Of course, I’m pissed off that Obama just won’t let go of his Grand Bargain, but I’m also pissed off at the Times reporter who wrote this:
With sequestration in place, the two sides now have agreed over two years to nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction through 2023, with about 80 percent from spending cuts and the rest from higher taxes on the wealthy. Virtually no savings come from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the entitlement programs whose growth is driving projections of unsustainable debt as the population ages and medical costs increase. And revenues are insufficient to support the size of government.
See what they just did there? They lumped Social Security in with Medicare and Medicaid, they didn’t mention the alternative solutions proposed by progressives, and they said we don’t have enough money to support government. Even though we have a fiat currency.
Why oh why can’t we have a better media?
Joe Scarborough was similarly horrifying this morning. Ugh.
“Why oh why can’t we have a better media?”
Because we can’t afford one, due to the entitlement programs whose growth is driving projections of unsustainable debt as the population ages and medical costs increase.
Duh.
There is one sense in which Social Security is a drain on the treasury: repayment of the bonds held in the “Trust Fund”. They just don’t want to have to pay that money back, and they really don’t intend to. That is what is behind those strange statements about “worthless IOU’s”, and Mr Simpson’s arguments about how it is “all the same government” paying the debt.
In other words, they want a bailout achieved by cancelling the debt owed to Social Security. Its similar to their using the pre-paid pensions of the Postal Service to cover the deficit and then running that institution into bankruptcy.
The Corporate Media is owned by the same central bankers who own the Federal Reserve. They only tell us what they want us to think. America is not broke, the wealth has just been concentrated into the hands of very few individuals.
@ realist: Exactly. The additional irony is that the liars that say the bonds in the SS Trust Fund are not real, are the same liars that say bonds held by the private sector are sacred, and that cuts to SS (via, e.g. chained CPI) are vital to appease the private holders of those bonds (aka the invisible bond vigilantes).
But let’s not blame just the media. The Obama administration has continually conflated the Grand Bargain cuts to social insurance programs with the sequester and budget discussions. cf. Sperling last Sunday on Talking Heads.
Next Sunday, look for a noted and highly respected economic thinker like Petty Petty Noonan, or Georgie Porgie Will, to assert that the automatic cuts of the sequester have liberated the animal spirits in the economy and driven the equities markets to new highs. Obviously, this proves that more cuts will be even better. Unemployment, job market insecurity and consequent low aggregate demand be damned.
Oh, yea, and the beltway chattering classes of all political persuasions will support the Republican plan to rejigger the sequester to soften military cuts and gouge the poors and the olds even more. Shocking, no?
If I recall correctly, SSI, and medicare are not entitlements. We all pay for SSI and Medicare out of our salaries to the Feds. All of the funds for those programs were predicated on the assumption of having the same or more tax revenue to support them. The best jobs that generated the highest tax revenue have been leaving the US for the last thirty years. So what we have left are programs with only funds from the revenue from poorly paid, minimum wage jobs. Certainly its not the poor or the elderly that should be blamed for this major screw up.
Remember those warnings that the time to get ironclad promises from Obama was well before he ran unopposed for the 2012 Dem nomination? And, then, well before the election? That after the election he didn’t need us for, well, just about anything. Oh, except to maybe pressure Congress to do his bidding, at the bidding of his Big Money cohort?
Well, with Obama I don’t think anything is “ironclad,” unless it’s his promises to his Big Money supporters.
He does not and never has represented those of us in the lower economic quintiles.
He deeply believes what he learned from his Big Money mentors: Their money is special and they shouldn’t have to share it with the rest of us.
I don’t know how to influence such a man, such a politician.
Will calls, emails, petitions, letters and whatever other contacts we lesser wealth holders come up with to try to influence our senators and reps get them to reconsider? I don’t know. Who do they fear most? Somehow I don’t think it’s us.