{"id":383,"date":"2011-04-22T15:02:36","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T19:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/?p=383"},"modified":"2011-05-23T19:24:41","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T23:24:41","slug":"dear-congress-dont-make-us-work-til-we-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/2011\/04\/22\/dear-congress-dont-make-us-work-til-we-die\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear Congress: Don’t Make Us Work ’til We Die"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Strengthen Social Security<\/a> web site has released a pretty compelling video addressing the apparent clear desire on the part of the Republican party to destroy Social Security (and Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and on and on, but who’s counting anymore, right??).<\/p>\n

The video is available on YouTube.<\/p>\n

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Robert (RJ) Eskow, writing on the blog for the organization Campaign for America’s Future<\/i>, has put together an outline of the content of the video’s salient points, in a piece entitled Work ‘Til You Die: The Alternate American Reality – and the Reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nThis video takes a \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d\/\u201dalternate reality\u201d tack, which suits me just fine. We’ve used that approach plenty of times ourselves over the years. (Here’s the latest.) With that in mind, we’ll adopt our best Rod Serling voice:<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026 The Ryan budget proposal is called \u201cserious\u201d by the likes of Ezra Klein and others, yet Ryan voted to preserve a tax break for hedge fund billionaires that allows them to be taxed at 15% of income while the rest of us pay much higher rates. That will never people from writing sentences like this one from Ezra: “I like Ryan personally, and appreciate his policy-oriented approach to politics.”<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026The top 25 hedge fund billionaires made $22 billion last year. If they had been taxed under the same rules that are used for cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers \u2026 for anyone who actually helps society, for that matter \u2026 the government would have received $4 billion in revenue last year.<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026That revenue would have been enough to write a check for $1,400 to everyone that turned 65 last year – all 2,858,000 of them.<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026Or the revenue from these hedge fund billionaires could have paid the entire Social Security retirement benefit for more than three hundred thousand people \u2013 more than four hundred thousand, if they were women.<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026And that’s just by establishing tax fairness for 25 people. Imagine what a return to Reagan-era tax levels would do. Back then, the top marginal rate was 50%. It’s 35% now (except for those hedge fund managers, who pay 15%), and both the Simpson\/Bowles recommendations and Ryan’s “policy-oriented approach” would lower it even more. While, of course, cutting Social Security and Medicare …<\/p>\n

Of course, nobody\u2019s proposing to pay anybody\u2019s retirement benefits out of general taxation \u2013 just lift the payroll tax cap so that the wealthy contribute more. Is that unfair? Not if you consider this: The changes made to Social Security under Reagan would have kept it solvent forever, if not for the fact that the extremely wealthy have captured more of our national income than even Alan Greenspan expected. Lifting the cap just redresses that wrong.<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026These unpopular cuts to Medicare and Social Security wouldn\u2019t even be possible politically unless Democrats like Dick Durbin were accquiesing, and unless Democrats like Barack Obama weren\u2019t refusing \u2013 at least so far – to offer unequivocal opposition. When Obama makes a Harry Reid statement about Social Security, we\u2019ll be fine. Until then I’ll worry.<\/p>\n

If I have any complaint about the video, it\u2019s that it\u2019s too lighthearted. The reality behind raising the retirement age is a brutal one. (They’ll undoubtedly try to mask the cruelty by creating a “hardship exemption” that will fail to protect workers. We’ve explained why that won’t work.) And the same people pushing this “solution” want to cap Medicare benefits. If that happens, people will die. That\u2019s not funny at all.<\/p>\n

Submitted for your consideration \u2026The new consensus that’s being so warmly embraced by Dick Durbin and others will increase the death rate among elderly Americans, and force millions to continue working under conditions that are all but Dickensian for someone of their age.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Strengthen Social Security web site has released a pretty compelling video addressing the apparent clear desire on the part of the Republican party to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,13,48,36,37],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":789,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keepamericafree.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}