Sunday, June 06, 2004
Looting Your Social Security: Heist of the century, aided and abetted by Alan Greenspan
And guess what! It's the ol' bait and switch! Krugman:
After lying, looting is what Republicans do best!
Before Greenspan became Fed chairman, he headed a commission that recommended changes in Social Security to secure its future. The most important recommendation, adopted by Congress, was for an increase in the payroll tax -- a regressive tax that falls much more heavily on lower- and middle-income families than it does on the well-off. The ostensible purpose was to generate a surplus within the Social Security system, building up a trust fund to pay benefits once the baby boomers retire.
That was the bait; now Greenspan has pulled the switch. The sequence looks like this: he pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used the overall surplus, mainly coming from Social Security, to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to maintain the tax cuts while cutting Social Security benefits. [Greenspan] never said, ''Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so that we can give big tax cuts to the rich!'' But that's the end result of his advice.
(via NY Times)
After lying, looting is what Republicans do best!