According to the Argus this morning, Tim Johnson has a plan for Social Security: Do nothing.
Johnson addressed a number of those
questions and said citizens' opinions will be used to shape a congressional
bill to improve Social Security while preserving the program's integrity.
He said Social Security will need to be improved, but privatization isn't the
solution.
"There's no need to go down that road," he said.
No indications what those “improvements” will be. We get this from an AARP shill:
Richtman, making his 53rd town-meeting appearance with a
member of Congress, took several shots at Bush and his proposal, then stressed
two main points:
· Social Security is not in a crisis. The system has sufficient funding until 2041, then will face a 25 percent shortfall. That's what needs to be addressed, and there's time to do that.
· Social Security is an insurance program. It's not an investment program and never was intended to be.
I would say a potential shortfall of 25% is a major problem. What’s the AARPs solution? Worry about it later. For all their talk about worrying about leaving debt to future generations, the AARP and Democratic plan for the coming disaster in Social Security (and even worse in Medicare) is to do nothing but pander to senior citizens. That’s leadership for ya. The question is not whether Social Security will cause us to take on debt. The question, it seems to me, is whether we want to take on a relatively small amount of debt now or a huge amount of debt in the future as Social Security goes into insolvency. I vote for the smaller debt today rather than the massive debt tomorrow. If I interpret this Social Security Administration website correctly, in 2004 the SSA paid out $421 billion in Old-Age and Survivors Insurance. Twenty-five percent of that would be about $105 billion. Obviously by 2041 that number will be much larger and will be annual.
More Tim Johnson:
Also, by diverting payroll taxes from the program, privatization would lead to substantial benefit cuts, Johnson said. Benefits would be cut most sharply for younger people, and they would be the ones left to repay the national debt.
The point of the private investment plan is that younger people like me will more than make up for the decline in our Social Security benefits by the greater return private investment gets. I suspect most of us will come out better off under the personal account system than under Social Security. I know I’d much rather have my FICA tax go into my retirement account than into Social Security.
More Johnson:
Johnson said a crucial step
Congress and the president can take is to balance the budget.
"We are going to be in trouble if we don't get the budget in
equilibrium," he said.
Johnson pointed to the administration's tax cuts and said if those were rolled
back among the richest Americans, that would cover a Social Security shortfall.
First of all, as I have noted before, Tim Johnson, like seemingly all Democrats, can’t think of a single way to help reduce the deficit outside of raising taxes. Also, I hate to give simple instruction on the workings of the federal government to a US Senator, but supposedly Social Security is self-financing through the FICA tax. Income tax dollars are not supposed to go into the Social Security Trust Fund. Senator Johnson can raise income taxes all he wants, but it won’t help Social Security.
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