Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.
Now that Mitt Romney is all but insured the Republican nomination for President he is officially dangerous. One must begin to look at all his ideas and imagine the America he would bring about. It is easy to see it is another "trickle-down" America that somehow still manages to trickle up. In Mitt Romney's America he will continue to pay less as he robs American workers blind. Starting with generations of younger Americans.
There is a reason the young should have voted for Obama and should again. Despite his faults and frequent complicity with bad policy he is definately the lesser of two evils. For the young, the devil is definately in the details of Mitt Romney's plan for your future.
And Mitt Romney is coming after us. He has not the guts to go after the Social Security of seniors or those soon to retire. Those folks always vote. He hopes to sneak by stealing Social Security from my generation and those just above and below me by "slowly" increasing the retirement age to draw benefits you paid for and earned:
•First, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that the retirement age should be slowly increased to account for increases in longevity.
http://www.mittromney.com/...
And just like that, with a bribe to older Americans Mitt Romney hopes they will be bought off just like he is and will only guarantee Social Security for the "foreseeable" future:
With just those two simple steps, and no change in benefits for those at or near retirement, America can guarantee the preservation of the Social Security system for the foreseeable future.
That is because Mitt Romney knows that once he starts raising the retirement age it is a ball that keeps rolling. Every time he and some other politician decides to steal from the fund to put in the pocket of themselves and those they truly represent they can just raise the retirement age once again and every time they do it is a cut in benefits for millions:
According to the Social Security Trustees, the Social Security Trust Fund will be able to pay full benefits until 2037, and incoming payroll taxes will be sufficient to pay about 78 percent of benefits thereafter. Some are using this modest gap in long-term funding as a pretext to justify proposals for large cuts in Social Security benefits. One frequently-discussed change to Social Security is to increase the age at which a retiree receives full benefits.
For most workers, increasing the full retirement age, which currently is 66, will result in a cut in benefits. This is especially true for seniors who take early retirement at age 62. For these seniors, the Social Security benefit is currently reduced by 30 percent. But increasing that person's full retirement age to70, as some advocate, would result in a reduction in the benefit of about 45 percent.
http://www.ncpssm.org/...
As always in Mitt Romney's America someone else has to pay. How dare Americans expect folks like him, folks who have been given every break already and crashed our economy before being bailed out take responsibility for the problems they caused. In Mitt Romney's America only those who can least afford it should sacrifice:
Although economists and others have proposed raising Social Security's retirement age, such a dramatic change should not be made without considering what it will mean for millions of America's workers. It will mean especially deep cuts for those who can afford them least - lower income workers and those whose physically-demanding occupations make it impossible for them to work to age 70.
In Mitt Romney's America those who do the actual work don't count.
Of course there is another solution. One Mitt Romney and his ilk would never consider. Asking them to sacrifice for once for the good of our country as a whole:
Under current law, Social Security contributions and benefits are based on earnings that fall below an annual cap, which is $110,100 in 2012. In the past, the tax cap has been set at a level that covered about 90 percent of all earnings paid in covered employment. Currently, however, only about 83 percent of earnings are subject to the Social Security payroll tax. This erosion in covered earning largely stems from the fact that wages for the highest paid six percent of workers have been rising faster than wages for the vast majority of people who make less than the cap.
The extraordinary growth of income for those at the highest end of the wage scale was not anticipated by those who established the formulas that fund Social Security today. Wages for middle and lower income workers have remained stagnant for over a decade, while higher-wage workers have seen significant wage growth during that time. Restoring the tax cap to a level that would again cover 90 percent of earnings would reduce Social Security's long-term deficit over its 75 year solvency period by nearly one-third.
http://www.ncpssm.org/...
In other words Mitt Romney's America for the young means they get to work cradle to grave for low wages and then when their bodies are beaten and broken down they will get to find out that folks like Mitt Romney stole their Social Security to sit on their fat asses and get fatter.
I venture to guess this will be the America most young people vote against once again. I just hope enough of them show up to keep Mitt Romney's America from becoming a nighmarish reality.