Re: So, it seems the economic recovery will help the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
Don't blame it on recovery. Blame it on policy. In 1983, prior to assuming the mantle as the head of the U.S. Central Bank, Alan Greenspan headed a Social Security Commission at the behest of Pres. Ronald Reagan and the conservatives who were becoming alarmed at runaway pension and medicare costs. The cure was a regressive "payroll" tax that was imposed from the first penny that any worker earned in America and was phased out after income reached a certain level. It was one of the most devilishly anti-progressive tax schemes ever conceived and imposed by the hand of man. And for the past twenty years, this tax has relentlessly taken money out of the pockets of the working poor as the rich proclaim how noble they are because they pay the preponderance of income tax. Utterly failing to mention the combined assault on the average American's wallet with the Social Security and Medicare taxes on top of income tax.
So, for two decades this "nest egg" of Social Security and Medicare trust fund money was being built up, on paper. Of course, as with all businesses, money is fungible and the Federal government liberally borrowed from the trust funds and produced increasingly obtuse 'smoke & mirrors' budgets. A couple of years ago, George Bush began demanding tax cuts for those in America who don't need them, i.e. the rich. This was another assault on the trust funds. Now that we have the Republicans in Congress and the White House spending money like drunken sailors in a whore house on shore leave, and we have the rich enjoying their vast tax cuts, something had to give.
So that wonderful system of paying ahead that Alan Greenspan cooked up in 1983 in order to create permanent solvency in the Social Security and Medicare system is now considered by Greenspan to be too fragile to save, without drastic cuts to the beneficiaries, and an increase in the eligibility age.
If this were a decent world, Alan Greenspan would be in prison today for fraudulently persuading the American public to pay twenty years of really harsh taxes, only to see that the very thing that we were paying them for has been stolen from us by the profligate wastrel in the White House and his completely unfair and unscrupulous looting of the Treasury for his rich cronies. Arrrgh, there ought to be a law against such grand larceny. |
