Conservative calls for civil disobedience (actually the destruction of public property) in reaction to the passage of Health Care Reform fell on deaf ears yesterday after the MSM (once again) displayed its (willful) ignorance of the ‘will of the people’.
The public isn’t nearly as ‘outraged’ as the MSM claimed…nor was the MSM able to provide ‘proof ’ of an outraged populous, (action shots of rioters in the act…even protesters carrying signs) further shredding their already mangled ‘credibility’. It seems the Tea Party ‘movement’ isn’t nearly as large as the corporate owned media would like you to imagine it is. (This ‘man-power’ shortage is evidence; they didn’t have enough people ‘on the payroll’ to ‘spit’ on passing Democratic politicians inside congressional offices AND to picket outside as well.)
Perhaps the more interesting question here is how this variety of public humiliation proceeded ‘unhindered’ by police as well as being broadcast nationwide? If these people were outside, protesting the Afghanistan war, cops with riot batons would have rendered most of them unconscious before hauling them downtown to be booked for ‘civil disobedience’ and locking up.
Guess it’s still ‘Okay if you’re a Republican!’
Well pay attention people because the next bit of corporate ‘slight of hand’ is about to be unleashed. A story I ran less than a week ago has made it’s way into the MSM…
So we arrive at tonight’s offering
Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: March 24, 2010
The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security. [Once again we see the general public being blamed for something they had no hand in.]
This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office. [Naturally, the nitwits don’t make the obvious connection, the hundreds of thousands of lay-offs, many of them due to ramped up off-shoring as well as the collapse of the domestic automobile industry as being directly responsible for this ‘early’ shortfall in SS revenues.]
Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual. [This, naturally, is not ‘the point’ of this warning article, in five years time, the sleazebuckets who had nothing to do with ripping off the Social Security Trust (only because they were too late for that party) will pronounce the fund ‘bankrupt’ and propose ‘eliminating’ the program.]
The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax. [Geez, ya don’t think we have a problem with our predatory ‘private employer’ system, do ya? Would ‘massa’ be so cruel?]
Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point — the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances. [Um, damn good citizen! Could the ‘problem’ be as simple as ‘mis-management’? Does anyone else see the huge ‘hole’ in the idea of trying to plan for future retirements when you have zero control over future costs? That’s stupid in the extreme…but it is not ‘insurmountable’ because you CAN control costs by managing output levels! Of course that would be socialism…something that’s never been tried because we don’t have enough ‘honest people’…which the crooks like to call ‘stupid people’.]
“When the level of the trust fund gets to zero, you have to cut benefits,” Alan Greenspan, architect of the plan to rescue the Social Security program the last time it got into trouble, in the early 1980s, said on Wednesday. [Um, so numbnuts, who ran the Fed, (a private corporation) was incapable of making the necessary ongoing adjustments to keep the fund solvent? What the Fuck does that tell ya? Oh, PS by the way…have a gander at the census figures and try to figure out where the shortage of people paying into the system is coming from…we have had a steady increase in population, while the workforce (percentage of labor force participation) has steadily decreased! Hello, anybody home?]
That episode was more dire because the fund could have fallen to zero in a matter of months. [causing the entire economy to collapse] But partly because of steps taken in those years, and partly because of many years of robust economic growth, the latest projections show the program will not exhaust its funds until about 2037. [Why do you suppose they are unwilling to repeat the ‘salvage operations’ they undertook 20 years ago? Because most Boomers were still young enough to either fight to get their money back or to force the government to keep paying. Now a majority of the boomers are in their fifties and thought to be ‘too old’ to fight back…big mistake.]
Still, Mr. Greenspan, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said: “I think very much the same issue exists today. Because of the size of the contraction in economic activity, unless we get an immediate and sharp recovery, the revenues of the trust fund will be tracking lower for a number of years.” [To his credit he is one of the few calling ‘Bull Shit’ on the ‘phantom recovery’ that only the MSM can see.]
The Social Security Administration is expected to issue in a few weeks its own numbers for the current year within the annual report from its board of trustees. The administration has six board members: three from the president’s cabinet, two representatives of the public and the Social Security commissioner. [Um, wonder what the ‘qualifications’ are for the civilian representatives on the SSA board? Do you have to be a Republican? AND your IQ cannot exceed 80 or is that the restriction just for the Democratic representative (because the Republican representative is assumed to already meet the IQ restriction?)
Though Social Security uses slightly different methods, the official numbers are expected to roughly track the Congressional projections, which were one page of a voluminous analysis of the federal budget proposed by President Obama in January. [Um, unspoken but pointed at in this article is the huge surge in petitions to collect Social Security Disability Pensions, supposedly restricted to the 100% disabled, there aren’t enough investigators to keep everyone ‘honest’. These pensions are seen as a way to ‘stay afloat’ financially while the recipient tries their hand at ‘self-employment’.]
Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.
The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again. [Um, it will be interesting to see how they plan to pull this off in light of the rapidly expanding ‘economic desert’ that is our economy?]
The long-term costs of Social Security present further problems for politicians, who are already struggling [?] over how to reduce the nation’s debt. The national predicament echoes that of many European governments, which are facing market pressure to re-examine their commitments to generous pensions over extended retirements.
The United States’ soaring debt — propelled by tax cuts, wars and large expenditures to help banks and the housing market — has become a hot issue as Democrats gauge their vulnerability in the coming elections. President Obama has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the debt problem, including Social Security, and make recommendations on how to trim the nation’s debt by Dec. 1, a few weeks after the midterm Congressional elections. [Are any of you ‘deluded’ enough to think all of this is ‘mere coincidence’? Talk about horrible timing! WHO (indeed) would believe our ‘bad luck’ (brought on by an obvious failure to plan ahead?)]
Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over time. Its so-called balance is, in fact, a history of its vast cash flows: the sum of all of its revenue in the past, minus all of its outlays. The balance is currently about $2.5 trillion because after the early 1980s the program had surplus revenue, year after year. [Um, geez, who do you suppose ‘spent’ all of that ‘surplus revenue’? (Because it is ‘gone’, the two and a half trillion dollars in the trust fund consists of IOU’s.)]
Now that accumulated revenue will slowly start to shrink, as outlays start to exceed revenue. By law, Social Security cannot pay out more than its balance in any given year. [Wonder who the ‘genius’ was that came up with THAT legislation? (Not that it particularly matters.)]
For accounting purposes, the system’s accumulated revenue is placed in Treasury securities.
In a year like this, the paper gains from the interest earned on the securities will more than cover the difference between what it takes in and pays out. [That’s right good citizen, go back to sleep, nothing to see here…but if you’re smart, you’ll be planning on being somewhere else by the middle of the decade as the civil unrest is going to be more than you can deal with being broke and all.]
Mr. Goss, the actuary, emphasized that even the $29 billion shortfall projected for this year was small, relative to the roughly $700 billion that would flow in and out of the system. The system, he added, has a balance of about $2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete. Mr. Goss said that large cushion could start to grow again if the economy recovers briskly. [Seriously good citizen, what do you think the odds are that the economy will ever see ‘real’ growth in your lifetime, here in the land where we are all ‘redundant’?]
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office’s projection shows the ravages of the recession easing in the next few years, with small surpluses reappearing briefly in 2014 and 2015. [Um, excuse me? We’re supposed to ‘take heart’ in the idea the ‘recession’ MAY BE easing A FEW YEARS from now? WTF! (Whatever the hell they’re smoking, they’d better start passing it around!)]
After that, demographic forces are expected to overtake the fund, as more and more baby boomers leave the work force, stop paying into the program and start collecting their benefits. At that point, outlays will exceed revenue every year, no matter how well the economy performs. [Um, hard to tell what’s more ‘problematic’ here, the fact that these assholes are projecting a budget shortfall or the fact that they’re trying to make it off like this was ‘unforeseen’?]
Mr. Greenspan recalled in an interview that the sour economy of the late 1970s had taken the program close to insolvency when the commission he led set to work in 1982. It had no contingency reserve then, and the group had to work quickly. He said there were only three choices: raise taxes, lower benefits or bail out the program by tapping general revenue.
The easiest choice, politically, would have been “solving the problem with the stroke of a pen, by printing the money,” Mr. Greenspan said. But one member of the commission, Claude Pepper, then a House representative, blocked that approach because he feared it would undermine Social Security, changing it from a respected, self-sustaining old-age program into welfare. [Geez, how much you want to bet ‘Claude’ was a Republican?]
Mr. Greenspan said that the same three choices exist today — though there is more time now for the painful deliberations. [Um, no irony should be lost on the fact that Randites absolutely HATE Social Security…and guess who was/is a class ‘A’ ‘social Darwinist’?]
“Even if the trust fund level goes down, there’s no action required, until the level of the trust fund gets to zero,” he said. “At that point, you have to cut benefits, because benefits have to equal receipts.”
Hard to say just how ‘uptight’ anybody should be getting about this…er, news. From the way things are going, there won’t be a U.S. government to ‘back’ a Social Security program before too long…and yes good citizen, should it come to a ‘Palace Coup’ the ‘new Regime’ gets to pick and choose what it will and will not do and ‘for whom’.
Bizarrely, a conservative victory (usurpation of power) would result in the defacto ‘liquidation’ of any and all opposing political parties…followed closely thereafter by the elimination of ‘elections’ altogether. Since we’re all ‘on the same team’ there’s no need to ‘challenge’ the status quo, is there?
How big do you think the ‘Order of the Phoenix’ would become? You’d think it would be universal BUT there are too many who are too ready to go along with just about anything so long as they can enjoy ‘peace’ and relative tranquility.
Naturally, those who would sell their liberty for peace and tranquility deserve neither!
So good citizen, when they kick down your front door, how you gonna go…with your hands on your head or the trigger of your gun?
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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