Saturday, January 08, 2005

Letter to the Editor

Once upon a time there was a wise Hebrew in Egypt who foresaw that seven years of bountiful harvest would be followed by seven years of drought. He had some credibility with the Pharaoh and convinced the Pharaoh to establish a program of saving a portion of the bountiful harvests so there would be grain to feed the people when the times of drought and famine came. The storage plan was successful and when the droughts came there was food enough for all.

This is the same thing that has been done with Social Security. It was foreseen that the retirement of the boomers was going to stress the system and payroll taxes were raised in the past above what was needed for current benefits and the excess was placed in the Trust Fund. The current administration has borrowed from that trust fund to pay for tax cuts and to fight an questionable war. Social Security is in trouble only if the federal government defaults on its debts to the trust. When today's pharaoh says that Social Security is short of money, he is saying that he has emptied the granaries so he could give food to rich people and fight his own private war.

Don't let this despot pay back the money he has given to his rich friends by reducing benefits and diverting revenue out of the system! Pharaoh, let the working people go!

UPDATE: The letter that actually appears in the Tri-City Herald will have been edited down to the TCH 200 word limit.

8 comments:

Brad said...

The only way anyone made it through the famine in Egypt was when they purchased the food from the storehouses. For anyone to be reliant upon Social Security for survival wasn't being a good steward of their wages.

Kendall Miller said...

I'll be long gone before young squirts like you will have to face the question of what to do with all those people who failed to take care of their own retirement. Either we will progress down the path of a third world country that we have already begun where the rich get richer and the poor don't matter OR we will put Social Security part deux in place.

Social Security is working and working quite successfully. And it will continue to work well in the foreseeable future DESPITE the effect of the baby boomers. Thet's the facts. But you can keep believing the liars if you want. It's still a free country so far.

Anonymous said...

You do realize that there is not one single penny in the Social Security Trust Fund, do you not? That money was transfered to the General Fund and spent long ago. That trust fund is nothing more than a promise to tax me and my children at unsustainable rates to subsidize the retirement of the boomer generation who paid far less into it than they'll take out. Socialism is NEVER sustainable. Socialism is never moral. Socialism is EVIL.

Kendall Miller said...

Yes. That money was LOANED to the General Fund and the General Fund needs to pay it back. It has been spent because other revenues into the General Fund have been cut back by irresponsible tax policy. We need more and better taxes. There is plenty of room for more government revenue and better government spending policies. Dead people don't need to keep millions of dollars. People with enormous windfall incomes won't miss a few bucks. Bringing a quick exit from the war of agression on Iraq would save both money and lives.

The Trust Fund shouldn't be replenished on the backs of the workers. It should be replenished by the people who were gifted with those enormous tax breaks that killed the surplus that should have gone to repay the Trus Fund.

Anonymous said...

Repealing the child tax credit would be burdening the workers. Or would you rather remove all the tax breaks for small business that created 2.2 million jobs last year so that all those workers can go form lines at the unemployment office? Don't forget that the pres that created the idea Social Security also believed in dropping taxes to help the economy out of recessions, he did do it twice. Also I don't recall Clinton talking about his deposits into the trust fund... Oh yes we have never put anything into a trust fund. Maybe that is the great myth.

Kendall Miller said...

The child tax credit was nothing but a sop to the masses. The real breaks were in the upper income brackets, estate taxes, and capital gains. Strange that the first break you think of to rescind is the one that benefited poorer people most. I say rescind the breaks received by the people with the spare money.

And 2.2 million jobs from tax cuts is really bogus. From Job Watch:

"With the newly released payroll employment data for December 2004 it is now possible to assess whether the administration's tax cut strategy produced the employment growth that was projected .... The final verdict is grim. Job growth over the last 18 months has fallen short by 1,703,000—more than one-third less than the number of jobs the administration said would be created without the tax cuts. Given that the economy failed to produce the number of jobs expected with no policy change, it seems hard to argue that the tax cuts were a successful strategy in adding any jobs—the promised 1.4 million additional jobs never materialized."

2.2 million jobs, my toenail!

When we had reasonable taxes the economy did just fine AND we had a surplus. Instead of using that surplus to do some good things, this president (hswib) just pissed it away. Then in response to the recession he just pissed it away more with no extra jobs to show for it. As if that wasn't bad enough, he created a war that is pissing more of it away. And he's trying to get Social Security to bail him out.

Anonymous said...

If you feel undertaxed, there is not one single thing on earth preventing you from paying more. As for me, I prefer to keep that which I've earned, rather than have it stolen at gunpoint and redistributed in communist fashion to those who have not earned it.

Kendall Miller said...

And how much have you really earned? As opposed to how much happened to come your way because of the "pre-birth lottery". You didn't earn the chance to be born in this country. You didn't earn your innate skills that just happened to be productive in the society you were born into. You didn't earn whatever social and financial advantages may have come with the family you were born into. But go ahead. Keep it all. Surely it is your divine right.