Mr. Shaman
10-27-2005, 04:52 AM
"It is not hard these days to find intelligent critiques of the budget policy and fiscal record of the Bush administration. Conservative and liberal think tanks alike grind out fresh analyses of the risks in the chronic refusal of the Republicans who govern the country to pay the bills they are amassing here and overseas (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102601911.html).
Nonpartisan budget groups -- especially those with a historical attachment to budgetary prudence -- have been even tougher on the president and his allies on Capitol Hill for their seeming nonchalance in letting the debt of the federal government climb so rapidly on their watch.
Gene Sperling, who served as an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that such a trade-off would simply be a repetition of the kind of bargain Clinton and his Republican predecessors, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, made with Congress in their own time. Those deals -- including the tax increases Reagan signed in 1982 and Bush in 1990 -- limited but did not erase deficits. The budget agreement that Clinton signed in 1997 actually put the federal government briefly back into the black (http://www.kellysite.net/taxes.html).
As Sperling recalled, there was a moment after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when this President Bush might have found a bipartisan readiness among Americans to forgo further tax cuts in light of the new demands that suddenly confronted the nation.
But that moment quickly passed, with the president instead saying that he intended to continue the course of tax-cutting on which he had embarked -- a pledge he has regularly reiterated, even though the wreckage of fiscal policy has now become clear even to many of his fellow partisans."
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Has there ever been a better argument for returning S.S. to it's original-design; with MEANS-TESTING (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/attarian5.html)???
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"The original Social Security Act attached a very big string indeed: in order to qualify for benefits, one had to be retired – and by George they meant it!
If one received any income from employment covered by the Social Security Act, one would lose his entire benefit for each month in which this occurred. This very stringent provision, known as the "retirement earnings test," is, of course, the same thing as a means test.
Now, one may argue – and Social Security partisans such as Dwight Eisenhower’s Undersecretary of Labor Arthur Larson and Social Security Commissioner Robert Ball did argue – that the retirement earnings test is not unreasonable since Social Security is, after all, a retirement program, and paying retirement benefits to someone who isn’t retired doesn’t make sense, and that the test does help keep the program’s costs down. But there’s no getting around the fact that it’s blatantly at variance with the no-means-test and "earned right" line fed the public since 1935. And it didn’t go down well with the old folks who found themselves on the wrong side of it." <i.e. today's 1%ers......and, other such greedy pricks!> :mad:
Nonpartisan budget groups -- especially those with a historical attachment to budgetary prudence -- have been even tougher on the president and his allies on Capitol Hill for their seeming nonchalance in letting the debt of the federal government climb so rapidly on their watch.
Gene Sperling, who served as an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that such a trade-off would simply be a repetition of the kind of bargain Clinton and his Republican predecessors, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, made with Congress in their own time. Those deals -- including the tax increases Reagan signed in 1982 and Bush in 1990 -- limited but did not erase deficits. The budget agreement that Clinton signed in 1997 actually put the federal government briefly back into the black (http://www.kellysite.net/taxes.html).
As Sperling recalled, there was a moment after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when this President Bush might have found a bipartisan readiness among Americans to forgo further tax cuts in light of the new demands that suddenly confronted the nation.
But that moment quickly passed, with the president instead saying that he intended to continue the course of tax-cutting on which he had embarked -- a pledge he has regularly reiterated, even though the wreckage of fiscal policy has now become clear even to many of his fellow partisans."
*
Has there ever been a better argument for returning S.S. to it's original-design; with MEANS-TESTING (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/attarian5.html)???
*
"The original Social Security Act attached a very big string indeed: in order to qualify for benefits, one had to be retired – and by George they meant it!
If one received any income from employment covered by the Social Security Act, one would lose his entire benefit for each month in which this occurred. This very stringent provision, known as the "retirement earnings test," is, of course, the same thing as a means test.
Now, one may argue – and Social Security partisans such as Dwight Eisenhower’s Undersecretary of Labor Arthur Larson and Social Security Commissioner Robert Ball did argue – that the retirement earnings test is not unreasonable since Social Security is, after all, a retirement program, and paying retirement benefits to someone who isn’t retired doesn’t make sense, and that the test does help keep the program’s costs down. But there’s no getting around the fact that it’s blatantly at variance with the no-means-test and "earned right" line fed the public since 1935. And it didn’t go down well with the old folks who found themselves on the wrong side of it." <i.e. today's 1%ers......and, other such greedy pricks!> :mad: