The GOP Unveils A 'Permanent Save' For Social Security — With Massive Benefit Cuts (Demo)

On December 9, 2016, Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Amid all the hand-wringing over Republican plans to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid and repeal the Affordable Care Act, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the GOP has the knives out for Social Security too.

The latest reminder comes from Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Tex., chairman of the Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee. Johnson on Thursday uncorked what he termed a “plan to permanently save Social Security.”

Followers of GOP habits won’t be surprised to learn that it achieves this goal entirely through benefit cuts, without a dime of new revenues such as higher payroll taxes on the wealthy. In fact, Johnson’s plan reduces the resources coming into the program by eliminating a key tax –another way that he absolves richer Americans of paying their fair share, while increasing the burdens of retirement for almost everyone else.

Predictably, this plan has already been hailed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a billionaire’s front group that likes to portray itself as a neutral budget watchdog. (The foundation of hedge fund billionaire Peter G. Peterson, whose hostility to Social Security is well-documented, provided $3.3 million in funding for the committee in 2015; that’s the equivalent of about half the group’s revenue of $7.1 million in 2014)

The group calls Johnson’s proposal “a thoughtful plan” and the product of “true leadership.” But it also says that “revenue and benefit changes both need to be on the table.” Johnson’s plan doesn’t meet that standard at all.

Typically, Social Security “reform” proposals at least pay lip service to the fact that the payroll tax has been giving the wealthy a larger and larger pass, by covering an ever-shrinking percentage of their wages and exempting the capital gains and dividends that make up a larger share of high-end income.

Johnson’s plan doesn’t mention that at all. It does, however, give higher-income beneficiaries a tax cut by eliminating income tax on benefits starting in 2045. The tax affects about 30% of retirees by treating at least half of the benefits of those earning more than $32,000 as taxable income.

By law, the tax must be credited to the Social Security system. It’s scheduled to bring in as much as $78 billion in 2025. Johnson’s rationale here is murky. If Social Security is in such bad shape that he sees the need to slash benefits, why cut its revenue, too?

Social Security’s actuaries, who analyzed the plan at Johnson’s request, agreed that it would improve the program’s finances, but noted that virtually every provision involved a benefit cut.

Let’s take a look.

Johnson’s “Social Security Reform Act” changes the program’s benefit formula to provide modest benefit increases for the lowest-earning workers in the system— those who earned up to an annual average of about $22,105 over their lifetimes in inflation-indexed pay — with cuts for everyone else ranging from 17% to as much as 43%, compared with currently scheduled benefits, by 2080.

The act would cut way back on cost-of-living increases for retirees. It would do this by cutting out cost-of-living raises entirely for retirees earning adjusted gross income of more than $85,000 ($170,000 for couples) starting in December 2018, and using the chained consumer price index to calculate the COLA for all others. (The income threshold would be adjusted for inflation.)

Johnson asserts that the chained CPI is “a more accurate measure of inflation,” but he’s blowing smoke. There are no grounds to say the index, which was heavily promoted a few years ago by yet another gang associated with Peter G. Peterson, is more accurate than the index used today. If anything, it understates price increases in housing and healthcare, which have especially pronounced impacts on the household budgets of seniors. Conservatives like it for one reason: It grows more slowly than the regular CPI, so it’s cheaper. As we explained a few years ago, using the chained CPI is a benefit cut, and one that gets larger year by year. Period.

Johnson would also cut benefits for the spouses and children of retired and disabled workers by pegging them to average wages, rather than to the wages actually earned by the worker. This pares the benefits for families earning more than the average.

Finally, the measure also raises the full retirement age, which is now pegged to reach 67 by 2022, to 69 by 2030. this means that workers taking early retirement, which is permitted as soon as age 62, would face a steeper cut in annual benefits for starting early. Johnson would increase the age up to which delayed retirement credits may be earned to 72, from 70. Workers who can afford to put off claiming Social Security will reap the great rewards from this maneuver; by their nature, they tend to be wealthier people who have the resources to live on while deferring Social Security.

Conservatives often argue that raising the retirement age is innocuous because Americans are living longer. Their lengthier retirements, it’s argued, put an unexpected strain on Social Security’s finances, and they don’t need all that money anyway.

But this change is unfair and short-sighted for several reasons. One is that life expectancy is closely tied to income, education and careers. Well-heeled persons who spend much of their lives behind a desk — congressmen from Texas and analysts at billionaire-funded think tanks, say — are more likely to live longer and can stay in their careers well into their 60s and 70s. That’s not so for workers who spent their careers in menial or physically challenging work.

Raising the retirement age is also predicated on life expectancies rising indefinitely. Just as trees don’t grow into the stratosphere, there’s no guarantee this trend isn’t finite. Indeed, just this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that U.S. life expectancies actually declined last year for the first time since 1993, falling to 78.8 years at birth from 78.9 in 2014, statistically a major decline.

Also see http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=16066.

Social Security is based on taxable earnings from JOBS in the form of payroll taxes. Because the function of technology is to “save” labor or in other words shift from labor intensive production of products and services to the non-human productive capital input, jobs are increasingly being replaced by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.

President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages and rely on their Social Security benefits, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people  that the system is rigged to benefit. The reality is that the 1 percent primarily derive their wealth through the ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets. Working people and the middle class, on the other hand, will continue to stagnate relying ONLY on their labor whose worth is rapidly eroding, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will ultimately result in upheaval. Dependent on a tax on wages and salaries, Social Security will falter as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production destroy jobs and devalue the worth of labor.

The majority of Americans, dependent on labor worker wages, no longer think that jobs and labor wages will return suddenly—if at all—and at a livable earnings level, that the value of their homes will re­bound, or that their limited retirement funds will soon be fully restored. Americans are scared but attribute their worsening finances to job losses, reduced hours, wage givebacks, and overall reduced earnings. They do not understand the role of productive capital driven by technological innovation and science and the requirement for them to become capital owners whose productive assets do the work, as well as labor workers, to earn a viable economic future. And until we, as a society, understand how wealth is produced, how consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, we will not be able to set a course to obtain an affluent quality of life for middle and working class citizens, where everyone “can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

Unemployment and underemployment is high, and will continue to be so, and there is an accelerating displacement of labor workers by technology and cheaper foreign labor, resulting in greater economic uncertainty and unstable retirement incomes for the average American citizen––causing the average citizen to become increasingly dependent on government wealth redistribution programs, openly or disguised.

The stark reality is that we are in a depression reflected in rising unemployment and underemployment and instability that we will never escape from until we change our economic policy. Increasingly, more Americans will not be able to ever purchase a home, due to the packed inflationary wage and welfare base factored into the cost of building homes, which inflate prices, and will be forced to rent their entire life or depend on government living assistance––not able to accumulate equity that can help to sustain them in their retirement years. This is the new reality now facing people in the middle class. The uncertainty of holding onto a good job is frightening to an increasingly wider base of middle-class working citizens. When you factor in the average non-salaried worker, even with a government-mandated minimum labor wage rate of $10.00+ per hour in some states, the outcome is grim. Never mind that consumer demand continues to dwindle because of insufficient income, solely tied to labor worker wages. The impact of the decline in consumer demand due to declining labor worker wages is that production will decline or desist without sustainable consumer demand.

The solution is to CREATE new OWNERS of wealth-creating, income-producing FUTURE productive capital assets simultaneously with the exponential growth of the economy, constantly driven by more “customers with money.” Unfortunately, conventionally, most people do not have the right to acquire productive capital with the self-financing earnings of capital; they are left to acquire, as best as they can, with their earnings as labor workers, relying on past savings (the denial of consumption). This is fundamentally hard to do and limiting. Thus, the most important economic right Americans need and should demand is the effective right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. Note, though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the “stock market exchanges,” purchased with their earnings as labor workers, their stock holdings are relatively miniscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners.

What historically empowered America’s original capitalists was conventional savings-based finance and the pledging or mortgaging of assets, with access to further ownership of new productive capital available only to those who were already well capitalized. As has been the case, credit to purchase capital is made available by financial institutions ONLY to people who already own capital and other forms of equity, such as the equity in their home and other capital assets that can be pledged as loan security––those who meet the universal requirement for collateral. Lenders will only extend credit to people who already have assets. Thus, the rich are made ever richer, while the poor (people without a viable capital estate) remain poor and dependent on their labor to produce income. Thus, the system is restrictive and capital ownership is clinically denied to those who need it.

The solutions can be found in the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, Monetary Justice reform at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice and  the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/