Having ruled out higher payroll taxes (for now), the Bush administration is now dropping hints that it will consider other revenue changes to fund “privatization” (a word that seems to cry out for scare quotes these days), e.g. raising the ceiling on income subject to SocSec taxation. (ABC News via MargRev). The biggest hint comes the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card: “Let’s get smart people like Alan Greenspan involved.”
Hmmm, like this? In 1983, Greenspan’s recommended legislation “moved tax increases scheduled for the future into the present, raised self-employment taxes, taxed benefits for single people with incomes of $25,000 and couples with incomes over $32,000, expanded the program to new federal employees, and prohibited state and local government employees from leaving the system. The reform delayed one cost-of-living increase, but this was more than outweighed by the onerous tax increases.”
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The comment by Andrew Card “Let’s get smart people like Alan Greenspan involved” clearly illustrates just how low debates of this nature have sunk. I guess a person being “smart” somehow justifies the taking of someone else’s property. Anyway, I thought Mr. Greenspan was prominent among those who “fixed” the social security system back in the 1980s. Also, didn’t President Bush rule out increasing taxes to fund this latest iteration of social security “reform”. The intellectual bankruptcy of those supporting increasing the ceiling on income subject to the social security tax while claiming not to support tax increases is starkly apparent.
Maybe if they’re really smart persons, they’re justified in killing you, if, in their infinite wisdom, they think its better for you, and for the “greater good”.
For an alleged dummy, GWB is pretty good at making Americans swallow contradictory pieces of information and come back for more. Witness his convention speech last summer, where 5 minutes of rhetoric about reducing government and cutting taxes were followed by about 45 minutes of talk about more welfare and more government interference in Americans’ personal lives.
Maybe GWB is really very smart: his genius is in making everyone think he’s dumb, then sneaking things through on them.
Part of the 1983 “fix” that was a scam was the raising of the payroll tax rate. If the portion of the taxes that was not needed to pay current benefits was in fact saved and invested for the sake of future beneficiaries, this would have helped. Unfortunately, it was spent on other government items and the so-called S.S. Trust Fund got some IOU’s in its place. When these Treasury bonds require principal and interest payments, this calls for NEW taxes to pay for them. In other words, the Trust fund is a monumental scam.
Privatization is coming under fire and I should point out that I don’t think it is necessarily the best response. But we should at least look at the situation realistically. The system is headed toward bankruptcy and we should not expect any solution to be pain-free. Some of the people who complain about privatization remind me of someone whose house was burning down complaining to the fire department about the water damage it did to his house. Perhaps the fire department did not respond optimally, but, absent a meaningful response, the house would have burned to the ground.
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