tempting for the gamblers and other risk takers on the market. As a Detroiter, I remember the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929 when some of the plutocrats on Wall Street jumped out of windows as a result of their great losses. Those were bleak days when some of the jobless workers also lost hope in the bitterly cold winter as they stood in long lines at the Ford Motor Company, many without overcoats, hoping for a job on the auto assembly lines. The movements for socialism and communism were given some credence as a way out of their misery. The difference between the Great Depression and the current Great Recession is "spirit" - during the 1930s Americans cared about each other. They flocked to Washington - teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses - selflessly offering their services. Next door to us, a family with six children lived on a $13 (equivalent to $163 today) per week welfare check. Somehow they survived and kept their faith. Along came FDR who told the stricken people, "You have nothing to fear but fear itself." The power of hope restored confidence in the country and in its leadership. We were happy to emerge from the depression, but many Americans at the time believed we rebounded economically because of the looming clouds of World War II. The world by this time was swept up by the "isms." The U.S. was divided between the interventionists in World War II (on the side of the allies) and the non-interventionists - they were the isolationists - who disappeared at the start of the war on Dec. 7, 1941. President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935 to cover the elderly, and eventually through amendments, widows, orphans and the disabled. Payments are split 50-50 by the employer and the worker. What has been missing in our current society is compassion and creativeness. Think of the bargains the President had to strike to renew the biggest (Bush) tax cut to the richest Americans, this in exchange for an extension of unemployment compensation for the millions who lost their jobs - some deal! That's the compassion part. As for creativeness, where are the ideas to put people back to work? For Roosevelt, the caring advisors produced a bundle of alphabet agencies. Not the least was the Works Progress Administration which put people to work on rebuilding the broken infrastructure. The program put men on the streets - and even artists painting the walls of great buildings in the Nation's Capital. Ideas and ideals along with great imagination brought our country back. Where are the caring creators now? Many believe it was World War II and the military needs that brought us back - but recovery was well underway by 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. According to the 2010 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds presented to Congress, 53 million Americans received benefits during 2009, including 36 million retired workers and dependents of retired workers, 6 million survivors of deceased workers, and 10 million disabled workers. During that same year, an estimated 156 million people paid social security taxes through payroll. Total expenditures in 2009 were $686 billion, while revenue totaled $807 billion - including $689 in tax revenue and $118 billion in interest earnings. Many Republicans believe the Social Security Trust should be at least partly privatized - Bush failed to achieve this in 2005. There is fear as President Obama has claimed that the new Republican leadership will push again to partially privatize social security funds. With the ups and downs of the stock market - and considering the pension plans that were privatized went down the drain - who would lead us down that path again? Let's not give the newly empowered Republicans - and their blindsided tea party allies - the ability to wipe out or even mitigate the only economic security deprived Americans can count on. Where is their heart? *** http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/opinion/07krugman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212 The Texas Omen Paul Krugman NYTimes Op-Ed: Juanuary 7, 2011 These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas. Wait - Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that "we have billions in surplus"? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting - the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending - has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere. How bad is the Texas deficit? Comparing budget crises among states is tricky, for technical reasons. Still, data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggest that the Texas budget gap is worse than New York's, about as bad as California's, but not quite up to New Jersey levels. The point, however, is that just the other day Texas was being touted as a role model (and still is by commentators who haven't been keeping up with the news). It was the state the recession supposedly passed by, thanks to its low taxes and business-friendly policies. Its governor boasted that its budget was in good shape thanks to his "tough conservative decisions." Oh, and at a time when there's a full-court press on to demonize public-sector unions as the source of all our woes, Texas is nearly demon-free: less than 20 percent of public-sector workers there are covered by union contracts, compared with almost 75 percent in New York. So what happened to the "Texas miracle" many people were talking about even a few months ago? Part of the answer is that reports of a recession-proof state were greatly exaggerated. It's true that Texas job losses haven't been as severe as those in the nation as a whole since the recession began in 2007. But Texas has a rapidly growing population - largely, suggests Harvard's Edward Glaeser, because its liberal land-use and zoning policies have kept housing cheap. There's nothing wrong with that; but given that rising population, Texas needs to create jobs more rapidly than the rest of the country just to keep up with a growing work force. And when you look at unemployment, Texas doesn't seem particularly special: its unemployment rate is below the national average, thanks in part to high oil prices, but it's about the same as the unemployment rate in New York or Massachusetts. What about the budget? The truth is that the Texas state government has relied for years on smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of sound finances in the face of a serious "structural" budget deficit - that is, a deficit that persists even when the economy is doing well. When the recession struck, hitting revenue in Texas just as it did everywhere else, that illusion was bound to collapse. The only thing that let Gov. Rick Perry get away, temporarily, with claims of a surplus was the fact that Texas enacts budgets only once every two years, and the last budget was put in place before the depth of the economic downturn was clear. Now the next budget must be passed - and Texas may have a $25 billion hole to fill. Now what? Given the complete dominance of conservative ideology in Texas politics, tax increases are out of the question. So it has to be spending cuts. Yet Mr. Perry wasn't lying about those "tough conservative decisions": Texas has indeed taken a hard, you might say brutal, line toward its most vulnerable citizens. Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It's hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts. I don't know how the mess in Texas will end up being resolved. But the signs don't look good, either for the state or for the nation. Right now, triumphant conservatives in Washington are declaring that they can cut taxes and still balance the budget by slashing spending. Yet they haven't been able to do that even in Texas, which is willing both to impose great pain (by its stinginess on health care) and to shortchange the future (by neglecting education). How are they supposed to pull it off nationally, especially when the incoming Republicans have declared Medicare, Social Security and defense off limits? People used to say that the future happens first in California, but these days what happens in Texas is probably a better omen. And what we're seeing right now is a future that doesn't work. ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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