SW's Energy Gap: "Everyone knows, or should know that there is one simple fix for social security that will assure that it can meet all the promised obligations to everyone who is now alive. That is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax.
Right now, as you read this Republicans are out there blatantly lying about this. They are saying that eliminating the cap 'only buys you seven years'. This is a lie. A blatant, bald faced lie.
When you eliminate the cap, it puts off the point in time where we start to draw down the trust fund for seven years. But this should never ever be the criteria for the wisdom of a particular plan. Why? Because you and I and everyone who has been paying into the system for the past twenty years have been paying in more than is needed, precisely because there will come a time where we have to draw down on this surplus in order to take care of the boomers. That is why we generated this surplus in the first place. So that we could meet our obligations. To say that the very fact of drawing down the surplus is undesirable is to say that we have been scammed over the past twenty years. That we paid into this kitty, only to have George Bush use it to reward his wealthy campaign contributors with disproportionate tax cuts.
That's what Republicans are saying when they say that eliminating the cap will only solve the problem for seven years. They are implicitly saying that they intend to use the trust fund to off set their tax cuts, not for its intended purpose of dealing with the demographic bulge that is the boomer generation.
The social security trustees say that eliminating the cap will keep the system solvent for the next seventy five years. Does that mean that in seventy five years there will be a problem? No. They only project out for seventy five years. So eliminating the cap will completely solve the social security problem of the future. The reason the Republicans are forced to lie about this point is that their extremist anti-tax zealots will simply not consider the one option that makes the most sense. And if they try to buck these zealots, their entire coalition falls apart.
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