USATODAY reprints Bush Soc SEC/Medicare scare Article as "analysis"

[papau]

USATODAY reprints Bush Soc SEC/Medicare scare Article as "analysis"


http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20041004/1a_debtcovxx.art.htm

84,454 is the average household's personal debt. $473,456 is the average household's share of government debt, including Medicare and Social Security. The government isn't asking you to pay it. Yet.

By Dennis Cauchon and John Waggoner USA TODAY

The long-term economic health of the United States is threatened by $53 trillion in government debts and liabilities that start to come due in four years when baby boomers begin to retire.<snip>

The worst-case scenario is a sudden crisis — perhaps a major terrorist attack or a shutoff of oil from the Middle East — that triggers a loss of confidence by investors in the U.S. economy. Foreign investors refuse to lend more money to the government to finance its deficits; drastic tax increases and benefit cuts occur suddenly; the dollar's value plummets, which raises the cost of imported goods; and a severe recession or depression results from falling incomes.<snip>

A softer landing: The USA acts swiftly and becomes more like Europe. Taxes are higher, retirement benefits are less generous but widely distributed; health care costs are controlled; and the economy is sound but less productive.<snip>

Big payments on the debt start coming due in 2008, when the first of 78 million baby boomers — the generation born from 1946 to 1964 — qualify at age 62 for early retirement benefits from Social Security. The costs start mushrooming in 2011, when the first boomers turn 65 and qualify for taxpayer-funded Medicare.

(Amazing that AARP tells truth and is correctly quoted that unfunded promises of Medicare and Social Security) are less worrisome than they appear -“The reason we make companies fund their pension liabilities is because it's uncertain they'll be around in the future. That doesn't apply to government,” says John Rother, AARP's research director. “The size of the liabilities isn't relevant, nor is how much we put aside today. What matters is how healthy will the economy be in the future.”He agrees that Medicare has a long-term funding problem but says the nation's entire health system is the issue, not Medicare."

[whistle]

1. Bush just signed legislation that is supposed to encourage.....

...low income housing for 7 million new low income homes during the next 10 years (700,000 housing units per year), by providing low income earners a tax credit. How can low income earners which I suppose are families who make less than $35,000 a year, benefit from a tax credit when they don't pay taxes? Anyone have an analysis that exposes the fraud in this please post here.

[papau]

3. What is the Bush tax plan to grow low income housing?

The items in the Bill today are:

-Extend the $1,000 child tax credit through 2009. Cost: $61.57 billion.

_Extend marriage penalty relief through 2008. Cost: $15.69 billion.

_Extend the expanded 10 percent tax bracket through 2010. Cost: $29.36 billion.

_Extend relief from the alternative minimum tax for one year. Cost: $22.58 billion.

_Accelerate refundability of the child credit for low-income families for one year. Cost: $1.99 billion.

_Extend the corporate research and development tax credit until the end of 2005. Cost: $7.6 billion.

_Extend the authority to issue New York Liberty Zone bonds for development of lower Manhattan. Cost: $486 million.

_Extend tax incentives for investment in the District of Columbia. Cost: $522 million.

_Extend for one year a tax credit for the production of electricity from wind, biomass and poultry litter. Cost: $1.16 billion.

_Extend for one year a tax credit for qualified electric vehicles. Cost: $5 million.

There is no refundable tax credit for housing in todays Bill

[whistle]

4. It was announced by Bush this past weekend in one of his....

...campaign speeches where he said that he was proposing tax credits to help low income families purchase 7million units over the next 10 years. I heard it on a news clip on PBS either Saturday morning or sometime from my car this past weekend. It sounded like he was pushing a bill in congress now, but I did not hear the details or the analysis of what he had claimed. Shrub lies so much that he could very well have been telling his audience that the above bill was for them as low income earners when in fact it provides nothing. That's why I was curious if anyone had heard that Bush speech.

[papau]

5. Good Grief - the only Tax based Bush Housing idea is 2.5B to corporations

Since 2002 the Bush folks have said they were trying to increase minority home ownership - and they have claimed cred minority folks purchasing 1.6 million homes since then according to Alphonso Jackson, housing secretary.
- but what have the Bush folks provided to make this happen?

a low down payment (he has push legislation for the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgages with no down payments), and by threatening to punish FHA lenders that foreclose too eagerly (they must make an effort to work things out with borrowers who fall behind on their payments - whatever that means)

This a housing policy!???? :-)

For the poor. Bush wants to cut the Section 8 housing voucher program, which provides help to 2 million renters, by $1 billion at a time when it would need to be increased by $600 million to maintain its caseload. Kerry calls it a "cost-cutting gimmick that will hurt American families."

Compare to Kerry who found out somehow that most of the poor rent! and has a programs for low-income renters - and on his site discusses his helping to craft and pass the Multifamily Assisted Housing Restructuring and Reform Act of 1997, "which helped save the government billions of dollars in rental assistance payments, preserved thousands of affordable rental apartments, and helped finance the rehabilitation of those apartments," adding that Kerry helped reform the public and manufactured housing programs, as well as co-sponsoring or offering amendments to other affordable-housing legislation while he sat on the Senate's housing subcommittee. One unpassed bill would have funded development of affordable rental housing; another would have encouraged construction and rehabilitation of houses in economically distressed areas so low- and moderate-income families could own them; another would have let home buyers borrow, tax free, from individual retirement accounts to make down payments. The Kerry campaign calls for federal laws to ban predatory mortgage lending: limiting high prepayment penalties, restricting balloon payments, capping points and fees on subprime mortgages, and banning single-premium mortgage insurance.

But Bush pretends and our media never challenges him.

In Housing the Bush web site says he did not veto the law passed by Congress that now provides 40,000 families with Down Payment Assistance - and for the future he has proposed in his budget a $2.5 billion over five years in tax incentives to home building corporations to increase the supply of affordable homes.



IS THIS THE TAX BASED HOUSING PROGRAM!!!!

LOL

:-)

[papau]

2. The Truth is buried in the article - but it reads like a Bush handout.

The Two true statements in this USATODAY reprint of the BUSH campaign theme about the need to kill Social Security and Medicare!: “Economists agree this cannot go on,” says Joseph Stiglitz, President Clinton's chief economic adviser from 1995 to 1997. “We can borrow and borrow, but eventually there will be a day of reckoning.” and

Two, from Economist James Galbraith of the University of Texas in Austin, “I'm not at all concerned about Medicare or Social Security,” Galbraith says. “Unless the government goes broke, Medicare isn't going to go broke, and the U.S. government isn't going to go broke because it can print money.”... the country can handle higher tax rates, as Europeans do, and can save money by cutting spending elsewhere, such as on defense, and by implementing a Canadian-style health care system that uses private doctors and hospitals but has the government set prices and pay the bills."

The rest of this USATODAY article is crap - as in USATODAY's assumption that the Bush folks are correct re "the corporate accounting rules" - in effect pretending a corporation would not be allowed to anticipate future revenue streams as offsets to a future liability when it sets up a reserve on its books! - with only an AARP comment that hints at the concept of proper reserve calculation.

The fear inducing problem will "start to come due in four years when baby boomers begin to retire" is WRONG!

IGNORES SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION AND CBO PROJECTIONS THAT INDICATE PAYROLL TAX HAS SURPLUS IN THOSE YEARS!!!!ALL THESE "OFFICIAL GOV NUMBERS" SHOW IS HOW NUTS USATODAY IS TO TRUST NEO-CON NUMBERS. INDEED USING BUSH 100 years LIABILITY NUMBERS THAT IGNORE ANY LIKELY ADJUSTMENT IN THE YEAR @)%@ TO A RETIREMENT AGE OF 70 FROM REAGANS RETIREMENT AGE OF 67 IS NUTS. THE ONLY WAY THE RETIREMENT AGE WILL NOT GO UP IN 2052 IS IS THE WAGE CAP IS ELIMINATED.

AND THIS USES THE CRAZY MEDICAL COST PROJECTION THAT ASSUMES INSURANCE COMPANIES GROW PROFITS 15% EVERY YEAR ON THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE BUSINESS, AS THE GOV MOVES HEALTH TO THE MORE EXPENSIVE PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES.

Thank God for the buried pieces of truth:- unfunded promises of Medicare and Social Security are less worrisome than they appear -“The reason we make companies fund their pension liabilities is because it's uncertain they'll be around in the future. That doesn't apply to government,” says John Rother, AARP's research director. “The size of the liabilities isn't relevant, nor is how much we put aside today. What matters is how healthy will the economy be in the future.”He agrees that Medicare has a long-term funding problem but says the nation's entire health system is the issue, not Medicare." Of course they imply bia as the fellow is in a group that advoctes for those over 50.

As if this warning about bias should not be after any administration statement!

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This is in effect a very long Bush Campaign PR piece - with pieces of truth buried in it just to show that USATODAY is telling "ALL SIDES" - but one would hope there would have a been a second article - rather than these buried truth tidbits - that - with the same force of this article - note that when Bush asserts - he rarely tells the whole truth. And indeed, partial truth spinning is Bush's favorite way to lie!