WaPo Whopper on Trumka, Social Security and Taxes

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/07/07/wapo-whopper-on-trumka-social-security-and-taxes/

by Mike Hall, Jul 7, 2010

Here’s a great way to save some Social Security money. Let more folks die before they can get a check. Cold? Maybe. But pretty darn effective according to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus.

Marcus seems to have taken offense at AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s objection to raising the retirement age and his call for the better-off among us to pay the Social Security tax on all their income, just like the rest of us do.

Trumka recently meet with the Post’s editorial board, including Marcus, and also testified last week before the federal budget deficit commission. In her WaPo column today, Marcus writes that Trumka “erupts” during the editorial board meeting when asked about raising the Social Security retirement age. She says he tells the board that would have been be a “death sentence” for workers like his late coal mining father whose 44 years in the mines left him with a case of black lung, but also a union pension check and Social Security.

Marcus writes that maybe there’s room for a little sympathy for coal miners, but then holds up the example of the “middle age assembly” sitting around with her at the “gleaming conference table,” as great evidence that boosting Social Security’s retirement age wouldn’t be so tragic.

Well, not all of us go to work around “gleaming conference tables” or enjoy what are probably pretty darn decent health benefits and not-too-shabby paychecks as do Marcus and her colleagues. And good for them. They’ve no doubt worked hard to get there.

But they probably are not counting on that Social Security check as a major element of their retirement security as are tens of millions of workers beyond the Beltway—heck, here within the Beltway, too.

FULL story at link.

[Historic NY]

1. its easy for people that sit on their ass in air conditioned offices to...

suggest it wouldn't hurt people to keep working beyond 65 or 66.

[unkachuck]

2. K&R....n/t

[Omaha Steve]

3. Kick