Jul 27 2010

Pobrecito

Every time our policy elites whine about how hard it is to be them I just have to laugh.

What they mean is it’s hard to keep the lies straight in the face of the truth.

No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements

By Neel Kashkari, The Washington Post

Monday, July 26, 2010

Cutting entitlement spending requires us to think beyond what is in our own immediate self-interest. But it also runs against our sense of fairness: We have, after all, paid for entitlements for earlier generations. Is it now fair to cut my benefits? No, it isn’t. But if we don’t focus on our collective good, all of us will suffer.

Getting Lost in the Fog of War

By ANDREW EXUM, The New York Times

Published: July 26, 2010

Many experts on the war, both in the military and the press, have long been struggling to come to grips with the conflict’s complexity and nuances. What is the public going to make of this haphazard cache of documents, many written during combat by officers with little sense of how their observations fit into the fuller scope of the war?

rustymancuso581

2 comments

  2. The people  on the deficit commission keep on proving they are the wrong people for the job. There are 18 members, all are millionaires, 14 are white men. There are no commissioners, or for that matter any one with knowledge of social security or retirement income, except one woman, Alice Rivkin and even she has it wrong. Ms. Rivkin penned an article explaining social security needs saving. The only thing that Social Security needs saving from is the deficit hawks, like Ms Rivkin, who want to gut it.

    Jane Hamsher piece at FDL today explains what Ms. Rivkin and the other members of the Cat Food Commission don’t want you to know and what they are refusing to even menntion.

    Raising or eliminating the maximum amount on which contributions are assessed and benefits calculated is one of the most popular options around, but not only doesn’t Rivlin mention it, she apparently doesn’t even understand it.  Ironically, she gets her facts wrong in the part of her piece where she is explaining how the program works.

       

    “Here is a quick refresher on how Social Security works. Workers and their employers pay Social Security taxes on their wages (up to a limit of $106,800 increased annually for inflation)…” (my emphasis.)

    The limit is increased annually not by inflation but by the average increase in nationwide wages.  This is a crucial distinction.  In 1977, Congress explicitly increased the base to cover 90 percent of all wages nationwide and then indexed it to the increase in average wages so that Social Security would continue to cover 90 percent of all wages.  That is, when you add together the wages of all the CEOs on Wall Street, sales clerks, janitors, factory workers, and everyone else, the intent is that 90 percent of all those wages are taxed for Social Security purposes and are insured against loss.  The idea is that the ten percent left out – earned by about 6 percent of the work force – do not need to be insured against loss by a public program like Social Security.

    But a funny thing happened to that 90 percent.  The last few decades showed huge increases in the earnings of CEOs and other top earners with stagnating wages for everyone else.  Consequently, when all those wages were averaged together, the wages of the highest earners increased by more than the average, and the percentage of covered wages slipped accordingly.  Today, only about 84 percent of wages are under the maximum.  That seemingly small slippage, from 90 percent to 84 percent, costs Social Security billions of dollars of lost revenue each year.  Gradually restoring the 90 percent is not only sound policy, but would go a long way to eliminating the projected deficit.

    Social Security is NOT in trouble. It is NOT an entitlement when you have paid for it. It is insurance.

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