mercredi 10 février 2010

Memo to Michele Bachmann: You already had a chance to repeal Social Security but you didn't take it

Perhaps because of the media love affair with the aging beauty queen from Alaska with the unmistakable maniacal gleam of insanity in her eyes, Minnesota nutball Michele Bachmann advocacy of repeal of Social Security received little attention at the Teabaggers' Ball last weekend:
Speaking to a small group of conference attendees and ThinkProgress during lunch on Saturday, Bachmann outlined how the Republican Party and its 2012 nominee must address the national debt. Bachmann referenced Glenn Beck, who falsely warned about a $107 trillion in supposed “unfunded liabilities” from Social Security and Medicare. She then called for a “reorganization” of entitlements where people “already in the system” would continue to receive benefits, but “everybody else” would be weaned off:
BACHMANN: Is the country too big to fail? No, the country can fail. We can, we’re not invincible. And we’re so close now to being at that point because the thing is, as Glenn Beck said last night, it is true. The $107 trillion that he put on the board. We’re $14 trillion in debt, but that doesn’t include the unfunded massive liabilities. That’s $107 trillion, and that’s for Social Security and Medicare and all the rest. You add up all those unfunded net liabilities, and all the traps that could go wrong we’re on the hook for, and what it means is what we have to do is a reorganization of all of that, Social Security and all. We have to do it simply because we can’t let the contract remain as they are because the older people are going to lose. So, what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can’t do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is.


Forget even about the remaining WWII and "Silent Generation" current retirees, whom even Bachmann will sop by leaving them in the current system. I'm sure that's going to go over just great with the 135 million Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers who have already paid into the system for between 25 and 44 years. We are the ones who have paid the increased FICA taxes resulting from the 1983 Amendments to the Social Security Act that were designed to address the elephant-through-a-snake problem of baby boomer retirement -- funds that were then stolen by Ronald Reagan to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and replaced with now-worthless IOUs. I know it's going over great with my 29-year-old co-worker who has already realized (it took me until I was 38) that this money is going into a black hole and that Republicans will always and forever want to use this withholding to pay for more tax cuts for people who already have more money than they can spend in 100 lifetimes in the name of Rich People Create Jobs.

Go ahead, GOP. Run on repealing Social Security and replacing it with "private investment accounts" put into the hands of companies like Goldman Sachs and Citicorp at a time of volatile financial markets. Yeah. That'll work.

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