By Obama’s own gamble on Wednesday in proposing budget concessions to Republicans on Social Security, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, and Medicare, the legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Obama has provoked angry supporters on his left to ask whether he is a progressive at all. The short answer is no: he’s a “Clinton Centrist,” a piece of this, a piece of that, and whatever else he can get his hands on or off.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. President Richard Trumka, in a blistering statement, called the proposed benefit reductions “wrong and indefensible.” An e-mail from Representative Alan Grayson, a liberal from Florida, was headlined “President’s Budget Breaks Promise to Seniors.”
Playing the chameleon still one more time, “Mr. Obama, said so-called cost-saving changes in the nation’s fastest-growing domestic programs are more progressive than simply allowing the entitlement programs for older Americans to overwhelm the rest of the budget in future years.” What is Obama and the Times thinking?
In order to generate more income in perpetuity for Social Security, you raise the limit of taxable income for it, which now stands at $6.2% taken from the individual and 6.2% taken from the employer. The wage limit was $110,100 in 2012. For 2013, it went up only $3600 for a cap of $113,700. So, big earners get the break of the century, whether they make $250,000, $250 million or $250 billion, their Social Security tax stops at $113,700 a year.
If the individual continues to pay 6.2 % payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits while employers pay a matching 6.2%, you’d get your 12.4% gross as usual. There is an additional 1.45% paid for Medicare by each, which brings the total to 15.3%. A self-employed person pays the whole thing himself. The hitch is, only 5.2 % of working Americans make more than $113,700 a year, which creates a shortfall. But by eliminating the payroll tax earnings cap, thus ending this regressive exemption for the top 5.2 % of earners would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, solve the financial crisis facing the Social Security system.
So for The Times [and Obama] to say “Democrats who began arguing several years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit programs, which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical prices rise, the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to help the poor, the working class and children, is a distortion of the truth. Obama knows what the real deal is on depriving the rich 5.2% of their regressive exemption. And he’s caving on that.
The math on benefits (erroneously called “entitlements”—a slick misdirection) is sustainable, as you can see. Whatever tax monies generated for Social Security should not be used for other purposes, which has traditionally been the policy of Republican presidents. George W. Bush, who had his hand in the SS Trust Box for war-making, wanted to go so far as to privatize those monies, so brokerage companies that would manage those accounts would likely inhale them through planned losses or swiped profits.
In that regard, the president should take a close look at military spending. The US government outspends the next 13 governments’ military budgets combined. That is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, chewing away monies for infrastructure, early-childhood programs, Head Start, education and veterans. The benefits have been victimized by this fraudulent oversight. Both Republicans and regressive Democrats do want to balance the budget on the backs of seniors, the infirm, and poor.
The president’s $3.77 trillion budget, with a mix of deficit reduction through spending cuts and tax increases, and new spending to spur the economy, projects a $744 billion deficit for the next fiscal year, 2014, that begins Oct. 1. That is down from the $973 billion shortfall projected for this fiscal year, after four years of post-recession deficits exceeding $1 trillion. If that occurs, it will be this century’s miracle. Again, it would be simpler to raise the taxable limits for top earners on Social Security and Medicare.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic minority leader, convened a meeting of House Democrats last week to hear a closed-door debate on Mr. Obama’s proposed change in the cost-of-living formula that determines Social Security benefits. The debate pitted the A.F.L.-C.I.O. counsel, Damon Silvers, who opposes the change in the formula, with Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which has long supported changes to benefit programs as part of a bipartisan deal to protect other federal spending on, for example, antipoverty programs, the nation’s infrastructure and education. Again, the Social Security funds should not be used for other purposes. Those monies can be appropriately siphoned off from Pentagon and DOD budgets, which are obscene.
“It has been evident from the president’s first months in office that the pragmatist in Mr. Obama has made him sympathetic to the thinking of Mr. Greenstein and others. In 2009, Mr. Obama considered proposing a much-discussed change in the cost-of-living formula for Social Security until Democratic Congressional leaders vetoed him,” the NY Times reported. Frankly, Obama is more the chameleon than pragmatist. He has real problems sticking to his guns.
Returning to guns, Obama promised an end to the wars immediately in 2004. Nearly ten years later, there is major fighting still going on in Iraq. Funding for Afghanistan was amplified by $30 billion. Drone programs in Pakistan have cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, yet wars continue to grow. Even after Syria, Libya and Mali. Now we are toying in central Africa and getting involved with the likes of Joseph Kony and his child armies, as seen on 60 minutes, terrorizing central Africans with mutilation and death.
But now in his fifth budget and the first of his second term, President Obama decided over some advisers’ objections to cut his budget; the government would shift in 2015 from the standard Consumer Price Index, used to compute cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other benefits and to set income-tax brackets, to what is called a “chained C.P.I.” The new formulation would slow the increase in benefits and raise income tax revenues by putting some taxpayers into higher brackets sooner, for a total savings of $230 billion over 10 years.
While many economists say the new formula is more accurate, opponents say it does not adequately reflect the out-of-pocket health care expenses that burden older Americans. All Social Security beneficiaries would be affected, but Mr. Obama proposes that at age 76 (or sometime shortly before dying) seniors would get gradual benefit increases to offset the depletion of their private assets or pensions. What a guy, all heart.
In the president’s bid to revive bipartisan talks, his budget includes other proposals from his last compromise offer, made in December to Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, before their private deficit-reduction negotiations collapsed. The president’s budget would save $400 billion from Medicare over a decade, mostly from reductions to hospitals and other health care providers, but also through benefit and premium changes. So he is balancing his budget again on the backs of seniors, contrary to his initial statement. Obviously, as doctor and hospital payments tighten, so could quality of care. Many doctors and hospitals could cut back on accepting Medicare patients.
“The budget’s total 10-year savings would replace the $1.2 trillion in indiscriminate across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect March 1 after Mr. Obama and Republican leaders failed to agree on alternative deficit-reduction measures.” This last piece was another flip-flop. But don’t take my word for it.
The Times writes, “By this budget, Mr. Obama has forced the party’s internal fiscal debate to go public in a degree unseen since President Bill Clinton in the 1990s pushed a liberal Democratic Party onto a centrist ‘third way.’ Until now, attention has focused on the Republican Party’s postelection divisions over defining conservatism.” The result . . .
“Democratic Congressional leaders were muted in their support for the president’s plan and were troubled that Mr. Obama had made his fiscal overture to Republicans without any sign that Republicans would compromise in turn.” The chameleon again!
“Their political concerns seemed to be validated when Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, the head of the House Republicans’ campaign committee, said on CNN that the budget was ‘a shocking attack on seniors.’ His words were interpreted as a signal that in 2014 Republican candidates will again accuse Democrats of trying to cut Medicare and Social Security, even though Congressional Republicans led by Mr. Boehner have demanded Social Security and Medicare cuts throughout budget talks of the past two years.” Chameleons and hypocrites!
Hopefully, by then Obama will be on track for Hawaii and retirement, good luck and good riddance. That is if the surveillance society hasn’t arrested us all for speaking up as whistleblowers and cut off our lips, as Joseph Kony’s child warriors do to his dissidents and other victims.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Obama budget takes a quantum step backwards
Posted on April 19, 2013 by Jerry Mazza
WASHINGTON—There was good reason for President Obama’s new budget to trigger a debate as to what it means to be a progressive Democrat in an age of austerity. It defines him as a president willing to take on the two pillars of his party—Medicare and Social Security—created by Democratic presidents and fracture them. That as The New York Times reported on it April 10, 2013.
By Obama’s own gamble on Wednesday in proposing budget concessions to Republicans on Social Security, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, and Medicare, the legacy of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Obama has provoked angry supporters on his left to ask whether he is a progressive at all. The short answer is no: he’s a “Clinton Centrist,” a piece of this, a piece of that, and whatever else he can get his hands on or off.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. President Richard Trumka, in a blistering statement, called the proposed benefit reductions “wrong and indefensible.” An e-mail from Representative Alan Grayson, a liberal from Florida, was headlined “President’s Budget Breaks Promise to Seniors.”
Playing the chameleon still one more time, “Mr. Obama, said so-called cost-saving changes in the nation’s fastest-growing domestic programs are more progressive than simply allowing the entitlement programs for older Americans to overwhelm the rest of the budget in future years.” What is Obama and the Times thinking?
In order to generate more income in perpetuity for Social Security, you raise the limit of taxable income for it, which now stands at $6.2% taken from the individual and 6.2% taken from the employer. The wage limit was $110,100 in 2012. For 2013, it went up only $3600 for a cap of $113,700. So, big earners get the break of the century, whether they make $250,000, $250 million or $250 billion, their Social Security tax stops at $113,700 a year.
If the individual continues to pay 6.2 % payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits while employers pay a matching 6.2%, you’d get your 12.4% gross as usual. There is an additional 1.45% paid for Medicare by each, which brings the total to 15.3%. A self-employed person pays the whole thing himself. The hitch is, only 5.2 % of working Americans make more than $113,700 a year, which creates a shortfall. But by eliminating the payroll tax earnings cap, thus ending this regressive exemption for the top 5.2 % of earners would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, solve the financial crisis facing the Social Security system.
So for The Times [and Obama] to say “Democrats who began arguing several years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit programs, which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical prices rise, the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to help the poor, the working class and children, is a distortion of the truth. Obama knows what the real deal is on depriving the rich 5.2% of their regressive exemption. And he’s caving on that.
The math on benefits (erroneously called “entitlements”—a slick misdirection) is sustainable, as you can see. Whatever tax monies generated for Social Security should not be used for other purposes, which has traditionally been the policy of Republican presidents. George W. Bush, who had his hand in the SS Trust Box for war-making, wanted to go so far as to privatize those monies, so brokerage companies that would manage those accounts would likely inhale them through planned losses or swiped profits.
In that regard, the president should take a close look at military spending. The US government outspends the next 13 governments’ military budgets combined. That is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, chewing away monies for infrastructure, early-childhood programs, Head Start, education and veterans. The benefits have been victimized by this fraudulent oversight. Both Republicans and regressive Democrats do want to balance the budget on the backs of seniors, the infirm, and poor.
The president’s $3.77 trillion budget, with a mix of deficit reduction through spending cuts and tax increases, and new spending to spur the economy, projects a $744 billion deficit for the next fiscal year, 2014, that begins Oct. 1. That is down from the $973 billion shortfall projected for this fiscal year, after four years of post-recession deficits exceeding $1 trillion. If that occurs, it will be this century’s miracle. Again, it would be simpler to raise the taxable limits for top earners on Social Security and Medicare.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic minority leader, convened a meeting of House Democrats last week to hear a closed-door debate on Mr. Obama’s proposed change in the cost-of-living formula that determines Social Security benefits. The debate pitted the A.F.L.-C.I.O. counsel, Damon Silvers, who opposes the change in the formula, with Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which has long supported changes to benefit programs as part of a bipartisan deal to protect other federal spending on, for example, antipoverty programs, the nation’s infrastructure and education. Again, the Social Security funds should not be used for other purposes. Those monies can be appropriately siphoned off from Pentagon and DOD budgets, which are obscene.
“It has been evident from the president’s first months in office that the pragmatist in Mr. Obama has made him sympathetic to the thinking of Mr. Greenstein and others. In 2009, Mr. Obama considered proposing a much-discussed change in the cost-of-living formula for Social Security until Democratic Congressional leaders vetoed him,” the NY Times reported. Frankly, Obama is more the chameleon than pragmatist. He has real problems sticking to his guns.
Returning to guns, Obama promised an end to the wars immediately in 2004. Nearly ten years later, there is major fighting still going on in Iraq. Funding for Afghanistan was amplified by $30 billion. Drone programs in Pakistan have cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, yet wars continue to grow. Even after Syria, Libya and Mali. Now we are toying in central Africa and getting involved with the likes of Joseph Kony and his child armies, as seen on 60 minutes, terrorizing central Africans with mutilation and death.
But now in his fifth budget and the first of his second term, President Obama decided over some advisers’ objections to cut his budget; the government would shift in 2015 from the standard Consumer Price Index, used to compute cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other benefits and to set income-tax brackets, to what is called a “chained C.P.I.” The new formulation would slow the increase in benefits and raise income tax revenues by putting some taxpayers into higher brackets sooner, for a total savings of $230 billion over 10 years.
While many economists say the new formula is more accurate, opponents say it does not adequately reflect the out-of-pocket health care expenses that burden older Americans. All Social Security beneficiaries would be affected, but Mr. Obama proposes that at age 76 (or sometime shortly before dying) seniors would get gradual benefit increases to offset the depletion of their private assets or pensions. What a guy, all heart.
In the president’s bid to revive bipartisan talks, his budget includes other proposals from his last compromise offer, made in December to Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, before their private deficit-reduction negotiations collapsed. The president’s budget would save $400 billion from Medicare over a decade, mostly from reductions to hospitals and other health care providers, but also through benefit and premium changes. So he is balancing his budget again on the backs of seniors, contrary to his initial statement. Obviously, as doctor and hospital payments tighten, so could quality of care. Many doctors and hospitals could cut back on accepting Medicare patients.
“The budget’s total 10-year savings would replace the $1.2 trillion in indiscriminate across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, that took effect March 1 after Mr. Obama and Republican leaders failed to agree on alternative deficit-reduction measures.” This last piece was another flip-flop. But don’t take my word for it.
The Times writes, “By this budget, Mr. Obama has forced the party’s internal fiscal debate to go public in a degree unseen since President Bill Clinton in the 1990s pushed a liberal Democratic Party onto a centrist ‘third way.’ Until now, attention has focused on the Republican Party’s postelection divisions over defining conservatism.” The result . . .
“Democratic Congressional leaders were muted in their support for the president’s plan and were troubled that Mr. Obama had made his fiscal overture to Republicans without any sign that Republicans would compromise in turn.” The chameleon again!
“Their political concerns seemed to be validated when Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, the head of the House Republicans’ campaign committee, said on CNN that the budget was ‘a shocking attack on seniors.’ His words were interpreted as a signal that in 2014 Republican candidates will again accuse Democrats of trying to cut Medicare and Social Security, even though Congressional Republicans led by Mr. Boehner have demanded Social Security and Medicare cuts throughout budget talks of the past two years.” Chameleons and hypocrites!
Hopefully, by then Obama will be on track for Hawaii and retirement, good luck and good riddance. That is if the surveillance society hasn’t arrested us all for speaking up as whistleblowers and cut off our lips, as Joseph Kony’s child warriors do to his dissidents and other victims.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.