"I need someone to show me
the things in life that
I can't find,
I can't see the things that make
true happiness, I must be blind."
"Paranoid," Paranoid
Black Sabbath, 1971
Social Security has nothing to do with our current budget deficit. Social Security is, as it has always been, a "pay as you go" system of social insurance (not an entitlement) that has a 2.3 TRILLION dollar surplus that Wall Street is foaming at the mouth to get its hands on. By the removal of the cap on income that is liable to taxation under Social Security (currently around $110,000 per year), as well as making all income taxable by both Social Security and Medicare (which is also a social insurance program, not an entitlement), including capital gains, together with controls on medical costs, would solve the problems of both systems for the foreseeable future.
No, our deficit problem has two primary causes: the pair of tax cuts enacted under the George W. Bush Administration, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which were essentially put on our nation's credit card. As Les Leopold's October 8, 2012 AlterNet article " 8 Facts That Prove Our Govt. Is not Going Broke ," asks the question:
"6. Isn't the debt caused by runaway entitlements?
Now we're getting down to what this debt debate is really about. The austerity folks don't want to tighten just any belt. They want to shred our social safety net. Debt is their excuse. Instead of making an open and honest case for a dog-eat-dog society, the social Darwinists (with Paul Ryan their new leader) make the utterly untruthful claim that so-called entitlements are driving up debt.
With a little addition, we can see how bogus this claim really is.
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About a decade ago we were running a yearly surplus, meaning that each year we were paying down our national debt, not adding to it. Then stuff happened.
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The Bush tax cuts (continued by Obama under severe Republican pressure) cost $250 billion a year in revenue.
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