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Wnen it Comes to Cutting Medicare and Social Security High Income Ain't What It Used to Be 
Wednesday, 09 November 2011 05:51 In an article on the deliberations of the supercommittee the NYT told readers that a Republican plan would raise money by charging "higher Medicare premiums for high-income people." While the article does not give exact cutoff for high income, it is likely that is no higher than $80,000 and possibly as low as $40,000. (Many proposals for reducing Social Security benefits for "high income" beneficiaries would lower benefits for people with incomes of just $30,000.)
It is worth noting that "high income" can mean something very different when the topic is the benefits that workers get in retirement than when the topic is income taxes. Most major media outlets have run pieces questioning whether $250,000 (the floor set by President Obama for people subject to tax increases) is really wealthy.
The reason that the cutoffs for benefits cuts are fairly low is that there are few elderly households with high incomes and per person benefits are not very different for the highest income household and the lowest income household. If $250,000 were set as a floor for subjecting seniors to benefit cuts, it would save almost no money. The only way to save substantial money from this sort of means-testing is by cutting benefits for seniors that anyone would view as middle class.
Actually, it makes sense. If we don’t cut health care and retirement benefits for old people, how can we pay for the carried-interest tax break that allows private equity guys like, well, Mitt Romney to keep paying 15 percent tax rates?And, naturally, another major part of his "reform plan" is to privatize the two programs. Because Wall Street has done such an awesome job with your 401k.
...they’ve all proven their complete and utter incompetence to do their ostensible jobs, i.e. the care and stewardship of money.
For instance, the top five investment banks in the country sought to remove capital requirements in the middle of the last decade, and all of them instantly jacked their debt-to-equity ratios above 20-1, some of them going as high as 33-1 or 35-1. Of those five investment banks, three (Bear, Lehman, and Merrill) went out of business during the crash, and the other two (Goldman and Morgan Stanley) required massive government aid to survive.And here's why O and I decided to celebrate "Move Your Money" Day by transferring our vast fortune from Wells Fargo to a local credit union.
The commercial banks have not been much better, with two of the biggest (Wachovia and Washington Mutual) imploding thanks to bad investment decisions and three of the biggest survivors (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup) recently facing downgrades.
The recent downgrades, incidentally, were widely seen as Wall Street’s way of making two interlocking judgments about these big banks. One is that their accounting is so fucked up and dishonest that it simply cannot be believed, leading to widespread expectation that one or more of them will ultimately collapse. The other is that when they collapse, the government may no longer be able or willing to completely bail these companies out. The downgrades were spurred by vague fears that implementation of new reforms via Dodd-Frank will make it harder to get bailouts.
So the mere hint that these banks might be denied future bailouts caused a company as massive as Bank of America to be downgraded to just above junk status. That means, in other words, that without the implicit promise of government aid, Wall Street considers these banks to be junk or below-junk businesses. Evaluated purely on their own merits, without the implicit attachment to the taxpayer, these companies actually have negative trustworthiness.
And these are the people we want managing the nation’s Social Security accounts?
In fact, the law’s working precisely as intended. After 28 years of generating huge payroll tax surpluses to cover the baby boomers’ retirement benefits, the system must now begin to draw upon those funds to help pay current benefits—the vast majority still covered by current payroll tax receipts.
“Rather than posing any sort of crisis,” explains Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.”
Again, this is the beneficiaries’ money, invested by the Social Security trustees in U.S. Treasury bonds drawn upon “the full faith and credit of the United States.” Far from being “meaningless IOUs” as right-wing cant has it, they represent the same legally binding promise between the U.S. government and its people that it makes with Wall Street banks and the Chinese government, which also hold Treasury Bonds.
A promise not very different, the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby points out, from the one implicit in your bank statement or 401K (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you think the money was buried in earthen jars filled with gold bullion and precious stones?...
So is Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”? No, it’s group insurance, not an investment... Do fewer workers support each beneficiary? Sure, but who cares? It’s denominated in dollars, not a head count. The boomers were nearing 40 when the Reagan administration fixed the actuarial tables. No surprises there.
Are longer life expectancies screwing up the numbers? Not really. Most of the rise is explained by lower infant and child mortality, not by old-timers overstaying their welcome. Kevin Drum points out that gradually raising the payroll tax 1 percent and doubling the earnings cap over 20 years would make Social Security solvent forever.We've heard a lot of crap from interested parties and ignorant tools about this issue. It's time to push back.
