Implications of the Bush budget for people over 55 (click here)
It was the Baby Boomer's fault they were born evidently. The entire myth surrounding SSI stating it needs to be revamped, takes 'opportunity' of a dispreportionate number of people coming into the 'system' with this aging generation. It gives no credit to the resourcefulness of the Baby Boomer generation, their desire to stay involved and vital as well as connected to fiscal independance. It never discusses the social trend of this generation to rely on their own resources, the income INTO the USA Treasury of those additional earnings hence counter balancing the deficit they create. It's a good estimate, the Baby Boomer Generation will carry it's own deficit in SSI to provide a continuation of a government supplement to the next generations of Americans that remains intact in it's heritage from FDR. Those aspects of reality are never discussed or incorporated into facts, figures and charts.
Social Security: Bush's Lies vs. Reality (click here)
Bush's Social Security Plan Is Said to Require Vast Borrowing (click on)
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
Published: November 28, 2004
...The budget deficit in the year ended Sept. 30 was $413 billion. The total national debt is about $7.5 trillion, including $3 trillion owed by the government to itself, much of it in the form of the Social Security trust fund. Rising debt forces the government to pay out more of its revenue in interest payments, and can put upward pressure on the interest rates paid by businesses and consumers....
...Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, both Republicans, have sponsored legislation that would allow workers to contribute more to their personal accounts than most other plans proposed by members of Congress and outside groups and would not require tax increases or benefit cuts. But by some estimates it would require nearly $2 trillion in borrowing - and, in the view of its critics, much more - and even then would rely on the idea that the new system would create so much more economic growth that it would partly pay for itself by generating additional tax revenues for the government.
Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, said the government could probably keep new borrowing to $800 billion over 10 years, but only if Congress and the administration are willing to back tax increases and benefit cuts as part of a broad overhaul of the retirement system....
Where do I start with this one?
Shortly after Bush was re-elected in 2004 he started a rant about SSI and demanded $2 trillion for it's 'reorganization' to begin privatization. He startled the nation and with over half the USA already traumatized by the overt illegality and immorality of the Iraq invasion, there was a shift in Republicans as well when Bush openly assaulted SSI. The country had just witnessed as well a return to the inequity of Medicare and subscribed to a perscription drug program KNOWN to be wrongly lead and allowed corrupt structure, but, it rationalized anyway as a good program because it provided a much needed benefit to seniors and the disabled.
Basically, the Medicare Perscription Drug Program is known to be corrupt, but, it is tolerated because a Republican Majority at the time demanded same. They were more interested in causing fiscal damage to the country than prudent and just policy because if the people of the USA would not stand behind the demise of SSI, Bush would attempt to assault the social programs by loading domestic budgets while separating the military budget. When SSI becomes the major component to the federal budget then it can be opened to legislation to trim it change it. That is why the tax cuts as well. Bush is attempting to privatize SSI in which ever way he can. Not that it is an agenda of the MAJORITY of Americans, but, only an agenda of the MAJORITY of wealthy Republicans.
SSI and Medicare/Medicaid need protectors and better advocates with moral character enough to secure the needs of Americans away from fiscal immoralists such as Republican Conservatives whom see the country as a black hole for their 2% Upper Class monies.
The Medicare Perscription Drug Program can do better, but, it's going to take Democrats to fix it. The only answer the Republicans have is to allow exploitation of it to increase the costs so Americans in this generation or next will see the benefit in dismantling it all together.
A Serious Drug Problem (click here)
...Another answer is to point to the haste with which key players in the drug bill's passage cashed in - making the claims that they wrote a pharma-friendly Medicare bill out of genuine concern for the public's welfare look ludicrous.
Let's look at just two examples.
Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he's making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this country.
Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator - who threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill's cost - was granted a special waiver from the ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he was pushing the drug bill.
If all this sounds like a story of a corrupt deal created by a corrupt system, it is. And it was a very expensive deal indeed. According to the Medicare trustees, the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by the 2003 law - not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just the additional gap created by legislation passed 18 months ago - will be $8.7 trillion....
