They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney that Social Security would get cut . . .

“And the fools reelected me anyway!”

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. . . and they were right!

Joan McCarter at Cheetoville:

President Obama considering putting social insurance cuts in his budget

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are reporting that President Obama is “strongly considering” including cuts to social insurance program benefits in his budget. The budget is slated to be released on April 10, the same day Obama is having yet another charm offensive dinner with Senate Republicans. Because this strategy has been working so well for him.

[...]

Well, since Republicans are criticizing him for not fully and officially embracing his desire to cut benefits to the poor and elderly, by all means he has to make the offer. Included in that, reportedly, is the chained CPI for Social Security and an idea from Eric Cantor for restructuring Medicare that would combine Medicare’s coverage for hospitals and doctor services, creating a single deductible that could increase out-of-pocket costs.

[...]

That should be considered a certainty, rather than a possibility. That goes along with the certainty that Republicans are going to use an official White House proposal to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in 2014 to run against Democrats. Republicans aren’t engaging in any of the budget negotiations in good faith. They didn’t do so in Obama’s first term, and they have no intention to do so now, regardless of the 2012 election.

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Obama is president and the Democrats control one house of Congress, but those big bad Republicans are forcing poor Barack to make granny eat cat food! Of course in Vile Progworld, Republicans are evil people who chortle with glee at the thought of senior citizens starving.

There was a time when my knee-jerk reaction would be just what McCarter is seeking. I’m not making any rash judgments these days and I don’t trust either party.

I just find the shocked reactions of the Vile Progs amusing. Where the hell have they been the last five years? Did they really believe that campaign rhetoric last year?

Could they really be that stupid?

(Yes they can!)

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They warned me if I voted for Mitt Romney that Social Security would get cut.

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They were right:

As part of the fiscal showdown negotiations, President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security for almost all current and future beneficiaries.

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Damn you Mitt Romney!

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I really don’t want to eat cat food

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There is a lot of misinformation about Social Security out there. I know this is true because at least half of what I read is inconsistent with the other half of what’s out there.

Here is a paragraph from Kim/Riverdaughter/Goldberry’s latest:

We know that Social Security does not add to the deficit. In fact, we have a trust fund worth almost $3 trillion dollars. Sure, that trust fund has taken a hit in the past four years because so many people are out of work and can’t pay their taxes but once people are working again, the kitty will start to grow again. And if all that is needed is a couple of tweaks to solve the minor shortfall, it’s really not as damaging to the economy or rich people’s ability to spend ungodly amounts of money on themselves as they pretend.

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I don’t mean to pick on my former blog overlord, but that’s not true. There is no vault in the basement of the Social Security Administration offices with $3 trillion sitting in it. There might be a vault somewhere, but the only thing in it is a government I.O.U.

Wikipedia:

In the United States, the Social Security Trust Fund is a fund operated by the Social Security Administration into which are paid payroll tax contributions from workers and employers under the Social Security system and out of which benefit payments are made to retirees, survivors, and the disabled, and for general administrative expenses. The fund also earns interest. There technically are two component funds, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Funds, referred to collectively as the OASDI funds.

When program revenues exceed payments (i.e., the program is in surplus) the extra funds are borrowed and used by the government for other purposes, but a legal obligation to program recipients is created to the extent this occurs. These surpluses add to the Trust Fund. At the end of 2011, the Trust Fund contained (or alternatively, was owed) $2.7 trillion, up $69 billion from 2010.[1] The fund is required by law to be invested in non-marketable securities issued and guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.

The trust fund represents a legal obligation to Social Security program recipients and is considered “intra-governmental” debt, a component of the “public” or “national” debt. As of April 2012, the intragovernmental debt was $4.8 trillion of the $15.7 trillion national debt.[2]

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It’s just like your local bank. They may say they have a $100 million in assets but they probably only have $20-30 thousand in cash on hand. The rest of it is invested or loaned out.

What the government did is loan itself our retirement savings. (Not all of it – some of it goes to pay current retirees.) Then they spent it. It’s kinda like a guy who stole and spent all his grandmother’s money and now he’s waiting for her to die so he can inherit it. But the bookkeeping is way more complicated – I suspect they intentionally make it hard to figure out so they can hide how much they are stealing.

My grandpa said that the best way to lie is to tell the truth, but not all of it. There is a lot of that going on these days. That’s why you can read one article saying that Social Security is broke, and another saying everything is hunky-dory. They are both telling you some of the truth, but not all of it. So who do you trust?

In a perfect world there would be some independent, non-partisan authority out there that would sort through all the bullshit and provide us with neutral, objective facts. Unfortunately we have the mainstream media and the blogosphere. Most of them don’t know what they are talking about and the rest can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

We just came out of a two-year long election campaign where control of the country was up for grabs. During that time do you recall EVER seeing a detailed discussion (backed up by hard, verifiable data) by any of the major players as to what is wrong (if anything) with Social Security and what needs to be done to fix it? There was something called “Simpson-Bowles” (aka “The Catfood Commission”) but there wasn’t any consensus on their findings and recommendations.

It’s not just Social Security. The first half of Obama’s first term was taken up by health care reform but I don’t recall any hearings discussing the problems. That’s like a doctor prescribing treatment without first doing any diagnosis.

I really don’t want to eat cat food when I get old. If there is something wrong with Social Security we need to fix it. I mean really fix it, not just slap a band-aid on it and kick the can down the road a few years. But before we start fixing anything we need to reach some kind of consensus as to what the problem is.

That’s really hard to do when you can’t trust anybody. I’m no bean counter so I can’t do my own research. What we need is somebody (or several somebodies) to put together a “Social Security Reform For Dummies”. Then maybe we can get everybody on the same page.

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Late Night is for Night Owls

About to head to bed here in a bit, but thought I’d share this beautiful manufacturing job by TPTB:

04.2012 Social Security is rushing even faster toward insolvency, driven by retiring baby boomers, a weak economy and politicians’ reluctance to take painful action to fix the huge retirement and disability program.

The trust funds that support Social Security will run dry in 2033 — three years earlier than previously projected — the government said Monday.

There was no change in the year that Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run out of money. It’s still 2024.

I kept that last bit in there because it’s relevant to what I’m about to remind you of:

09.2011 WASHINGTON — The centerpiece of President Obama’s job-creation plan, a proposal to further reduce Social Security taxes, is emblematic of a package of modest measures that some economists describe as helpful but not sufficient to lift the economy from its malaise.

In his speech on Thursday night, Mr. Obama asked Congress to cut the amount that workers must contribute toward Social Security benefits, extending an existing measure, and to reduce, for the first time, the matching payments that employers are required to make.

The cuts, which would deprive the government of about $240 billion in revenues next year, are the largest items in the president’s $447 billion job-creation plan, which includes payments to unemployed workers, incentives for companies that hire workers and increased federal spending on infrastructure.

Bolding mine. We discussed this at the time. If I recall correctly, the argument went like this: “Oh lookey! Obama delivering on a Grover Norquist/GOP promise to slowly kill Social Security.” The opposition was, like, “Awesome. Eleventy-dimensional chess!” You tell me who was right. #SawThisComing

Moral of the story? Every year Obama is in office, we lose another year of Social Security. We can’t afford 4 more years.

PS: The reason the Medicare date didn’t change is because those taxes weren’t cut, if that wasn’t obvious enough.

This is an open thread.

Jobs Czar Crony #1 Immelt Blames Businesses for Unemployment

BFFs

Question of the day:
What do you call someone who donates bunches of money to get Obama elected, then gets exclusive no-bid government contracts,  then moves jobs to China, and then on top of that gets the job of recommending how the federal government should rewrite regulations, and then goes in front of other business owners and leaders and says this?

“The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway,” he told the group. “There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”

Excuse me while I barf.

Here’s a video of Immelt that shows how serious he thinks job-creation is. Just watch his reaction to Obama’s statement on shovel-ready jobs.

 

Ok, now that I’ve vented, please feel free to discuss the latest in the budget debt-ceiling SS-checks-hostage-taking impasse 11th dimension chess kabuki. What’s the latest?

 

Obama’s “bad negotiating” is Neither

Glenn Greewald has a good article out today on Obama’s “bad negotiating”. Glenn get’s it right, mostly. Of course we all know his blind side, like many liberal purists, that the Clinton’s are even worse than most in the GOP. But we’ll let that slide. Mostly. Read the whole thing, but I’ll pull out a few gems. He starts with a summary of extending the Bush tax cuts, continuing and extending wars, etc., etc., and then the recent willingness to accept GOP legislation to put the hardship on the backs of the poor:

All of that has led to a spate of negotiation advice from the liberal punditocracy advising the President how he can better defend progressive policy aims — as though the Obama White House deeply wishes for different results but just can’t figure out how to achieve them. Jon Chait, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias all insist that the President is “losing” on these battles because of bad negotiating strategy, and will continue to lose unless it improves. Ezra Klein says “it makes absolutely no sense” that Democrats didn’t just raise the debt ceiling in December, when they had the majority and could have done it with no budget cuts. Once it became clear that the White House was not following their recommended action of demanding a “clean” vote on raising the debt ceiling — thus ensuring there will be another, probably larger round of budget cuts — Yglesias lamented that the White House had “flunked bargaining 101.” Their assumption is that Obama loathes these outcomes but is the victim of his own weak negotiating strategy.

I don’t understand that assumption at all. Does anyone believe that Obama and his army of veteran Washington advisers are incapable of discovering these tactics on their own or devising better strategies for trying to avoid these outcomes if that’s what they really wanted to do? What evidence is there that Obama has some inner, intense desire for more progressive outcomes? These are the results they’re getting because these are the results they want — for reasons that make perfectly rational political sense.

Exactly. Obama is doing all of this on purpose. He and his WH are not bad negotiators. Why so many Obama supporters are disappointed and are still scratching their heads over his “ineffectiveness” is still wondrous to behold. And why:

Why would Democrats overwhelmingly support domestic budget cuts that burden the poor? Because, as Yglesias correctly observed, “just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats.” In other words, once Obama lends his support to a policy — no matter how much of a departure it is from ostensible Democratic beliefs — then most self-identified Democrats will support it because Obama supports it, because it then becomes the “Democratic policy,” by definition. Adopting “centrist” or even right-wing policies will always produce the same combination — approval of independents, dilution of GOP anger, media raves, and continued Democratic voter loyalty — that is ideal for the President’s re-election prospects.

Exactly. Why would he do any different. It’s been the plan all along. He has make it clear to those of us that bothered to listen to him, that this is what he does. But then a bit later Glenn brings out the usual crutch for why 2008 didn’t matter:

Before Obama’s inauguration, I wrote that the most baffling thing to me about the enthusiasm of his hardest-core supporters was the belief that he was pioneering a “new form of politics” when, it seemed obvious, it was just a re-branded re-tread of Clintonian triangulation and the same “centrist”, scorn-the-base playbook Democratic politicians had used for decades.

Right Glenn, because the 90′s where so horrible under the Clinton’s when the gap between the rich and poor continued to widen just like under Reagan/Bush… oh wait, no it didn’t, it actually reversed. And there was a surplus. And more jobs. Yea, that was really horrible for the working class. We wouldn’t want any more of that. See, this is where even Glenn continues to fall short. He can’t come to grips with the fact that something really horrible happened in 2008, and that horrible thing was fully funded and backed by the sample people that brought us Reagan/Bush I/ Bush II, and the wars and many other things. If you can’t see a better, viable alternative right in front of your face, you will never get there. It’s the usual liberal purist thinking I guess. Glenn continues:

What amazes me most is the brazen claims of presidential impotence necessary to excuse all of this. Atrios has written for weeks about the “can’t do” spirit that has overtaken the country generally, but that mindset pervades how the President’s supporters depict both him and the powers of his office: no bad outcomes are ever his fault because he’s just powerless in the face of circumstance. That claim is being made now by pointing to a GOP Congress, but the same claim was made when there was a Democratic Congress as well: recall the disagreements I had with his most loyal supporters in 2009 and 2010 over their claims that he was basically powerless even to influence his own party’s policy-making in Congress.

Nicely said. Glenn does a nice bit of shredding of some of our least favorite bloggers and their silliness. He seems to think Digby is in the right side though. Another blindside for him I think. All in all a good read.

So there you have it. Glenn mostly gets it. And in fairness mostly has along the way. But how does that help? I know we’ve all been down in the dumps because it seems pretty hopeless out there with a Reagan/Bush president destroying what little is left of the Dem brand, and mindless creative class types cheering all the way. Maybe someone with some guts will challenge him in ’12. I’m not holding my breath though.

This is an open thread.

Compare and Contrast

It's yummy and nutritious!

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Two different views of last night’s SOTU response by Rep. Paul Ryan:

Paul Krugman:

The Ryan Response

… was as bad as you might expect. Lots of breast-beating about deficits; you’d never know that no leading Republican, Ryan very much included, has offered a serious proposal to cut the deficit. Some cooked statistics about federal spending. And then there was this curious assertion:

Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.

Greece maybe fits that description. But if you’d read anything about the euro crisis — like this article — you’d know that Ireland was running a budget surplus on the eve of the crisis, and had quite low debt. Its problems now have nothing to do with fiscal irresponsibility in the past; they’re the consequence of weak financial regulation and the government’s too-generous bank bailout.

Ross Douthat:

The Politics of Evasion

If you were a visitor from Mars, watching tonight’s State of the Union address and Paul Ryan’s Republican response, you would have no reason to think that the looming insolvency of our entitlement system lies at the heart of the economic challenges facing the United States over the next two decades. From President Obama, we heard a reasonably eloquent case for center-left technocracy and industrial policy, punctuated by a few bipartisan flourishes, in which the entitlement issue felt like an afterthought: He took note of the problem, thanked his own fiscal commission for their work without endorsing any of their recommendations, made general, detail-free pledges to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent (but “without slashing benefits for future generations”), and then moved swiftly on to the case for tax reform. Tax reform is important, of course, and so are education and technological innovation and infrastructure and all the other issues that the president touched on in this speech. But it was still striking that in an address organized around the theme of American competitiveness, which ran to almost 7,000 words and lasted for an hour, the president spent almost as much time talking about solar power as he did about the roots of the nation’s fiscal crisis.

Ryan’s rejoinder was more urgent and more focused: America’s crippling debt was an organizing theme, and there were warnings of “painful austerity measures” and a looming “day of reckoning.” But his remarks, while rhetorically effective, were even more vague about the details of that reckoning than the president’s address. Ryan owes his prominence, in part, to his willingness to propose a very specific blueprint for addressing the entitlement system’s fiscal woes. But in his first big moment on the national stage, the words “Medicare” and “Social Security” did not pass the Wisconsin congressman’s lips.

Regarding Social Security, read this from The Daily Howler:

Correct on every point: In our view, Bob Herbert’s column about Social Security is correct on every point.

That leaves one problem with Herbert’s column—it won’t help matters at all.

On what points is Herbert’s column correct? It’s true—there really are “demagogues” who “would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits.” It’s true that these claims are false. It’s true that “there is no Social Security crisis.” And we’d almost agree with all this:

HERBERT (1/25/11): Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.

Let’s assume every word in this column is accurate. Will it help convince people that there is no Social Security crisis?

Almost certainly, no. Here’s the reason:

People believe that Social Security is facing a crisis due to a decades-old propaganda campaign. The talking-points which have misled the public are slick, convincing, skillfully drawn. But uh-oh! Herbert mentions none of these familiar points; doesn’t explain where these points have come from; and makes no attempt to help people see past them. He simply ignores the skillful claims which have driven the public’s mistaken belief. Instead, he offers us this:

HERBERT: The demagogues would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security “is emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds.”

How do we know that the program is sustainable? Of course! A think tank said!

Large majorities believe that Social Security won’t be there for them. At this site, we’ve endlessly described the talking-points which have thus convinced them. Unfortunately, people like Herbert have endlessly failed to help the public unravel these claims.

Large majorities still seem to believe that Social Security won’t be there for them. (In August 2010, 70 percent of people aged 18-49 told CNN that the system “will not be able to pay you a benefit when you retire.” The hapless work of liberal “intellectual leaders” explains why this is the case.

Alas, poor Herbert: Groan. Herbert quotes a think tank referring to the program’s “trust funds.” But why do people think the program won’t be there for them? Because they’ve been told, for the past thirty years, that these “trust funds” don’t really exist!

Herbert shows no sign of knowing that this basic problem exists. But then, this is the way our “leaders” have “argued” over the past thirty years. In response, we angrily call average voters stupid!

It’s pretty obvious to me after last night’s speech that Obama agrees we should all be eating catfood in golden years, he just doesn’t want to take the blame for it. I was wondering if he was trying to sucker the GOP into trying to cut SS benefits so he can veto the legislation.

I have now reached the conclusion he just wants to be “forced” to put old people out on the ice floes.

Neither side will admit it but we’re going to get screwed. On the bright side it will be a bipartisan effort.

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Senior housing of the future

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