Posted by
Rich on Friday, February 01, 2008 7:16:27 PM
Waldo Proffitt, our favorite liberal, is using children to push his political agenda. Is there no shame.
Waldo in his editorial, "
Deliver the children's message", warns politicians that playing with Medicare and Social Security is political suicide because, "where they [seniors] make up slightly less than a third of the population, and where they vote in numbers making it politically dangerous to displease them."
He goes on to say that, "We do not want to see Social Security privatized or see Medicare put at risk by increasing the role of private insurers."
So Waldo wants to help children but takes Medicare and Social Security off the table. But Waldo Social Security and Medicare eat up huge amounts of our budget.
According to the
Heritage Foundation, "Social Security and Medicare have promised $37 trillion more in benefits to senior and disabled workers than the programs will be able to pay, according to a new report. The 2006 annual report of the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds concludes that both programs will require progressively larger transfers from general revenues to maintain the projected levels of spending."
"Medicare and Social Security will require growing amounts of federal income tax revenue. Today, 6.9 percent of federal income taxes go towards the two programs. Dr. Thomas Saving of Texas A & M University, a public trustee of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, estimates that, in 2020, 26.6 percent of all federal income taxes will go to paying for Medicare and Social Security. By 2030, that number will increase to 49.7 percent."
But Waldo says, "There is another age group to which we should give first priority, to whose well being we should pay constant attention, and in whose behalf public resources should be allocated in amounts not just adequate but generous. Nobody in this age group votes, for they are all children."
So which is it? Give money to seniors or the children? You can't have it both ways - or can you? For liberals you can, just raise taxes!
We have a better solution. We need to fix Social Security by privatizing it. Read our column, "
How to fix Social Security".
In this column we show that today’s Social Security not only fails to provide workers with any way to build a family nest egg, but also actually discourages savings by absorbing a large proportion of earnings that moderate-income and low-income workers could otherwise use to save for retirement or other purposes.
This hurts families, especially poor families, and their children.
Also, younger and lower-income workers receive relatively little in benefits for their Social Security taxes because they will have to pay substantially higher taxes than older workers do. A 25-year-old male living in a low-income section of New York City would receive a –4.46 percent rate of return on his Social Security taxes.
These younger and lower income workers have the most children.
Finally, under the current inflexible Social Security system, all workers receive a monthly payment that starts when they retire and ends when they die or when their spouses or dependents die. This one-size-fits-all approach especially hurts the one-fifth of white males and the one-third of African–American males who die between the ages of 50 and 70. These workers face the prospect of paying a lifetime of Social Security taxes in return for little or no retirement benefits.
This leaves no legacy for families and their children.
The way to help our children is to fix Medicare and Social Security now.
The best long term solution to help our children is to build strong traditional families with a mother and father in the home and one of them working a full time job. If just these two dynamics are in place it will reduce by 75% those children living in poverty.
That is how you help children - privatize Social Security, turn Medicare over to the private sector, build strong traditional families and provide jobs.
Waldo's solution of throwing more money at children, when we will have less money to play with because of the out of control Medicare and Social Security programs, is both wrongheaded and dangerous.
Waldo's final statement is, "don't forget to put in a few good words for the children." Lip service does not help the children, action does.
What do you think?