"Entitlement Reform" means "Social Security Cuts"

Watch out for “entitlement reform” after election day. This is a phrase used to disguise cuts in Social Security. The first target of cuts is likely to be the disabled, since the elderly are a larger and more likely to vote population.  Already, there are frequent themes promoted in media coverage of Social Security that Social Security Disability has had excessive growth, promoting laziness and dependency, and adding to our economic crisis.

The last major push for Social Security reform, by Republican George W. Bush, would have handed Social Security money over to Wall Street, where huge commissions would have enriched investment firms, just before the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression would have caused losses for Social Security claimants and compounded the financial crisis.

Almost 30 years ago, in 1983, Congress accepted the recommendation of Republican Alan Greenspan to collect a big increase in Social Security payroll taxes from workers, with the promise that this would cover all of the cost of paying Social Security to the baby boomers.  Indeed, the tax increase on every dollar earned by most workers, but not the rich, was projected to cover all costs for 75 years, as far as the eye could see, considering the difficulty of estimating anything that far off.  Experts knew how many retirees and disabled to expect in future decades and planned accurately.  The tax collections from workers allowed the subsequent series of tax cuts for the rich, contributing to the increasing concentration of wealth and erosion of the middle class.

Literally trillions more Social Security taxes have been collected than paid in benefits, so Social Security has never added a dollar to the deficit.  It will be decades more before collected taxes would fall short of promised benefits, which are set to grow slowly in step with wage growth beyond inflation.  A tax on high earners at the same rate as typical workers would prevent any shortage in Social Security funds for the next 75 years, a similar kind of fix as devised by Greenspan in 1983 and passed by a Congress not deadlocked by extremely partisan Republicans.

Congress raised Social Security taxes with the promise of future benefits, building a cushion for the foreseeable needs of the aging baby boomers, a postwar demographic bulge whose members would have increasing rates of disability as they approached retirement age, and whose numbers of insured workers swelled as women more often worked outside the home.  The cushion of increased Social Security tax collections made it easier to cut taxes on the rich, while paying for a military expansion and wars, until the prolonged recession combined to produce large current deficits and the renewed calls for “entitlement reform.”

Why should disabled or retired workers be told we can’t afford promised Social Security, when they were fully taxed to pay for it?  Would it be fair to impose cuts after having collected the Social Security taxes, as part of a grand bargain to extend income and corporate tax breaks for the rich? 

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