News & Comment

No matter how fatigued the rest of the country is with the endless Republican debate schedule, Mitt Romney must be looking forward to tonight’s face-off in New Hampshire. Despite reports that he is losing ground in some states to Herman Cain and others, Romney knows he has nothing to fear in New Hampshire. read more »

There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs. The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies — billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement — offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs — revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world. read more »

For more on how we can save Social Security from conservative attacks, hear Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Campaign for America's Future's Roger Hickey, Strengthen Social Security's Eric Kingson and more at the Take Back the American Dream conference, Oct. 3-5. read more »

For more on how we can save Social Security from conservative attacks, hear Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Campaign for America's Future's Roger Hickey, Strengthen Social Security's Eric Kingson and more at the Take Back the American Dream conference, Oct. 3-5. read more »

The Sanders bill “goes big” for Social Security--the nation’s most important pension, life and disability insurance plan. read more »

The Sanders bill “goes big” for Social Security--the nation’s most important pension, life and disability insurance plan. read more »

Two fresh dangers in the looming Social Security battleground confront blacks and Hispanics. The GOP presidential candidates posed one when they again called for partially privatizing Social Security in recent stump speeches and statements. The idea is nothing but a rehash of the idea floated by George W. Bush in 2005. The idea mercifully went nowhere, Bush dropped it. The other danger is the soaring poverty numbers. Social Security stands squarely in the middle of the two dangers. The recent census report found that the number of Americans in poverty has hit a near all time high. A disproportionate number of those are blacks and Hispanics. This is where privatizing or any tweak, reduction, or downsize of Social Security would virtually guarantee that the economic pain to blacks and Hispanics would be unimaginable. read more »

Ever since Texas Governor Rick Perry attacked Social Security as a Ponzi scheme as an opening gambit in his presidential campaign we have been treated to a spirited debate in the media on the truth of this proposition. Those of us who consider this to be ill-informed nonsense that has the effect of misleading the public about the state of Social Security's finances were told to lighten up. After all, what is wrong with debating the topic? In this spirit of free and open debate, perhaps our attention should be devoted to the question of whether the Washington Post is a criminal enterprise. While it is ostensibly a newspaper that purports to give the public an objective take on key events in the country and the world, it has been involved in several actions that raise serious questions about this status. read more »

Washington, DC felt like a city on a deathwatch this week, after a series of White House news leaks said the President would announce cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits next Monday. One plan was to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security. Another involved an accounting gimmick that would cut the already-inadequate cost of living adjustments for Social Security benefits - and raise taxes on the middle class, too. read more »

If you want to know why we are so screwed as a nation, you can probably find a couple of dozen good reasons. But this, I say, is right at the top of the list. From MSNBC, with Chuck Todd filling in for Andrea Mitchell: read more »