norquisling

Ee, ee, and eek! The dreaded Fiscal Cliffe is only a month away. Let's all panic and voluntarily give up the next generation's Social Security benefits.

Not so fast. Medicare is negotiable (because it affects the deficit), BUT ONLY if we start with part D, which was written by the pharmaceuticals companies.

Social Security is "off the table" as people annoyingly say nowadays, because -- and I think everybody here knows this -- it has absolutely nothing to do with the deficit.

Then spake Atrios of Eschaton, and said: (See post immediately below).

As far as I know, SS is solvent till 2033, so we're going to have to raise the cap some time in the next 20 years to keep it that way. Anybody who thinks we're going to be stampeded into giving our blessing to any of the Rehooligan/captalist class excuses for robbing the poor and elderly must be nuts.

And the reality is that what the Republicans and quite a few Democrats, including St. Barack, are proposing is straight-up robbery.

"We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”

--F.D. Roosevelt (who apparently did not imagine how brazenly larcenous US politicians would become, once the majority of them were completely bought up by the capitalist class).