Social Security
Everybody should print out this snippet of a John Mulligan interview with U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) as a cheat sheet on Democrat talking points about Social Security. It’s all there. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong in the New York Times discussion where he claims that one reason that Social Security shouldn’t be considered a full-blown Ponzi scheme is because it is involuntary. Think of it this way: Suppose Bernie Madoff requested that he be allowed to do community service as part of his prison sentence, in…
One can only wonder whether the Providence Journal‘s PolitiFact team reads their own newspaper. The other day, they did what they love most to do (whacking Republican candidates) and graded Senatorial candidate Barry Hinckley “false” for saying that “there’s no money in Social Security.” Theirs is not a new argument — it’s one that partisan…
Undeterred by fiscal or economic realities, Projo op-ed columnist Froma Harrop continues to argue that there is an actual “trust fund” backing the Social Security system. Here is the analogy made in her Sunday column, where she criticizes Ohio Congressman Rob Portman for expressing concern that Social Security now pays out more money than it…
I’ve been meaning to comment on this casting of the non-increasing Social Security payments for a couple of weeks: As if voters don’t have enough to be angry about this election year, the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an…
Social Security is a pay-as-you go program disguised by conceptual accounting gimmicks. Reporter Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times described the primary gimmick this past March…Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over…
In Wednesday’s Projo, op-ed columnist Froma Harrop defended (well, more like asserted) the idea that Social Security is our collective national trust fund…Republicans have never loved Social Security, but they know that plans to privatize the program remain deeply unpopular. A few holdouts still carry the privatization flag, but most others prefer another tack: undermining…
So, the federal government has deficits as far as the eye can see and higher than the Statue of Liberty. What could we layer on top of that? How about the Social Security “trust fund” debt that’s now coming due? … This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social…
On Friday, October 16th, 2009, the Providence Journal and other news outlets highlighted a story with great impact on senior citizens. Due to negative economic growth over the last 18 months recipients of Social Security retirement benefits will not receive a Cost of Living Allowance, or COLA increase, in their monthly checks during 2010. This…
Wow. It’s been awhile since we’ve had an opportunity to use the “Social Security” tag for a post, so for that much we should thank Bryant Math Professor Robert Muksian. However, once he moves beyond the calculation of benefits, into the reality of the program, his declaration that “Social Security is far from ‘broke’” should…