Max wrote: I never said the Gov would run out of money, comrades. Just telling you how budgeting is done. I did a quick check and SS spending currently exceeds tax income and will soon if not already after restoration of the payroll tax. I have to take exception to Michael's point, which if you think about it is contradictory. If what matters is where the money comes from, the Trust Fund is exactly about that. It reflects the extent of financing from the payroll tax and taxes on benefits. Moreover, the trust funds have political salience, whether you like it or not. Accounting is not fiction. How you count and classify is profoundly political. Accounting is sexy. *************************
Social Security has been paid for many times over through real productivity increases of on average 1.3% per year since the program was initiated. I paid into the fund. You paid into the fund. The productivity increases went into corporate profits which didn't go into the fund. The big end of town is looking to rip you off through their polytricksters in government coming to some bi-partisan compromise to cut a deficit which wouldn't be there, if they had the political guts to tax corporations at an adequate level. As for Medicare, it's in trouble because private healthcare corporations charge higher and higher prices for the same value--shades of the real estate speculative bubble which burst as the GFC. Corporate investors in the healthcare industry are fine with this and they lobby to keep their bloated profits rolling in. In short, real representatives of the people would be busy passing legislation which would tax corporate profits to fund the retirement and healthcare of the people who worked all their lives to produce the wealth of the USA. and then Ron wrote: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/905 answers my question then. It says that SS payments aren't subject to sequestration and the Social Security Administration can draw on the fund to make payments. **** Finally some good news. But laws can be changed and finagled--what the State giveth, the State can taketh away. As Max pointed out some posts ago, the smart bourgeois political bets are that bi-partisan agreement changing the COLA formula for Social Security will emerge from the cloud of sequester. That, along with the decline in the value of the USD should do the political trick for members of our ruling class bent on immiseration to further discipline their wage-slaves. Mike B) *********************************************************************** Wobbly Times http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
