Reply #103: I am aware [View All]

[davekriss]

I was rattling off facts from memory. I didn't have time to cite, as I was only home during my lunch hour. My sources are a bit dated. My primary source, read several years ago, was Paul Krugman, "Confusions About Social Security", The Economist's Voice: A Special Issue on Social Security (Volume 2, Issue 1, 2005). It can be downloaded in PDF form from here:

http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss1/art1/

Krugman in this piece makes the point that the exhaustion of the Trust Fund is a moving target, thought to be 2029 back in 1995, and moved to 2042 when he was writing in 2005. He also states the date upon which drawdown starts as 2018, not 2012 as I say in the post above (but, hey, I was recalling from an article I read in 2005!). Krugman also makes the point that these dates are made using the most conservative set of assumptions (e.g., on the conservative assumption of only 1.8% GDP growth over the next 75 years when over the last 100 years GDP growth has averaged around 3%).

I have other dated material as well, but to be fair I owed the thread at least one cite.

It is VERY sad to me to hear Obama talk about "fixing" Social Security and Medicare. I can't say I feel betrayed as I expected this. First, Bush succeeded in the mission begun by Reagan (as David Stockman confessed in his Atlantic Monthly expose after he jumped ship in the early years of the first Reagan administration): The intent was to build up federal debt to the point where social programs will have to be dramatically curtailed and/or ceased. Why? The net result is to reduce every non-wealthy American to a peon dependent on the largesse of capital. By so doing, capital will be able to more easily extract higher and higher portions of the value labor creates.

The Conservative Revolution (reactionary revolution) was, unfortunately, very very successful. It is my sincere belief that the pendulum will swing far to the left in the years ahead, but I understood when I voted for him that Obama is not the leader that will push us in that direction. No true progressive is allowed to run at the national level in American politics. They are drowned out by the near-monopolized media -- or they fall out of the skies in small planes -- either way, the already powerful will not allow someone to rise to power who threatens their advantage. Obama is no threat to the already-advantaged.

We've been Cheneyed through and through.