Saving Social Insecurity

Greetings from Sedona…

If all that I knew about economics and finance were derived from radio, television, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal I would be a proud, unrepentant lefty.  The events of this week offer yet another example why.  Republican/conservative politicos again proved themselves to be heartless morons.  They gave Barack Obama the perfect opportunity for a terrific speech that could have guaranteed his reelection if not for the tepid delivery.

In referring to the republicans the key lines were:

“They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty-three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs.  That’s not right and it’s not going to happen while I am president.”

Way to go BO!!  Too bad you said it like an aloof college professor instead of the spellbinding deliverer of stem winders in your campaign.  The presidential election would be in the bag.

Skipping down a paragraph or so, Barack Obama again delivered the literary knockout blow had it only been with passion instead of the damp dishrag delivery he served up:

“The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism.  We take responsibility for ourselves and each other; for the country we want and the future we share.  We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness.  We sent a generation to college on the GI bill and saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare.  We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives.

This is who we are.  This is the America I know.  We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit investments in our people and our country.  To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms.  We will all need to make sacrifices.  But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in.  And as long as I’m President, we won’t.”

Wow!  Where do I sign up to volunteer?

All of this was made possible because the righty politicos really are heartless morons.  Even knowing nothing about economics, how politically stupid can anyone be to stick your chin out like that and dare the president to knock you senseless?  Why is it that the idiots on the right never cut the crony cash paid to Washington’s horde of corporate welfare kings?  There are plenty of great candidates like the sugar quota (making billionaires out of a few connected families and contributing to the destruction of the everglades).  Then there are big agribusiness subsidies (including ethanol) which not only line the pockets of lots of rich folks, but also make for utter environmental devastation on more levels than I could possibly enumerate here (and contributes to toxic meat too).

I can literally hear many of you thinking that it is easy to throw bombs without having the responsibility to come up with a plan.  This type of criticism is even more powerful when my libertarian philosophy is considered in the mix.  After all, libertarians make the righties look like pansies when it comes to cutting government spending, eliminating government programs and actually closing whole departments.

Ok, here is a suggestion for saving social insecurity that I would not enact if it were up to me, but which does the job and should be palatable to any unlobotomized humanoid:

1. Social security benefits are currently indexed to wages.  Index future benefits for current workers to rising consumer prices instead.  This will go most of the way to putting the system on an actuarially sound basis and still protect beneficiaries against inflation.
2. Raise the full retirement age to 70 from the current 67.  It would be phased in to minimize the impact on those nearest retirement.  Life expectancy has risen much more than five years since SS was enacted.  I would also steepen the discount for early retirement and increase that age as well.
3. Eliminate cost of living adjustments on benefits.  It was not part of the original plan and only became law under despot Dicky Nixon.  This is a key point.  As long as there is no anti-inflation constituency, everything is ultimately useless and hopeless.  Eliminating COLAs builds in a powerful political bloc that could be relied upon to check the natural political pressures to create inflation.

Actually, now that I look at it a bit, this represents part one of my entire plan (which I will reveal in future posts), but we will leave it here for now.  Unfortunately the above will save social security which my full blown offering will ultimately eliminate.    Of course social security is the easy entitlement target.  Medicare is the killer, with Medicaid not far behind.  I will offer a plan for them as well.

To be fair, libertarians are often as stupid as everyone else when it comes to selling policy.  More often than not, when you meet a libertarian about the first thing you will learn is the libertarian position in favor of legalizing drugs.  Talk about sticking your chin out for the fat roundhouse!!!!  At least let someone get to know you and a little bit about the philosophy first, so they can at least already dislike you.

Happy Tax Day!!!

All the best to you all,

Stephen Reiss
[email protected]

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