"New tax deal is threatening the livelihood of America's present and future seniors"

madfloridian

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu Dec-23-10 02:35 PM
Original message

"New tax deal is threatening the livelihood of America's present and future seniors"

Those are the words in an op ed in the Palm Beach Post yesterday. The op ed is by Robert Weiner, a former chief of staff of the U.S. House Select Committee on Aging and Jonathan Battaglia, a policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associates.

Commentary: Social Security's future at risk with new tax deal

Under the radar screen, the new tax deal is threatening the livelihood of America's present and future seniors - to line the pockets of millionaires. If made permanent, a new Social Security "payroll tax holiday," reducing the "match" employers pay from 6 percent to 4 percent of salary, will drop the solvency of the program 14 years, from 2037 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. At the same time, Congress agreed to increase high-end loopholes in the estate tax, exempting 39,000 estates worth as much as $5 million.

This bill puts in motion two devastating policies: lowering taxes for the rich and destabilizing the financing of Social Security. Without sufficient worker and employer matching money, which has kept Social Security solvent for 75 years and helped millions of Americans live out their senior years in comfort, the program could be doomed. Congress and the White House say they want to "protect Social Security's solvency," but this action does just the opposite.

The most dangerous aspect of the payroll tax holiday is that it could become permanent. The new philosophy in Congress seems to be "once a cut, always a cut." When the payroll tax holiday expires in a year, Republicans will insist on keeping it, just as they did with the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

This paragraph is devastating because our Democrats are going along with what the Republicans intended all along, and Dan Bartlett even put it into words.

Democrats are falling for the same trap they did nine years ago when they helped pass the Bush tax cuts. Bush communications director Dan Bartlett explained how they used "temporary" cuts to get votes: "We knew that, politically, once you get it into law, it becomes almost impossible to remove it."

They knew exactly what they were doing, and we apparently do not.

Paul Krugman's comments earlier this month were also true and to the point. It's a matter of class.

Class and Social Security

The proximate cause is that cutting Social Security is one of those things you�re for if you�re a Very Serious Person. Way back, I wrote that inside the Beltway calling for Social Security cuts is viewed as a �badge of seriousness�, which has nothing to do with the program�s real importance or lack thereof to the budget picture; that column elicited a more or less hysterical reaction, which sort of proved the point....

But why Social Security? There was a telling moment in 2004, during one of the presidential campaign debates. Tim Russert, the moderator, asked eight or nine questions about Social Security, trying to put the candidates on the spot, while asking not once about Medicare, which serious people � as opposed to Serious People � know is the real heart of the story. Why the focus on Social Security?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with class.

The goal of the centrist think tanks has been to make the Democratic party less reliant on its "traditional constituents"....that means those who are not rich.

Changing Democratic policies

Al From interview

"One of the important things we had to do in 1992 was remove the obstacles that kept people from voting Democratic in the first place," he said.

That included addressing issues of welfare, fiscal discipline and crime. "As long as people thought we were going to take money from people who worked and give it to people who didn't work, they didn't want to listen to anything else," he added.

And I'll bet Simon Rosenberg would love to take back these words he spoke long ago about why they formed their think tank.

Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."

And the words of Robert Dreyfuss from 2001:

Today's is not your father's Democratic Party. Though the dwindling chorus of party progressives provides counterpoint, today's Democrats are proud to claim the mantle of budgetary moderation. They oppose President Bush's $2-trillion tax-cut plan not by arguing mainly for more spending on health, education, and welfare, but because it risks the new sacred cause of paying off the national debt. They are the party of increased military spending, the death penalty, the war on drugs, and partnership with religious faith. They are the party of Ending Welfare As We Know It, the party of The Era of Big Government Is Over.

They have started touching Social Security, our own party leaders did that.

And we should not be expected to be silent.