So new tax cuts were passed by a bipartisan Congress in 2001, and once again, the main beneficiaries were — you guessed it — the filthy rich. The top 1% of wage earners, those making 500K and up, saved 70 billion in 2006 alone. Enough to fund the Department of Education with change to spare.
Over the ten years 2001-2010, the top 5%, those making 191K and up, will save about 920 billion dollars. That’s 48.3% of all Bush’s tax cuts.
Incidentally, that’s about half of what’s in the Social Security Trust Fund right now, built up over 24 years on wages under 97K.
But the Trust Fund debt, some say, is “just IOUs”. You’ve heard the spiel. Here’s Bush in 2005:
Now, let me tell you something about the Social Security system. It’s not a trust. A lot of people think, well, we’re collecting your money and we’re holding it for you, and then when you retire, we’re going to give it back to you. That’s not the way it works. We’re collecting your money, and if we’ve got money left over — in other words, if the — if there’s more money than the benefits promised to be paid in our hands, we’re spending it and leaving behind an IOU. That’s how it works. It’s called a pay-as-you-go system. You pay, we go ahead and spend it. (Laughter.)
“President Participates in Social Security Conversation in Arizona,” 3/21/2005.
Isn’t he cute? Here he is again, same year:
“We take your payroll taxes, we pay out the benefits to current retirees, and with the money left over, we pay…for other programs. And there’s nothing left but file cabinets with IOUs. And that’s how it works.”
Let’s not ignore his second-in-command. Here’s Cheney on the mission:
“Now, about 1.7 trillion of that is in the so-called Trust Fund: that is, money – that’s money that’s been collected that’s not there as cash at this point.”
They don’t sound very encouraging, do they?
The cost of the war in Iraq, waged over imaginary WMDs, is approaching 200 billion a year.
Apparently it’s easy to find 200 billion a year to kill people, even while cutting 70 billion from millionaires’ tax bills — but impossible to come up with 60 billion or so a year to redeem the Trust Fund.
Those IOUs are implied to be “worthless” only because they’re owed to ordinary working people: sheep to be sheared, rubes to be conned, like the rubes dying in Iraq.
Greenspan’s no better. In 2004, he urged the House Budget Committee to “deal with the country’s escalating budget deficit by cutting benefits for future Social Security retirees.”
There. Did you watch his hands? Same old three-card monte shuffle.
Thanks to Bush’s “No Billionaire Left Behind” tax policy and Iraq, there’s a growing deficit in the general budget — so Greenspan wants to cut Social Security benefits. That’s the kind of rigorous logic that earns you the title of “Wizard” in ruling circles.
Social Security was set up as a self-funding program. It’s currently running multi-billion-dollar surpluses. Its finances and benefits have nothing to do with the general budget, or didn’t, until Alan stuck his paws in. Is he senile? Doesn’t he remember what he did and said in 1983?
If deficits are bad, why in 1983 did he recommend the deliberate creation of a deficit — the debt now owed to the Social Security Trust Fund?
And if the extra money we’ve been sending Social Security for 24 years is just creating debt and “worthless IOUs,” how come Alan never suggests we stop making those excess payments?
Because he’s senile like a fox.
And neither will you hear our brave party leaders suggesting we stop paying the extra freight. Instead, Republicans cheer-lead for private accounts, and Democrats push for benefit cuts and payroll tax increases. To save us from crisis, they say. They’re picking our pockets, and they offer us every solution but the obvious one: remove their thieving hands.
They’re lying. They’ve always been lying.
“…the great masses of the people… more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others…”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 10