Alarm - Social Security Now on Chopping Block

Mr. President, Please say it isn’t so.

On page 4 of today’s Albany Times Union is a story entitled: A third rail at issue …

WASHINGTON -- Once considered untouchable, Social Security is now in play in the debt-ceiling negotiations. And that could mean higher income taxes for many U.S. families in addition to shaved benefits for tens of millions of retirees as they age.

Social Security became part of the private discussions between President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner on coming up with "something big" to reduce deficits by $2 trillion to $4 trillion over the next decade. One option includes a new inflation measure for Social Security that could produce savings close to $200 billion through a combination of reduced benefits and higher taxes, White House officials said Thursday. Low- and middle-income families could be hit.

                              Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/A-third-rail-at-issue-  

This is alarming.  Although this is an AP article, it is hard to find in regular media and certainly not in the Hudson Register Star.

It is really a double whammy as part of the debt of the USA is to its Seniors who have paid into a “trust fund”.  That money is actually loaned to the USA and so Seniors and all who have paid into it are creditors of the USA.  By reducing benefits, the overall long term debt is decreased – so it is easier to pay subsidies to Oil Companies and allow high income earners to escape paying what the rest of us pay in taxes.

Neither Social Security nor Medicare are part of the so called spending problem as both have the benefit of payroll taxes and are considered “funded”.  Neither SS nor Medicare are in dire straits and funding problems for these programs are only a problem years in the future.  Even that problem is and has customarily been an easy fix - by increasing the applicability of the payroll tax to higher income earners.  This has been done many times before.

The above wrecking of a traditional safety net for the older and disabled Americans makes all the more urgent the success of the American Dream Movement.

Please consider attending the local American Dream meeting on July 16^th at Bob Bisson’s home in Stuyvesant Falls.  Information concerning the meeting is on my blog, as are other related subjects, at:

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