News & Comment

When you tell people some proposals for fixing it, they a) overwhelmingly choose to fund it more generously and b) decide that the program actually does not face any sort of crisis at all. A marketing firm hired by the National Academy of Social Insurance surveyed a random sampling of Americans and discovered that what people want is to raise taxes on rich (and regular!) people in order to fund more Social Security benefits, which is a good idea because the program is currently pretty stingy by international standards and Americans don’t actually have pensions anymore. Deficit fear-mongering succeeded in getting 57 percent of survey respondents to believe that Social Security is a “crisis or significant problem,” until they learned that minor tax increases would make it totally sustainable for 75 years, at which point 74 percent of Americans were like “Oh, really? Then it seems fine, why don’t they ever put it like that on the news.” read more »

The "chained" CPI is a Social Security benefit cut (not an innocuous "adjustment"), and the majority of voters understand this, with 55% opposing this policy proposal. A new poll, Strengthening Social Security: What Do Americans Want? from the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), highlights working people's opposition to benefit cuts, including the "chained" CPI, which reduces the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). A large majority, 64%, thought the COLA should be increased to better protect seniors and other beneficiaries from inflation and rising prices of food, utilities and other necessities. read more »

Unsurprisingly, most Americans are split between various misconceptions of what Social Security and Medicare are. Many, particularly right-wing politicians and their media mouthpieces, see them as pure tax-and-transfer programs: they gather money from one set of people and give it to another set of people. From this point of view, they are bad bad bad bad bad and should be cut. Many others, particularly beneficiaries and people who hope to see beneficiaries, see them as earned benefits. The common conception is that you pay in while you’re working, so you earned the benefits you get in retirement. You didn’t “earn” them in the moral sense that people who work hard should get benefits; you “earned” them in the accounting sense that you’re just getting back “your” money that you set aside during your career. Both of these perspectives are wrong, the latter more obviously so. read more »

With its elegant rendering of the liberal agenda before the eyes of the American people, President Barack Obama's second inaugural address was music to the ears of many a progressive. But to the ears of Tea Partiers and the Republican right, this inauguration speech, as well as the ceremony that surrounded it, was war -- not just a war of words, but a war of prayer, a war of poetry and even, perhaps, a war of song. Driving the message home were the hands of the Fates, who conspired to see the second inauguration of the nation’s first African American president fall on Martin Luther King Day, the national holiday whose very creation was opposed by so many who still today comprise the Republican Party’s right wing. Here we recount a dozen ways in which the president brought his fight to the right, in no uncertain terms, at his second inauguration. read more »

According to inside-Washington gossip, Congress and the president are going to do exactly what voters elected them to do: they are going to cut Social Security by 3 percent. You don't remember anyone running on that platform? Yeah, well, they probably forgot to mention it. Of course, some people may have heard Vice President Joe Biden when he told an audience in Virginia that there would be no cuts to Social Security if President Obama got re-elected. Biden said: "I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you." But that's the way things work in Washington. You can't expect the politicians who run for office to share their policy agenda with voters. After all, we might not like it. That's why they say things like they will fight for the middle class and make the rich pay their fair share. These ideas have lots of appeal among voters. Cutting Social Security doesn't. read more »

Three trillion dollars a year. That's how much the wealthiest Americans avoid through the system of subsidies and schemes and sweet deals that deprive middle-class workers of their earned benefits. That's three times more than the deficit. That's enough for a full-time job for every middle-class household in America. Here are the distressing details. read more »

Here we go again. read more »

Millions of people are rightly outraged to hear that Social Security is in the gun-sights of both Speaker Boehner and President Obama in their budget negotiations. There is no reason that our political leaders should be discussing cuts to the country’s most successful social program. While the promotion of budget hysteria is one of the largest industries in Washington, the most important and widely ignored fact about the budget situation is that we have large deficits today because the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy. This is not a debatable point. read more »

Notwithstanding the White House claim that the fiscal-cliff deal is "A Victory for Middle Class Families and the Economy," we worry that it will play out as a defeat for both. Intended or not, the deal set the agenda for negotiations that will threaten the future of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- three programs that are core to economic security of working Americans. The potential impact on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid of the fiscal cliff deal reminds us of the old joke about the man who fell off a cliff and was halfway to the ground. When asked how he was, he replied, "So far, so good." read more »