Social Security and Medicare are not the problem.

Straight talk from The Booman

Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community

Social Security and Medicare aren't the problem. The problem is tax cuts for the rich, the greatest inequality between those at the top and everyone else in income and net worth ever, and the stranglehold large corporations have on our government.

Some commentators blame recent legislation — the stimulus bill and the financial rescues — for today’s record deficits. Yet those costs pale next to other policies enacted since 2001 that have swollen the deficit. Those other policies may be less conspicuous now, because many were enacted years ago and they have long since been absorbed into CBO’s and other organizations’ budget projections.

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).

America's wealth and power arose because we had a strong vibrant large middle class and a safety net in place in the form of social security and medicare and other government programs that helped people buy homes, pay for college tuition for their children, clean up our air and water (reducing public health costs), keep our food safe, financial regulation that made our markets the most stable and trusted in the world, Labor laws that protected the rights of unions and individual workers, etc.
Those used to be Democratic Party accomplishment of which Democrats were proud and that they defended. Not anymore, apparently.

Destroying that safety net and making the middle class small enough to drown in a bathtub is a recipe for disaster, both in the short and long terms. You want a libertarian paradise? Go to Somalia. You want lack of regulation of major corporations? See what that has done to the environment and health of the people of China, India and Russia. In relative terms the deficit is significantly lower than it was after WWII, the period that jump started America's rise as the most dominant economic force on the planet. Yet after WWII, instead of demanding reparations and other financially punitive measures, we used our economic strength and targeted foreign aid to build up the economies of our former enemies and a devastated Europe. That spending created the global economy that we have today which reduced much suffering, even if it did not eliminate all global inequities.

We choose what we spend our money on... we can spend it on our own people, to make our country better or we can spend it to bomb people on the other side of the planet or to give the millionaires a few more dollars. seems a simple choice to me.

tnb