COMMENTARY | Ever since Social Security was first introduced, it's been political suicide for anyone to even suggest cutting it. GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, whose budget plan included dramatic cuts to the program, got booed when he showed up at town hall meetings afterward, and other Republicans who supported it have had to deal with similarly unruly crowds.
Democrats, on the other hand, have long been known as the party that supports Social Security, along with other "social safety net" programs like Medicare. This is one of the big things that's ensured their reelection even in contested districts. And it raises the question: Why on Earth is Obama starting to negotiate cutting it?
Doesn't Social Security add to the deficit?
No.
But we have to pay for it somehow, right?
It's already paid for through 2037. Your payroll taxes are used to buy U.S. Treasury Bonds, and the Social Security Administration has a huge stockpile of them already.
What happens in 2037?
You'll get about 80 percent of what you're supposed to get from Social Security, unless somebody fixes that. Conservatives want to stick it to the poor by lowering benefits and increasing the retirement age, and liberals want to increase the payroll tax cap, so that people making more than about $100,000 a year pay the same proportion of their income that we do.
Don't we have to fix Social Security, then?
Yes, on or before 2037. Right now we're facing a much closer deadline: If we don't either go further into debt or eliminate the deficit by Aug. 2, Bad Stuff starts to happen.
So that's why we need to cut Social Security, right?
Yes, one way we could eliminate the budget deficit is by tossing elderly people out of their homes and into the cold, just like back in the days before Social Security. The "poor house" is a part of our vernacular for a reason, and the more we cut holes in our safety net the more people will find out what it was.
But what else can we do?
Well, for one, the Bush tax cuts contribute about $400 billion to the deficit, and are adding trillions to our national debt. So that choice right there is simple: Make 84-year-old widows starve, or make rich people choose between Audis and Mercedes?
Are you saying that Bush caused the deficit?
Coming out of the Clinton presidency, we didn't have a deficit. We had a surplus, which is the opposite: We were making more money each year than we spent. President Bush immediately blew it all by giving it away to rich people in the form of a tax cut, plus going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars have added $4 trillion to our national debt, all so we can kill dirt-poor peasants who don't spend nearly as much to fight us.
Now all of a sudden, with millions of Americans in poverty and unemployed, what's hanging up our whole government isn't figuring out how to put people to work, New Deal style. It's making sure we don't go into debt, period, even though the longer people stay unemployed the less money we'll take in in taxes. And even though companies like General Electric effectively pay zero dollars in taxes, attempts to fix tax loopholes that the wealthy exploit are facing fierce opposition.
That's part of the reason that the plan they're hammering out right now does not raise taxes, and does cut things like Social Security. Because the rich are sacred, and it would be evil and awful to touch them. The rest of us are just going to have to make sacrifices, for their greater good.
That sounds pretty bad.
That's not even the worst part. The worst part is that a lot of Democrats agree with the Republicans on this, including Obama. And while he's trying to fix some of those tax loopholes, the fact that we're even talking about touching Social Security is a bad sign.
