The real reasons why corporate America wants to destroy Social Security and Medicare [View All]

[Better Believe It]

There’s Nothing Wrong with Social Security that Taxing the Rich Fairly Wouldn’t Fix
by Dave Lindorff
August 16, 2010

The ideologues at places like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation are providing the intellectual justification for destroying Social Security, but the real opposition to Social Security, though, is corporate America, as represented by groups like the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce (it's corporate America that funds those foundations and their resident "scholars," after all). And the reason for this corporate opposition is that Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes paid by workers are both matched, dollar for dollar, by employers. If you pay 6.2% of your income in taxes to the Social Security Administration each year, so does your boss, and if the income cap is lifted for workers it will also be lifted for employers. That means a bigger tax bill for the company, and of course personally for the managers and board members.

So let's at least be honest in this coming battle over "saving" Social Security. It is nothing less than a war between bosses and workers.

The system is not in trouble because it's too generous or because it is underfunded. It has been pilfered over the years by politicians who have been unwilling to raise taxes to fund America's wars, or to fund the programs that we Americans say we want, like better roads, grants for local schools, etc. Instead of telling us what things cost, they borrow (steal) money from the Social Security Trust Fund, and then tell us Social Security is in trouble.

And now, as a day of reckoning approaches, they pretend it's all our fault. They say we want too much in benefits, or that we want to retire too early. But the truth is, we deserve decent retirement income, and we deserve to retire at 65 or even 62. In fact, if we hang onto our jobs until 70 or 72, as these hacks and the lobbyists for corporate American want us to do, it'll just be that harder for our kids to get jobs and move out of the house!

This is not about a private pension fund that's going bust. It's about a public pension program that has been raided, that has never been adequate, and that needs to be bolstered now by a tax on the rich. Nothing elaborate mind you. They just need to pay at the same rate that the rest of us do.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/16-7