How Stupid Does Jon Runyan Think I Am?

To be fair, I don't think... (0.00 / 0)

...that even the staunchest opponents of Social Security are proposing its immediate destruction, if only because seniors like yourself vote so damn much.

However, if the issue were to be addressed with any degree of intellectual honesty by both conservatives and liberals, we should agree that whatever problems are inherent within the system as a result of the pressures that will be placed on it by the baby boomer generation should have solutions that are borne from the baby boomer generation.

According to Wikipedia, Landon Jones, who coined the term "baby boomer" in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1943 through 1960, when annual births increased over 4,000,000.  This book was written in 1980 and while I do not understand why it would take 20 years for someone to discover the presence of a generation as outsized and consumptive as the baby boomers, it is only slightly harder to understand why nothing was done since then to prepare for the impact of this generation on our country's Social Security and Medicare systems.

In fact, every proposed reform to these systems that I have seen from both conservatives and liberals places the burden of solving the problem that will be caused by this generation on future generations, despite the fact that past generations have had no less than 50 years to make the necessary modifications to this system to ensure that it would be sufficiently funded to provide for the needs of the present generation without unnecessarily burdening future generations.

It would be easy enough to just blame the Republicans who elected Reagan and Bush and Bush who in turn tax cut and deficit spent our country into oblivion, but Clinton was hardly any kind of visionary on Social Security and waited until he left office before recommending that the budget surpluses that he bequeathed to his predecessors should be used to "Save Social Security First".  No, he wanted to be re-elected just as badly as everybody else who spent the last 30-50 years passing the buck and so does Barack Obama and everybody else running for re-election in 2012.

So while Runyan's robocalls are indeed being intellectually dishonest, they are no more so than any politician's statements about a problem that should be solved by today's not tomorrow's beneficiaries.  However, this would require elected officials to be courageous enough to be willing to cross the AARP, a lobby that is even more powerful than the NRA.

And if we cannot get electeds in DC to ban ammo clips larger than 10 bullets after one of their colleagues and some of her constituents were gunned down by a lunatic armed to the teeth with guns with 33-bullet clips, how the hell can we expect them to means test present-day Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, which would go a long way towards ensuring the solvency of both systems going forward?

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by: Bertin Lefkovic @ Tue Oct 25, 2011 at 05:04:05 AM UTC

The courage to implement a solution (0.00 / 0)

The solution to the Social Security shortfall is pretty simple. Just remove the cap on FICA deductions. If you earn less than $110,000 per year, it will have no effect on you. If you earn more, it's just a "flat tax" that is touted so often by the very people who want to destroy Social Security by putting it in the hands of Wall Street brokers.

Blog: http://www.deciminyan.org

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by: deciminyan @ Tue Oct 25, 2011 at 11:17:57 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I agree, but... (0.00 / 0)

...this liberal solution, like the conservative solution to increase the retirement age, negatively impacts future generations of beneficiaries and does not make the current generation of beneficiaries accountable for their failure to recognize the strain that they would place on the system as a whole.

It would have been better if the cap on FICA deductions had been removed 30 years ago to ensure that the SSTF would be sufficiently funded to meet the needs of retiring baby boomers.  Because this did not happen, I believe that current beneficiaries should be means-tested to determine whether they need these benefits or not.  Those benficiaries who fail to exhibit sufficient need now are most likely people who should/would have been paying larger FICA deductions for the last 30 years, but didn't because of the cap.

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by: Bertin Lefkovic @ Tue Oct 25, 2011 at 19:50:50 PM UTC

[ Parent ]