Would The Republican Party Really End Social Security If They Could? You Better Believe It

It's their collective dream-- and the collective dream of all conservatives and all politicians-- like Biden-- who lick the ass cracks of the billionaire class. For the sake of the campaign, Biden has backed away, rhetorically at least, from talk of Grand Bargains; once he's in the White House, he's likely to ease right back there. As for Republicans, though... they're on the move. Trump is promising the billionaire class that if they help him win a second term, he'll do it.





NBC News reported yesterday that if the Orange Menace were to permanently terminate the payroll tax-- as he's pledged to do-- and not offer another revenue source "The federal government’s ability to pay Social Security benefits could stop by mid-2023. The chief actuary, Stephen Goss, offered the prediction in a letter to Bernie Chris Van Hollen, Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden, who requested an analysis of what would happen if the payroll tax is eliminated with no other funding stream for Social Security benefits." He ended his letter with this paragraph:

If this hypothetical legislation were enacted, with no alternative source of revenue to replace the elimination of payroll taxes on earned income paid on January 1, 2021 and thereafter, we estimate that DI Trust Fund asset reserves would become permanently depleted in about the middle of calendar year 2021, with no ability to pay DI benefits thereafter. We estimate that OASI [Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance ] Trust Fund reserves would become permanently depleted by the middle of calendar year 2023, with no ability to pay OASI benefits thereafter.

If he manages to steal the election then starts obeying the law-- and why would he?-- he "wouldn’t be able to terminate the payroll tax unilaterally. Congress would have to pass legislation for that to happen, and with the makeup of the current Congress, the Democratic-controlled House would block any such proposal. A number of Republicans have also rejected calls for a payroll tax cut in the current Senate. [He] has said legislation to cut payroll taxes would specify that the money comes from the general fund. The SSA letter noted they were asked not to consider that scenario, which would not affect benefits. A measure to pull money from the general fund would be unlikely to pass under a divided Congress."

See that video up top by the most endangered-- only endangered-- Democrat in the Senate, Doug Jones? He released it yesterday and it shows he's smart enough to appeal even to Alabama's conservative voters by bringing up the safety of Social Security, America's most cherished safety net program. I asked Julie Oliver how the news of Trump and his Republican enablers like her own opponent, Roger Williams, is being taken in central Texas. "Not only are we not going to allow Trump and Roger Williams to permanently defund social security-- we're going to tax the rich, so that they pay their fair share and so we can expand Social Security."

Culture Of Corruption-- Mitch McConnell's Pandemic Relief Bill... And Plenty Of The Worst Dems In Congress Love The Worst Parts Of It

UnAmerican by Chip Proser

House Democrats passed a $3 trillion dollar recovery and stimulus package in May. The Republicans' bill, finally revealed last night, was about a third of that-- and McConnell said, arbitrarily, that it will likely represent lawmakers’ last major legislative response to the coronavirus pandemic. What an asshat! That's up to the pandemic not some closet case from Kentucky to determine. Besides, if he doesn't die sooner, he'll likely be out of power in a few months anyway. Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein, Laura Meckler and Tony Romm wrote that the two bills are so dissimilar that "the path toward a final compromise [is] unclear on many key questions."

The GOP legislation left out some White House priorities, such as the president’s demand for a payroll tax cut, but includes more than $100 billion for America’s schools; a liability shield to protect businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits; another round of direct stimulus payments; a new round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, as well as more money for emergency business loans; and a reduced extension of emergency federal unemployment benefits, among other measures.

The legislation is also notable for what it leaves out, as the GOP opted against including new funding for state and local governments, and hazard pay for essential front-line workers, among other policies pushed by congressional Democrats.

So... let's compare. Over 20 million people are collecting enhanced unemployment benefits-- or were; it runs out this week. It was $600/week. McConnell's bill lowers that to $200. Pelosi's bill extends the $600 benefit. And even in the Deep Red South, voters want more pandemic relief, not less:

In McConnell's bill, the one-time government stimulus check is for another $1,200 for the same people who got it last time. Pelosi's would make the benefit bigger by providing families with an additional $1,200 for reach child for up to three children, whereas the initial bill approved in March gave families only $500 per child.

And then comes the GOP "liability shield," which prevents businesses and other institutions from being sued for 5 years even if they're found guilty of negligence in the deaths of employees and customers. McConnell has basically said that without this, there will be no package whatsoever. Democratic leaders oppose it but I suspect that the corrupt New Dems and Blue Dogs like it as much as Republicans and will force Pelosi and Hoyer to give in eventually. Just watch.

McConnell isn't interested in aiding local governments, which is a key Democratic demand-- a trillion dollars worth. Presumably the Democrats will get part of their wish on this one in return for McConnell's liability shield.

Stein, Meckler and Romm wrote that "The GOP bill includes $105 billion for education, with $70 billion targeted to K-12 schools. Of that, two-thirds of the funding reserved to help schools to reopen for in-person instruction. To get the funding schools would have to meet certain 'minimum opening requirements' established by their states. Trump has demanded that schools open fully for the fall term, even as covid-19 cases rise. He’s threatened to pull federal funding from those who don’t. He doesn’t have the power to do that, but he has insisted that new funding be tied to schools reopening... Senate Democrats are demanding more total money for schools, although House Democrats’ package has slightly less. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), the top Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, proposed $175 billion for K-12 schools and $132 billion for higher education plus a $33 billion flexible Governor’s Fund."

As for the troubled and corrupted Paycheck Protection Program, McConnell wants to throw about $190 billion in to support second loans for PPP recipients and another $100 billion for long-term loans to seasonal businesses and businesses in poor neighborhoods. Democrats will likely be fine with this.

McConnell is proposing $16 billion in funding for testing; $16 billion for the National Institutes of Health; and $3 billion for the Centers for Disease Control in their efforts to contain the virus, also likely to be fine with Senate Democrats.

As we mentioned earlier, the GOP wants to make business meals 100% deductible (instead of 50% as they are now). This has been a Trump priority forever.

Other nonsense proposals having nothing to do with the pandemic include $686 million for new #F35 fighter jets-- because, of course, fighter jets are well known for their pandemic fighting abilities.

And that ain't all. Trump forced McConnell to include nearly $2 billion in the relief bill "for the design and construction of a Washington, D.C. headquarters facility for the Federal Bureau of Investigation." Why? CNN reported Señor T personally demanded this. Why? Simple: "Plans to relocate the FBI from the aging Hoover building, which had been in the works since at least 2012, could have resulted in the construction of a hotel to compete with Trump's hotel a block away... In late 2018, senior House Democrats said they had reviewed documents indicating that Trump was 'directly involved with the decision to abandon the long-term relocation plan and instead move ahead with the more expensive proposal to construct a new building on the same site, and thereby prevent Trump Hotel competitors from acquiring the land.'" Always a scumbag.

And speaking of scumbags... anything co-sponsored by a Republican, in this case, Mitt Romney, with the four biggest conservative suck-ups in the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Joe Manchin (WV), Doug Jones (AL) and Mark Warner (VA) can only be scumbaggery. In this case, the inclusion of their so-called Trust Act into the bill. It's a toxic brew from right-wing advocacy groups, including the Koch-funded organization Americans for Prosperity, that will allow the Senate to try again to dismantle Social Security. Because, you know how much that belongs in a pandemic rescue package. Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare: "This would allow benefit cuts to be fast-tracked through Congress. Seniors and people with disabilities need their benefits boosted, not slashed. Like payroll tax cuts, the TRUST Act is bad medicine for everyday Americans struggling to stay financially afloat, especially during the Covid crisis."

Alex Lawson and Nancy Altman, respectively, executive director and president of Social Security Works: "Trump and his stooges in the Senate can't stop trying to rob us of our Social Security. They will use every opportunity and every crisis-- including the mass death and economic carnage from Covid-- as cover for their sick desire to destroy our Social Security system." And Altman warned the TRUST ACT is "a way to undermine the economic security of Americans without political accountability. Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and all congressional Republicans have made their priorities clear. In the midst of a catastrophic pandemic, they should be focused on protecting seniors, essential workers, and the unemployed. Instead, they are plotting to use the cover of the pandemic to slash Social Security. Democrats must stand united and unequivocally reject any package that includes the TRUST Act."

There are also 30 House Democrats eager to destroy Social Security-- the worst of the worst garbage among House Dems. Here's a letter they signed to Pelosi advocating for Romney's Trust Act:

• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Ed Case (Blue Dog-HI)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Kathleen Rice (New Dem-NY)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)... Rebecca Parson is priamrying him next week
• Jimmy Panetta (New Dem-CA)
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)... Eva Putzova is primarying him next week
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)... Keeda Haynes is primarying him next week
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)
• Dan Lipinksi (Blue Dog-IL)... defeated by Marie Newman in a primary
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)
• Ann Kuster (New Dem-NH)
• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)
• Lou Correa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Chrissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)

That's basically a list of the 30 Democrats in the House who should be defeated in November if they survive primary season, as most of them have. When someone mentions the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party"... that's the House contingent. One more thing about the McConnell bill-- David Sirota reported that "while raking in cash from health care industry donors, McConnell and his cronies copied and pasted Cuomo's incredibly corrupt corporate immunity law into their new COVID relief package... word-for-word.

Adam Christensen is the progressive candidate running in north-central Florida for the seat that Ted Yoho is abandoning. He told me today that he had recently spent the morning at Grace marketplace in Gainesville. "Grace," he said, "is an organization that works to find permanent housing for the chronically homeless. They have done an absolutely amazing job to prevent the spread of COVID-19 with those that they are working with. But they also told me that they feared they would be overrun in the next couple months. That if evictions start to happen, and people start to lose their homes that there are almost 28,000,000 people that will be at risk of being on the street. We also have reports of people walking around in poor neighborhoods offering cash to buy homes (for pennies on the dollar) taking advantage of desperate people. Before the pandemic 40% of people in the U.S. were living paycheck to paycheck and only had $400 in their accounts. That money is now gone. Unless we take bold and drastic steps now, we are going to see a level of poverty and pain that the United States has never experienced before. That is why I have backed an emergency UBI of $2,000 a month, so that people are able to get through this crisis. Because if we don’t start taking care of people instead of just donors then our problems are only going to get worse." Suggestion: give Adam a hand with his campaign here. You'll never find his name on a list of Democrats who want to dismantle Social Security.

Naming The Names: The Democrats Working With Republicans To Gut Social Security And Medicare

Eva: "Back in 2015, my opponent switched parties from Republican to Democrat. But if you look at his track record, you couldn't tell the difference. He's voted to roll back important banking regulations adopted under Dodd-Frank, weaken the federal minimum wage bill, he accepts corporate PAC money from private health insurance companies and Big Pharma, and now wants to gut two of our most important and most popular safety nets. Clearly, my opponent still bleeds GOP red. Programs like these are essential-- we are seeing it now more than ever.  When I'm in Congress, I will defend and fight to expand Social Security. I will fight for Medicare for All. Our system needs a complete overhaul, and that starts with replacing representatives in Congress who aren't willing to put people first."

Conservative politicians-- entirely clueless and unable to learn from past mistakes, but dramatically-inclined-- many representatives of their own wealthy class-- are already talking the Austerity talk about how to deal with the economic blowback from the dual pandemics-- the coronavirus and Trumpism. Cutting what conservatives love to label "entitlements," as well as services depended on by the non-rich, come immediately to mind. Virtually all Republicans and the entire Republican wing of the Democratic Party, want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and so on. Well, the Republicans want to eliminate them; the Democraps just want to cut them (liberals).

The nearest parallel is the financial crisis of 2008-- a story of unregulated market failure that in the UK the Conservative government somehow succeeded in turning into a story of state failure in the form of the allegedly spendthrift Labour government preceding them. This enabled it to follow low-spending, deficit-cutting austerity policies that, it’s widely acknowledged, only prolonged the economic pain-- though it did have the desired effect from the government’s perspective of most hurting the people it cared least about, and generally weakening public institutions to which it was ideologically opposed. Justifications for austerity are often informed by the so-called 'household analogy' that a country’s finances are just like those of an individual, debt-averse household-- the idea that ex-Prime Minister Theresa May had in mind when she said 'there is no magic money tree' to increase frozen public sector wages. This time around, plenty of commentators are warning against the siren song of austerity and the 'economically illiterate' household analogy as a response to the forthcoming economic crisis. But there are plenty on the right still trying to sing it. If they succeed once again in pinning the economic storms to come on lazy employees and install another round of austerity, I think I’ll give up whatever vestigial faith I still have in electoral politics.

Ever since Caitlin Emma's tweet promoting her password-protected PoliticoPro article Monday, people have been asking which Democrats are working with the Republicans to compromise Social Security and Medicare under the cover of Trump's ballooning deficit. Here's the letter conservative New Dem Scott Peters (San Diego) and right-wing freak Jodey Arrington (R-TX) sent to Pelosi and McCarthy.

No one wants to say it out loud, but what these people think is a "cure" is to raise the retirement age and reduce benefits, rather than eliminating the cap on contributions so that wealthy people (the people who finance their cushy lifestyles and careers) pay their fair share. These are the Democrats who signed on. Every single one of them-- notice, not any just normal Democrats, all Wall Street-owned New Dems and Blue Dogs, most with histories of wanting to work with the GOP to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid-- is a shit-eating conservative (shit-eaters in red have primaries pending):

• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)
• Ed Case (Blue Dog- HI)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Kathleen Rice (New Dem-NY)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)
• Jimmy Panetta (New Dem-CA)
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-CA)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Harley Rouda ("ex"-Republican/New Dem-CA)
• Ann Kuster (New Dem-NH)
• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)
• Lou Correa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Chrissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)
• Gil Cisneros ("ex"-Republican/New Dem-CA)

Lipinski's constituents already defeated him in the March primary but he still wants to do all the harm he can before he gies back to Tennessee to live. I might add that the Republicans on the list are all garden variety Trumpists like Jason Smith (R-MO), Roger Williams (R-TX) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). I reached out to McMorris Rodgers Democratic opponent, Chris Armitage, a firm defender of Social Security and someone who wants to expand Medicare, not shred it. Yesterday, he told me that "Cathy thinks she can do anything to hurt people and never face consequences. Well, we are shining a light on the cockroaches with this bill. Make people show what they are really about, greed and corruption or compassion and integrity."

I bet Horn will be sad when she she passes by No. Western and Britton Rd in OK City

Another staunch progressive, Tom Guild, is running for the Oklahoma seat Blue Dog Kendra Horn is disgracing with her conservative approach. Tom told us he's "extremely disappointed that Ms. Horn is undermining the security of America’s and the Fifth District’s seniors. It was just a few days ago that I received a slick and very expensive mailer paid for by one of Horn’s Super PACs praising her for her alleged work on behalf of senior citizens. Raising the retirement age and reducing benefits rather than eliminating the cap is simply a power play that feathers the nests of her well-heeled New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC mega donors. Horn opposes Medicare for All. Instead she wants to give more public money to Big Insurance Corporations to prop up the failing profit-driven health care insurance industry. Social Security should be expanded, not weakened. Benefits should be increased, not undermined. With alleged friends like Kendra Horn, who needs enemies?"

Just down the road from Tom's OK City district, Texas progressive Julie Oliver is taking on Trump enabler Roger Williams in a gerrymandered district that stretches from the suburbs south of Ft. Worth right into Austin. "Every American," she said after hearing Williams was one of the signatories, "should be able to retire with dignity. Not only should we eliminate the Social Security wage benefit so that the ultra-rich do their patriotic duty and pay into it like the rest of us, we should expand Medicare to every person in this country so that we all get the care we need.

Cathy Ellis is running for the seat occupied by Trumpist Jason Smith in the rural southeast Missouri district. "Cutting Social Security," she told us this morning, "would dramatically hurt districts like mine, where the population leans older and folks rely on Social Security to live, eat, and survive. Jason Smith continues to make it clear that he doesn't have the interests of his constituents at heart-- he only works on behalf of the big corporations that fund him, including many that have a vested interest in cutting Social Security."

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, told us today that "This is both incredibly stupid and extremely dangerous. Austerity prolonged the Great Recession and weakened the recovery. If Wall Street billionaires and the politicians they own are successful in bringing back austerity, it will prolong the pandemic and lead to economic catastrophe. We need much more government spending right now-- to save lives in nursing homes, and to prevent state governments from having to make catastrophic cutbacks. The last thing we need to do is cut Social Security and Medicare, which are more essential than ever in the midst of a pandemic. Shame on every Member of Congress who signed this letter."

Will Conservatives Use The Pandemic As Cover To Achieve Their #1 Goal-- Killing Off Social Security

One of the reasons-- there are many-- I'm not planning on voting for Status Quo Joe is because of his career-long goal of wrecking Social Security and Medicare on behalf of the wealthy donors who have financed his entire career. Biden has tried again and again to weaken social safety net programs and he has always been one of the very worst of the austerity politicians in the Democratic Party. At least Trump, I've thought to myself, hasn't killed off Social Security in his first term. So far. Trump actually would like to destroy Social Security at least as much as Biden does.

Writing yesterday for the Motley Fool, Sean Williams explained how Trump's proposal to cut the Social Security payroll tax could kill the whole program. He started by proposing a payroll tax (12.4% on earned income up to $137,700) holiday for the rest of the year. Progressives think increasing the cap or doing away with it would be a much better idea and would also like to add investment income to earned income.

Believe it or not, a payroll tax holiday has been done before. Following the Great Recession, the Obama administration passed a partial payroll tax holiday in 2011 and 2012 for employers and employees, which reduced their liabilities by 2 percentage points. This wound up allowing workers and employers to keep around $109 billion, in total.

However, Trump's desire to cut the payroll tax doesn't end with 2020. When recently asked his opinion on payroll tax cuts, the President hinted that he'd like to see reductions to the payroll tax become permanent. Further, he noted that his desire to cut workers' payroll tax liability would be consistent, whether or not the country were dealing with the coronavirus. Here are some snippets of what President Trump had to say to White House reporters:

I would love to see a payroll tax cut, and I think on behalf of the people it would be quick... There are many people that would like to see it as a permanent tax cut... You'd get a lot of people a lot of money immediately. The payroll tax cut would be a great thing for this country. I would like to have it regardless of this [the coronavirus pandemic].

While the idea of reducing the amount of payroll tax collected might sound great, a permanent cut to the payroll tax would not be benign by any means. It would, in fact, completely gut the Social Security program and put the retirements of tens of millions of seniors in jeopardy.

The payroll tax is one of three sources of funding for the Social Security program, along with the taxation of benefits and the interest income earned in its nearly $2.9 trillion in asset reserves. Of the $1 trillion collected in 2018 by Social Security, the payroll tax was responsible for generating $885 billion. It's unquestionably the workhorse for our nation's most successful social program.

If Trump were granted his wish of a complete payroll tax holiday for the remainder of 2020, I'd estimate that Social Security's net-cash outflow for the year might hit $700 billion. For context, the worst single-net-cash outflow for Social Security over the past 80 years was $5.3 billion. In just nine months, the Social Security program would potentially have wiped away a quarter of its almost $2.9 trillion in asset reserves.

Now, imagine if a partial cut to the payroll tax became permanent. Not only would we witness an even quicker depletion of Social Security's asset reserves than is already expected, but it also would almost certainly result in the need for steeper cuts to retired workers' benefits just to keep the program solvent for the long run. With 62% of current retirees leaning on Social Security for at least half of their income, and another 34% counting on the program for virtually all (90%+) of the income they receive, any sort of extended reduction to the payroll tax would seriously jeopardize the ability of these folks to make ends meet.

In actuality, the most recent Social Security Board of Trustees report forecast the need to increase the payroll tax by 2.78% immediately (i.e., to 15.18% from 12.4%) in order to stave off an expected $13.9 trillion cash shortfall between 2035 and 2093. What Trump is suggesting is the exact opposite of the recommendation offered by the Trustees report.

If there's some solace for current and future retirees, it's that Trump's call for a partial or permanent payroll tax holiday are almost certainly falling on deaf ears. In order to pass such a measure, Trump would need bipartisan support in the Senate and majority support in the House of Representatives. With the House led by Democrats and no supermajority in the Senate, there simply wouldn't be enough support for a payroll tax holiday if lawmakers voted according to party lines.

Even beyond party lines, I don't think there would be enough support for a measure that would almost certainly gut the Social Security program.

In other words, current and future Social Security beneficiaries will be receiving a payout-- assuming they qualify for one-- and the payroll tax is the main reason why. As long as the payroll tax remains the program's primary funding mechanism, Social Security is incapable of going bankrupt.

It's February 20. Why Are People With Million-Dollar Salaries Celebrating?

The Pete Buttigieg Memorial Wine Cave Club. Members shown celebrating their early freedom from Social Security taxes.

by Thomas Neuburger

It's February 20. Why are people with million-dollar salaries celebrating? Because as of yesterday, they stopped having to pay for Social Security.

That's right. While the very very very wealthy, people like Jeff Bezos, stopped paying for Social Security a month ago, the only very wealthy, those with salaries of a mere million per year, stopped paying just after Presidents' Day.

These are the people who want to cut benefits for those far less wealthy than they, the working poor and struggling middle class. These people also finance candidates who, prior to campaigning for the presidency, happily proposed such cuts. See, for example, "Klobuchar: Grand bargain still within reach" from 2013.

Brendan Cole, writing at Newsweek (emphasis added):

Americans With Million-dollar Salaries Stop Paying Into Social Security Before March While Everyone Else Continues

The burden of sustaining Social Security is not being carried fairly by the rich, a U.S. think tank has said as it noted an American earning an annual salary of $1 million will effectively stop paying into the scheme on Wednesday, fewer than seven weeks into 2020.

Social Security, which provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to one fifth of the U.S. population, is funded by a payroll tax capped at the first $137,700 of earned wages, and excludes income from other sources such as capital gains.

Sarah Rawlins, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) noted that someone who earns $1,000,000 a year would have reached that cap by Wednesday, February 19.

"That makes a millionaire's effective tax rate well below the 6.2 percent of income that most Americans pay," Rawlins said. "Instead, it is less than one percent of a millionaire's income.

"The burden of Social Security taxes falls more heavily on those who make less," Rawlins noted, suggesting that to make the system more progressive, the government should look at "scrapping the payroll tax cap entirely and making everyone pay the same tax rate."

"Scraping the payroll tax cap entirely" is a fine idea. Unfortunately it's been co-opted by half-measures Democrats, who wish merely to raise it a little. Thus Pete Buttigieg wants to raise the cap from its current setting to just $250,000. Thus Amy Klobuchar with the same proposal.

In other words, under these proposals million-dollar earners would be taxed on 25% of their salaried income instead of 14%, while the rest of us, who earn below $137,700 per year, would continue to be taxed on 100% of our income.

Needless to say, this what democracy in an oligarchy looks like. But I think you knew that already.
 

What's Worse-- Biden's Sincere Belief In Austerity Or Trump's Belief In Nothing But Personal Corruption?

Trump's a monster, no doubt about it. He's a grifter who has not an ounce of patriotism nor the will towards public service in his bloated orange body or his misshapen shriveled soul. That said, unlike Joe Biden, Trump is not driven-- the way his party is-- to destroy Social Security and Medicare. And it isn't just the Republican Party that is eager to destroy the social safety net; it is also the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, faction of the party that has largely rallied behind Biden, one of the worst pro-Austerity warriors in our lifetimes, worse on that count than Trump, who doesn't care enough about it to want to stir up the ultimate hornets nest.

Over the weekend, Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein and Erica Werner looked at how Trump's proposed budget "is expected to lay bare how much he has adjusted to the political and practical limits of Washington, with some of his biggest campaign promises from 2016 cast aside and replaced with more limited policy ambitions. On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago."

Those advising Trump are as eager to cut Social Security and Medicare as Biden and his faction are. If Trump was interested in issues beyond his own prospects of emptying the treasury into his own pockets, he might be as bad, or even worse, than Biden on the social safety net. So far, though, he has only let the Austerity hawks chip away around the edges. His campaign promises to protect Medicaid from cuts, wrote Stein and Werner have "been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal 'will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.' He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign. He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions."

Biden, who has advocated deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for his entire career, would be much less likely to beat around the bush. Trump is reticent because of the political blowback. Biden would ignore the blowback and see himself as the ultimate political martyr who only has one term anyway. He sees Austerity as an ultimate good. Trump only sees graft and corruption as ultimate goods.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to deliver a major infrastructure plan, but there has been virtually no progress on this issue.

And the president’s promise to eliminate the government’s roughly $20 trillion debt within eight years has also gone unfulfilled. Instead, Trump has added almost $3 trillion to the debt in three years, and that number is only expected to balloon, according to nonpartisan estimates. Proposals to cut domestic programs have evaporated in massive year-end budget deals with Congress that have actually raised spending limits.

Trump’s first budget proposal relied on questionable math when it sought to eliminate the budget deficit after 10 years, but even that goal has slipped out of reach.

Trump has scored a string of victories in recent months, including securing a bipartisan revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement and being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate on impeachment charges. He signed a partial trade deal with China and marshaled through a massive tax-cut package in 2017.

But Monday’s budget proposal will demonstrate that a number of the president’s loftiest campaign promises from four years ago have largely been abandoned, because of political realities as well as simple budget math.

“I have no idea how he can live up to his campaign promises to reduce the deficit, not address entitlement programs, and at the same time cut taxes,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican who served as staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “I have not figured out how to square this circle, and neither have they.”

...[E]ven more so than under prior administrations, Trump’s budget proposals have been largely rejected by lawmakers who’ve agreed on a bipartisan basis to restore and even increase spending for agencies and programs that the administration has tried to cut, including health and education programs and foreign aid.

Trump in the past few years has sought to backpedal on some of the proposed budget cuts, facing blowback after seeking to cut funding in states central to his reelection campaign, such as Michigan.

That has led to some dejection among career officials at agencies and within the White House Office of Management and Budget, who are forced to devote enormous time and attention to developing a budget document they know Congress will largely reject, according to several people with knowledge of internal administration dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.

In prior years, Trump’s budgets have reflected the irreconcilable contradictions of his campaign promises in part by relying on overly rosy economic forecasts and glossing over how he would achieve big cuts.

In 2017, Trump’s budget predicted that economic growth would surge to an annual rate of 3 percent by 2021 and stay at that healthy rate indefinitely. This goal has proved elusive. The economy grew 2.9 percent in 2018 but slowed to 2.3 percent in 2019, and is projected to slow even more this year. Relying on rosy economic estimates in the budget plans allows the White House to assume that prospering families and companies will generate high levels of tax revenue as a way to offset the widening deficit. Instead, the deficit estimates have proved faulty.

Trump’s budgets have also proposed enormous cuts to domestic spending programs as a way to try to bring the deficit down. But nondefense domestic spending, aside from what are considered mandatory programs, makes up just a sliver of the overall $4.6 trillion federal budget. Mandatory programs, including the domestic programs Medicare and Social Security, make up more than 60 percent of federal spending. And since Trump has promised repeatedly to wall off Medicare and Social Security from cuts, while also increasing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security budgets, he has fewer agencies available for cuts if he wants to seek reductions.

Rep. Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (R-TN), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said the deficit cannot be addressed until Congress and the administration take on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But he noted that Trump has promised to protect those programs, “and I will certainly respect that.”

“So I think right now, this year, is probably not the year to deal with the mandatory side of the equation,” Fleischmann said. “But perhaps that’s something that President Trump will look at with the Congress in his second term.”

Ironically, Fleischmann's bloodthirsty instincts would undoubtably better-served by a Biden (or, likely, a Bloomberg) administration that would go right in for the kill. "Although," wrote Stein and Werner, "Trump has talked publicly about wanting to cut spending, he has also signaled an indifference toward the federal budget... [and] rarely speaks of it. Leaked audio from a dinner the president attended in January with donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, captured the president brushing aside those who are critical of rising defense and federal spending as part of the growing national debt. 'Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,' the president said."





Biden and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs, New Dems, so-called "Problem Solvers"-- care. Which is why the 2020 primary is the ultimate crossroads for the Democratic Party. Bernie wants to lead a party that embraces the philosophy of governance espoused by FDR. The B-Team embrace, albeit never openly, Rockefeller, Eisenhower and Nixon Republicanism.

Do You Want The Election To Be All About Who Is The Bigger Liar, Trump Or Biden?

Democratic primary voters have been smelling Biden's bullshit and have been turning away-- some in disgust and some in disappointment. Like Trump, he's incapable of stopping himself from lying. Like he Trump, he lies about all things, great and small. He was one of the architects of the Iraq War and he lied over and over and over again, claiming he opposed it. CNN: "Biden dishonestly suggested on Saturday that he had opposed the war in Iraq "from the very moment" it began in 2003-- even though Biden's campaign said in September that he "misspoke" when he made a similar claim... It's false that Biden opposed the war from the moment Bush started it in March 2003. Biden repeatedly spoke in favor of the war both before and after it began."

Another bunch of Biden whoppers are the string of lies he's been telling about Social Security, denying he's been working for years to cut both Social Security and Medicare. Anyone who's ever paid attention to Biden's political career knows full well that he's always been one of the Democrats' biggest proponents of Austerity. Here he is on the floor of the Senate in 1995 demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security. At first he claimed Bernie "doctored" the tape, but when people asked if Bernie also doctored the Congressional Record, Biden shut up about it:





Two of America's best investigative journalists, Ryan Grim and Lee Fang tried getting to the bottom of Biden's Social Security lies last week. They began by pointing out that Status Quo Joe's "defense of his record has included multiple television interviews, public comments, and even an ad attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders for 'dishonest smears' challenging him on Social Security. In the ad, Biden makes a sweeping claim: 'I’ve been fighting to protect-- and expand-- Social Security for my whole career. Any suggestion otherwise is just flat-out wrong.' At Vice’s Black and Brown Forum in Iowa this week, when pressed on his proposal to freeze Social Security payments by moderator Antonia Hylton, he simply lied: 'I didn’t propose a freeze.'" He's as shameless a liar as Trump.

Biden has argued for cuts or freezes to Social Security throughout much of his career. Earlier in January, The Intercept wrote about several instances in which Biden advocated for cutting Social Security over the course of his career. Biden, when he acknowledges his past support for cuts, portrays the advocacy as deep in the past. But a close inspection finds reams of more recent evidence of Biden’s support for cuts — including in Biden’s recent recounting of a conversation he had with China’s president, Xi Jinping, and in his choice of Bruce Reed, a longtime deficit hawk, as a senior policy adviser in his current presidential campaign.

Reed, a longtime Biden aide, played a central role in advocating cuts to the New Deal-era program as a co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the top staffer for a controversial commission dedicated to slashing the deficit, and then as Biden’s chief of staff during the Obama administration. In Washington, D.C., he would be the last high-level staffer a campaign would bring aboard if it was genuinely intent on expanding, not cutting, Social Security.

Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Biden, said that, as president, Biden would push to expand Social Security. “As President, Joe Biden would expand Social Security benefits-- paid for with new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And as Senator Sanders himself said in 2015: ‘Joe Biden is a man who has devoted his entire life to public service and to the wellbeing of working families and the middle class,’” Bates said.

The Cuts came closest to happening amid talks between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans aimed at hammering out a so-called grand bargain. The most prominent vehicle for those negotiations was known as the Bowles-Simpson Commission, a bipartisan panel charged with making recommendations to Congress on how to reduce the federal debt. It was chaired by Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina.

And the staff director for Bowles-Simpson? Bruce Reed. “Our team was led by Bruce Reed, and believe me, there wouldn’t be a Simpson-Bowles Report without Bruce,” Bowles later wrote. The chairs of the commission recommended reducing Social Security benefits for the top half of earners, cutting the amount the benefit grew relative to inflation and raising the retirement age to 69. Progressives skewered it, with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noting that “it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen-- completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most.”

“Simpson-Bowles is terrible,” he concluded. “Yes, I know, inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”

The commission failed to secure the supermajority needed for its recommendations to move on to Congress, but the administration was far from done try to implement them. After finishing with the commission, Reed was brought on as Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, to continue to work on a grand bargain. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington group dedicated to cutting Social Security and other entitlement programs, celebrated the appointment. We can’t think of a better person for the job,” CRFP said in a statement. “We hope Bruce will be able to leverage his expertise in this new position, and that his appointment portends positive steps from policymakers in the Administration in tackling our rising deficits and debt.”

At the time, the Fiscal Times wrote, “The recent appointment of Bruce Reed, the Executive Director of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, as Vice President Biden’s Chief of Staff is the latest signal that the administration plans to endorse many of the Commission’s recommendations. Since one target for deficit reduction appears to be Social Security and social insurance programs more generally, it’s essential to understand the important role that social insurance plays in the economy.”

National Journal reported that Reed helped Biden shape his approach to the debt-reduction commission, “often sitting right behind the vice president in meetings with Republican leaders.” Reed, National Journal noted, had sided with a cadre of other Obama administration advisers to “back cuts to Medicare and Social Security despite pushback from some Democrats who opposed touching entitlements.”

Reed was not some entry-level staffer. By that point, he had been a top domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, where he had championed the reform of welfare and otherwise advocated for slashing government spending. He was also co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, which represented the pro-business wing of the party that rose in the 1980s.

The DLC was the only influential Democratic institution to lobby not only for cutting Social Security benefits, but also supported the push for privatization of Social Security. In the 1990s, DLC began calling for “limited privatization” of the program that would allow individuals to invest part of their benefits in the stock market. “Personal accounts would refashion Social Security from a system of wealth transfer into one that also promotes individual wealth creation and broader ownership,” the DLC argued, encouraging the Clinton administration to embrace a grand bargain with Republicans.

In 1998, a plan to embrace the grand bargain came close to fruition. In secret negotiations between House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, and President Bill Clinton, a proposal was hatched to reduce Social Security benefits and embrace partial privatization in exchange for Gingrich to drop his demand for new tax cuts. That plan came perilously close to being implemented, but was blown up by Gingrich’s drive to impeach Clinton rather than cut a deal.

After Reed left the DLC and joined the debt commission, the organization continued to lobby for cuts to Social Security and a hike in the retirement age. The DLC submitted comments to the Bowles-Simpson panel suggesting that Social Security consider an approach that included “offering ways to mix part-time and online work with partial Social Security benefits after age 67 and into the eighth decade of life.”

Reed has remained in Biden’s inner circle. The campaign paid him more than $35,000 for “policy consulting” last year. As Politico reported, Reed routinely travels with Biden, continuing to serve as the former vice president’s chief policy adviser on the road.

The next phase of the Obama-era bargain talks, in the wake of Bowles-Simpson, became the so-called Biden Committee, a series of negotiations over deficit reduction chaired by Biden, staffed by Reed, and joined by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor; Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD); and others. Biden, in talks that were covered closely in Bob Woodward’s book The Price of Politics, put Social Security and other cuts on the table but couldn’t get to a yes because Republicans refused to agree to any tax cuts. (Fly-on-the-wall books on the later years of the Obama administration lack the drama of Trump-era tell-alls.)

In the summer of 2011, the talks evolved into the Super Committee, made up of six Democrats and six Republicans from the House and Senate, charged with coming up trillions in budget cuts. Woodward obtained a copy of the administration’s recommendations to that committee, and it largely mirrored what was on offer during the Biden Committee talks and included significant cuts to Social Security.

But then came Occupy Wall Street. By the fall, coverage was dominated by protests that began in New York City around the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” calling attention to vast wealth inequality and the country’s superrich in a way that hadn’t happened since the days of the robber barons. The movement spread to cities and towns across the country, with encampments springing up in downtowns in every region. That fall, after Bank of America announced a new $5 monthly fee for debit cards, it faced so much backlash that it backed down and rescinded the fee.

In early November, a group of protesters set out from New York to Washington, calling themselves Occupy the Highway and aiming to hit the capital on November 22, the day the Super Committee was due to issue its legislation, which was designed to glide through Congress.

On November 21, the Super Committee collapsed, lacking the votes to get the legislation out of its own committee. “Super Committee Fail = Occupy Wall Street Win,” celebrated Michael Glazer, an organizer of Occupy the Highway, in a statement that day. “The so-called Super Committee was a failure from the beginning. No one has the courage to stand up inside our corrupt political system and fight for regular Americans. So, we will continue to take a stand outside the system.”

The willingness of that faction of protesters to even acknowledge the Super Committee was controversial inside Occupy, which considered direct interaction with the political system futile at best and corrupting at worst. But as Glazer emphasized, Occupy had blown up the committee from the outside by changing the political terrain. Concerns over the deficit and a preference for austerity were replaced by a conversation about economic inequality, one that would ultimately boost the Sanders campaign in 2015 and put an end, for the time being, to Democratic attempts to cut the deficit by trimming entitlement programs.  (It wasn’t completely dead: An ad Biden released this week includes footage of Biden telling Paul Ryan, at a vice presidential debate, that he is committed to protecting Social Security. The Obama administration’s 2013 budget included Social Security cuts regardless. By 2015, those cuts were out.)

But even while the logic of the party changed, deficit scolding had become such a firm element of Biden’s brand that he had a hard time letting go. In 2018, at a speech at the Brookings Institute, Biden again returned to Social Security, criticizing then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recent tax cut but agreeing with his focus on Social Security and Medicare.

At a speech in July 2018, Biden again addressed Social Security and Medicare, relaying an anecdote in which Chinese leader Xi Jinping asked him if China’s investments in U.S. debt were safe and specifically if the United States planned to do something about the cost of entitlement programs-- Social Security and Medicare-- which Xi saw in conflict with meeting U.S. obligations to China. “I said don’t buy any more of our T-bills,” Biden whispered, as he does when he’s letting the audience believe that he’s letting them in on something secret or saying something verboten.

“‘I hope you’re able to do something about your entitlement problem,’” Biden said Xi told him. “And I said, ‘With regard to our entitlement problem, Mr. President, ours is a political problem, and it’s soluble, but my god, your problem, your one-child policy has produced a circumstance that by 2022, you’ll have more people retired than working.’”

It’s a story Biden has been telling versions of since 2011, and it has consistently cast entitlements as a problem to be solved. Biden’s reference to “our entitlement problem” as “a political problem” that is “soluble” suggests that his view of the programs hadn’t evolved over the past 40 years, though his official position in his 2020 campaign is the opposite, that benefits should be expanded, not shrunken.

This past week, Biden steadily ratcheted up his revision of his record. At Vice News’s Brown and Black Forum in Iowa on Monday, he was pressed on Social Security. “Do you think though that it’s fair for voters to question your commitment to Social Security when in the past you proposed a freeze to it?” he was asked by Vice moderator Hylton.

“No, I didn’t propose a freeze,” he said.

“You did,” she corrected.

On Tuesday, he released an ad attacking Sanders for what he called “dishonest smears.”

...On Wednesday, Biden joined the crew at MSNBC’s Morning Joe and was asked about the Social Security flare-up. “I have 100 percent ratings from the groups that rate Social Security [votes], those who support Social Security,” Biden said.

The claim was in line with, but more specific than, his earlier assertion of “I’ve been fighting to protect-- and expand-- Social Security for my whole career.”

It’s also not true. A review of media reports from the 1990s shows that groups dedicated to protecting Social Security, including the AARP, saw Biden’s votes and advocacy as a betrayal. Ahead of the critical vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment in 1995, the Delaware News Journal carried a story that was headlined: “Biden gets blasted on budget bill: Seniors head list of groups pressing him to reconsider.”

The story began: “Angry lobbying groups for senior citizens, children and families, and congressional watchdogs united Friday to denounce Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his support of the GOP’s balanced budget amendment.”

The article noted that Biden himself had previously warned that “Seniors are going to pay a big price” thanks to the amendment. An AARP representative is quoted saying that Biden “can’t have it both ways” and that the bill “is nothing more than a raid on Social Security’s trust fund.”

Another News Journal article from the time reported that the “defections” of Biden and another Democratic senator “were a serious blow to opponents of the legislation, said David Certner, an official of the American Association of Retired People, which fears that the amendment will erode Social Security benefits.”

There were a number of groups scoring votes on legislation around Social Security at the time-- meaning that they gave ratings to legislators based on their votes-- including the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the National Council of Senior Citizens. Biden did not get 100 percent scores from any of those groups because of his votes to undermine Social Security.

The amendment passed the House and fell one vote short in the Senate, the Constitution just barely dodging the bullet. Ultimately, the focus on the measure’s impact on Social Security, according to the New York Times, swayed enough Democrats to stop it. In the House, then-Rep. Sanders had zeroed in on the amendment’s effect on Social Security. “The balanced budget amendment will be a disaster for working people, for elderly people, for low-income people,” he said on the House floor. “It will mean, in my view, the destruction of the Social Security system as we know it.”

Sanders was asked on Friday if he would apologize to Biden for criticizing him on Social Security, as he had apologized for a surrogate’s op-ed that argued Biden had a corruption problem. “No,” Sanders said. “There are ways to raise money in order to protect the working families of this country. Cutting Social Security ain’t one of ’em.”