Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

[justaprogressive]

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:
Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it

in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

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[spooky3]

1. The comments on the NYT opinion piece were great. Nt

[planetc]

2. Extremely invigorating. Thanks.

[Lonestarblue]

3. Commenters for this Times article skewered the writers, and deservedly so.

As just one example, their view that workers should not collect SS until age 77 totally ignored that the new average life expectancy in the US is age 76. So pay into a plan all your life and get nothing. SS is easily fixed simply by raising the earnings cap. I would actually like to see graduated earning caps so that CEOs are forced to pay a bit more of their $30 million salaries.

I saw an article today where Republicans are now claiming that SS is fueling the debt. It is not because it pays its own way, but they will lie and lie and lie. At one time SS was not included in the federal budget because it is income taxes that pay for the government’s operation. Congress put it in the budget because its excess of income over outgo masks the extent of deficit spending elsewhere. We need to remove it once more and have an honest budget. SS is merely a return to recipients of money paid in over a lifetime of work. It should not be cut so billionaires can have a tax cut!

[Brenda]

4. Good post

I agree about raising the cap. But the problem is that these large-millionaires and billionaires don't actually have SS taxable income, right? Their money is not "earned" but sitting in investments legally and (much more I'm sure) illegally offshore.

[appalachiablue]

5. K/R