Tag: Super Congress

What are you buying the 1% for Cliffsmas?

Cliffsmas is coming and I bet you, like most of us, have not figured out just what it is that you are going to wind up giving the 1% this time around.  Fortunately, they want to make it easy for you, they have made a list of their wants and checked it several times now.

Many on Wall Street with the help of nice people like Paul Ryan and a group of Democrats that call themselves “The Third Way,” working with President Obama would like to give your Social Security to the 1% to use as gambling chips on Wall Street.

Then there are the CEO’s from Peter Peterson’s “Fix the Debt Commission,” who want 134 Billion dollars in tax cuts exempting foreign earnings for corporations (along with their usual trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies, bailouts and tax loopholes) for Cliffsmas.

In fact, these Fix the Debt Commission CEO’s are so eager to get this cutting of costs for people other than themselves who want to retire, that less than 60% of their companies offer pensions for their employees and of the ones that do, the CEO’s have underfunded their employee pension funds by more than $100 billion.

There are a bunch of other 1%ers that would prefer the Bowles-Simpson approach of gutting your Social Security payouts over a period of years as President Obama was pushing on the campaign trail and in negotiations with Congressional Republicans over a long period.  In these same negotiations Mr. Obama put cuts to health care for veterans and cuts to Medicare on the table.

The cuts to your benefits that Mr. Obama and the Austerians are promoting for Cliffsmas are far from chump change.  The chained-cpi cut is small at first, but over a period of years is a 9% cut in benefits  over a period of years.  Raising the age of eligibility for retirement age to 70 would cut benefits for the average retiree by 19 percent or about $35,419.