The Growing Social Security and Medicare Problem

Debt Limit Bill and Social Security Benefit Cuts
(cross posted at SocialSecurityDefender.blogspot.com) Well the first line of attack is opening up. Lindsay Graham is threatening to hold up the Debt Limit Increase Bill, and so potentially throw this whole country and perhaps the world into default unless he gets cuts to Social Security. This is insane on several levels, not least because the two things have nothing to do with each other to start with. To understand this we have to back off and examine four different categories of Debt: Public...

Mark Sunshine: There's A Better Alternative To Cutting Social Security...
On Sunday morning, I woke up just in time to hear Senator Lindsey Graham announce on a TV Talk Show that he isn't going to vote to increase the U.S. Debt Limit unless Social Security and Medicare benefits are cut for people under 55 years old. I started listening carefully to the program because if Senator Graham has his way two of the people that will have their benefits cuts are my wife and me. While we are both under 55 years old, we have paid into the system for more than 30 years and woul...

It Is Too Late To Privatize Social Security!
by Frank Hill, Telemachus So to the opponents of such a measure for the past 45 years, congratulations! ‘You. Win’! (sic?) Converting or transitioning to a combined private/public Social Security program has been one of the ways reformers have sought to improve the system for every single recipient from the Minimum Wage earner up. It has been steadfastly opposed by those who have bought into the status quo and swear on a stack of Bibles: ‘Everything is OK with Social Security...

Tea Party Betrayed On Spending Cuts
The Tea Party membership is being set up for yet another huge betrayal by the DC Republican establishment. The members had very clear expectations that specific Spending Cuts would fix the government's Budget problems. The Republican leadership is betraying them by cutting things Tea Party members do not want cut, and are not cutting the things they were led to believe would fix the Budget problems. Tea Party members expected the new Congress to fix the Budget by cutting "government waste," st...

Boehner challenges new CBO estimate that repealing Obamacare will raise deficit
The Congressional Budget Office has just sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying that repealing ObamaCare would "probably increase federal budget Deficits over the 2012-2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion." The CBO's reasoning is basically this: If ObamaCare is repealed, the government will not collect X in taxes, as provided for in the national Health Care law, and it will not cut Y in Medicare spending, as the law instructs, but it will also not spend a little less than t...

Gary Johnson talks National Debt and National Security
By Grant Bosse  (MANCHESTER, NH) Gary Johnson says the United States is on the brink of a financial collapse, and only an immediate end to the federal Spending Spree will keep the country from going over the edge. The former New Mexico Governor was back in New Hampshire this week promoting the need for fiscal discipline and his organization, the Our America Initiative. In an interview with New Hampshire Watchdog on the New Hampshire Institute of Politics on the campus on St. Anselm College, t...

Congratulations, you just bought 40,000 computers for kids in Detroit
In case you missed the news, the Detroit Public School system is purchasing 40,000 Laptops for all of the 6-12th grade Students in the district. On top of that, every single teacher in the district is receiving a computer. Also, 4,300 scanners and printers are being purchased. And if that’s not enough, the district is buying 500 desktop computers for 138 early childhood classrooms on the district. All told, the district is purchasing almost 50,000 computers, printers, and scanners with a t...

Michigan Ground Report
More fearful yet is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, who Obama has made a health policy advisor at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.  Ezekiel has stated that the Hippocratic Oath gets in the way of doctors doing what is “right for society”.  According to Ezekiel, what is right is not providing care to sick infants and the elderly.  This will cut down on “costs” an...

Pelosi's Final Debt Tab: $5.3 Trillion Added During Speakership -- $3.67 Billion/Day...
(CNSNews.com) - In the 1,461 days that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) served as speaker of the House, the National Debt increased by a total of $5.343 Trillion ($5,343,452,800,321.37) or $3.66 billion per day ($3.657,394,113.84), according to official Debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury. Pelosi was the 52nd speaker of the House. During her tenure, she amassed more Debt than the first 49 speakers combined. The total National Debt did not climb above $5.343 Trillion (the amount amassed duri...

Holtz-Eakin sets the record straight on the debt ceiling
The Obama Administration and Democrats are presenting Republicans with their first challenge on reducing the size and scope of government with a vote expected to occur in the first half of the year to raise the Debt ceiling to almost $14.3 Trillion. Democrats and some Republicans are warning of dire economic consequences if the increase isn’t passed. Over at the Daily Caller, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, takes issue with the view presented by the O...

CBO: Health reform repeal would add $230 billion to deficit by 2021
The GOP has already shown they'll play fast and loose with their own Budget rules, exempting health reform Repeal from they're new "CutGo" rule. So they've proven they care more about making petty political points than reducing the Deficit, but here's what we're actually talking about: $230 billion in 10 years, and a Trillion over the next two decades: As a result of changes in direct spending and revenues, CBO expects that enacting H.R. 2 would probably increase federal Budget deficits over th...

So Where Do These Republicans Actually Stand On The Constitution They Purport To Love So Much?
Think Progress has a great post on the truth about where the GOP stands on the Constitution that sends them into paroxysms of delight. Many of them have never expressed their views but, among those who have, it’s not pretty: Child Labor : In three separate opinions, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas called for a return to a discredited theory of the Constitution that early twentieth century justices used to declare federal child labor laws Unconstitutional. Many GOP elected officials ha...

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The New Sophists. In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The New Sophists. “In 2009, brilliant Economists in the Obama Administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer — assured us that record Trillion-plus Budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent Unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in National Debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street. . . . The public might have better belie...

Will health-care reform really save the government money?
Bill Daley: Is it about competence or ideology? I'm a big critic of the new House Budget rules, which have the perverse effect of making it easier to increase the Budget Deficit. And I think repealing the health-care law would be a mistake. But it's unfair to accuse House Republicans of being willing to blow a huge hole in the deficit by repealing Health Care and of being hypocrites on Fiscal Responsibility by exempting the effects of health-care Repeal from their Budget rules. The Congressiona...

Liberal debt claxons
Yes, that's right. Both the darling of Tea Party Republicans and scion of New York's most liberal first family are in agreement about the disastrous effects Nanny State policies have played on their state economies. Decades of unbalanced Budgets, or budgets balanced by financial skulduggery, combined with increasing social "justice" arrangements have led their states to near Bankruptcy. In New York's case, bankruptcy may come as soon as this summer - a cataclysm that would be larger than the Gre...

Top Line: Democrats Re-Selling Health Reform in Fact of Repeal
ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports: House Democrats, chastened by voters in November, are newly in the minority on Capitol Hill. But they’re not shy about defending their signature achievement of the past two years - passage of the sweeping health reform law last March. Even though most of the law won’t go into effect for another three years, Democrats got good news today when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted it would add $143 billion to the Deficit to Repeal the pro

ADP shows addition of 297,000 private-sector jobs in December
Tomorrow the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report on the Unemployment Rate for December, and one early indicator shows promise of significant private-sector job growth.  ADP, which manages Payroll for millions of companies across the country, issued its monthly estimate yesterday that showed an additional 297,000 jobs added to The Economy.  It’s the best month for ADP’s report since the Recession began: Private-sector employment increased by 297,000 from November to December on...

You can not escape death or taxes
There is no question if state taxes could go up, the question is how much will our lawmakers charge us for their years of bad policies. Since 1999 our state has been run on a Deficit Budget and back in 2003 when then State Budget Director John Filan sounded the alarm over the $4.8 billion Deficit saying,  “Illinois is facing its worst fiscal crisis ever,” and added, “this monumental fiscal problem is real and must be dealt with in order to turn our state’s economic ...

Summary Box: Hiring outlook improves, layoffs fall
FEWER PEOPLE SEEK JOBLESS AID: The number of people applying for Unemployment Benefits fell in the past month to its Lowest Level since July 2008. It's the latest evidence that hiring may soon accelerate. APPLICATIONS ROSE: More people actually applied for Unemployment Benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. But the increase wasn't enough to reverse a steady decline that began in August. OPTIMISM ABOUT JOBS: That decline is a major reason Economists expect the government will rep...

Do Facts Matter?
John Boehner is out to gut the Health Care reform from last year. Since the bill includes no Public Option I have to say that I am not sure why I should care that this "reform" act get gutted, but it would be helpful if our Health Care decisions were based in facts. Democracy Now has an hour on Health Care reform from January 5th. In this program you can hear John Boehner gush about how we have the best Health Care system in the world and he's so proud of it that it makes him want to jump for jo...

Obamacare; the nightmare of Single Payer
Insurance is the brain-child of Benjamin Franklin.  Previously, when disaster struck, people would lose everything and then have to rely on the charity of others to begin their recovery.  With Insurance, many people would pool some of their wealth so that, if disaster befell one, he would receive immediate relief. So then, you think, if grouping many people is good, why have all these individual Insurance Companies?  Just group the entire population thru the government and then ev...

Welcome to Dickens World
“This eager assault on the foundations of modern middle-class America is of a piece with Tea Party tantrums on the 14th Amendment, or Rand Paul’s views on the Civil Rights Act. The urge to Austerity is epitomized in a movement that demands we return to the gold standard. Modern Conservatism has exceeded its title: not content to stand still, today’s Conservatives demand a great going backwards. They would spend the 21st Century undoing the 20th Century.” - OsborneInk Wha...

The Ryan-Rivlin Plan, in Pictures
I have a piece in the American magazine this morning looking at the plan to reform Medicare and Medicaid proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan and Economist Alice Rivlin. There are several things I do not like about this plan. For instance, it continues the Washington tradition of extending open-ended entitlement promises to millions of people without paying for them. However, this plan is important because it is a clear option for reforming the programs that are at the source of most of our financial prob...

Boehner Dismisses CBOs Health Repeal Cost
Yahoo! Buzz House Speaker John Boehner is dismissing an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that repealing President Barack Obama ’s health bill would increase the Deficit by $230 billion over 10 years. “The CBO is entitled to their opinion,” the Ohio Republican told reporters in his first Press Conference as speaker. “CBO can only provide a score based on the assumptions that are given to them,” he added. “If you go back and look at the health c...

Midday open thread
My god is David Ignatius ridiculous. The best sign that the economic engine is really repaired would be a joint plan by the White House and congressional Republicans to trim the federal Budget Deficit over the next 10 years. As Atrios concludes: the "best sign" would be... some more fucking jobs and rising incomes. Republicans don't care about deficits, and neither do organizations that pretend to care about deficits. They just care about destroying Social Security. Sigh, Daley. There's...