Update: people have questioned the raising of Social Security payroll taxes back to a 90% level. I have to confess I only have the quote they gave us:
When Social Security was established, about 92% of all earnings were subject to the payroll tax. As incomes rose over time, that figure gradually fell until, in 1977, Congress changed the law in order to restore taxable earnings back to about 90%. More recently, as incomes for those at the top have risen rapidly the share of total earnings subject to the payroll tak had fallen to about 80% by 2007.
Move On pointed me to an America Speaks Town Hall meeting that is part of the Deficit Reduction Committee work. It was funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, who it is said, put in a Billion with a B for these meetings. Peterson came out of the Nixon administration. I have heard that he is a hedge fund trader, but I couldn't verify that.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation also donated.
This meeting was coordinated with other meetings across the nation and the hosting was done from Philadelphia.
I had some preconceptions going in and a lot of surprises during.
The Overland Park, KS meeting was held at the Johnson County Library. I was greeted outside by Social Security Works group and a La Rouche guy, the latter I blew off. The former I picked up a sheet with some info on it pointing to Social Security Works and The Voice of Midlife and Older Women and Social Security Matters. I had received a card from the organizers that pointed me to USA Budget Discussion Website. There is a video there on the debt and deficit but I have to confess that after a few moments I gave it up as propaganda. And I truly thought most of the day would be propaganda. Mostly I was turned off by the idea that the deficit would balloon so alarmingly from here on out unless something drastic is down. I feel very strongly that some of the powers that be are trying to push the end of medicare and social security by using the current meltdown figures to scare people.
Our metro complex is big and encompasses both the Kansas and the Missouri sides of state line and our table consisted of people from all over this area. There were a couple of guys who had tax t shirts on, one stating he was "FairTax" and the other apparently was a tbagger who just didn't like government or taxes. One of the other guys pointed out his dissonance with the attitude that government was good with giving him social security and medicare but bad for anything else. I had lumped the two tax guys together in my mind but as we talked more I realized how different they were.
There was a younger woman who said she had been in a wave of 5000 people laid off from a telecom company. I was tempted to tell her that I had been in a much earlier wave but I didn't. Another younger woman (everybody is younger than me so just assume it is true about all of them except maybe for the white guy who hates government and whose mantra was "you're gonna chase business away from the USA if you do that!") (as I was saying) another yong woman was an entrepreneur. There were other liberals as well at the table - an architect and a lawyer. One fellow from Angola was there, and he left after the sandwich and a fellow who was a financial adviser who was definitely a conservative who left even before the sandwich. They had speakers from the three foundations all emphasizing how terrible and horrible and very bad the deficit and the debt are. But the sound went out on the third guy. We had some technical marvels - a response card about the size of a credit card with about 12 buttons that we used to vote with and of course, the fact that we could hear people from the other cities as they were cued up. Somehow the response card sent data to some pick up point and they could tally the responses pretty much the next 2-5 minutes. And they had the report ready for us as we left the meeting this evening.
From their response polling it looks as if we were pretty well representative of the USA except we had fewer Latinos and the two lowest income strata (50K and under) was underrepresented by a combined 10 points and 9 of those points were coming from the upper two income categories (75k-over 100K) in our group with the 10th added to the middle range.
This thing was scripted all to hell and back with their ideas about what should be cut and/or added and we had very little time to even think much about the answers so the exercise became a math game for some like me. Then we came together as a table and tried to agree on items. We did, in fact, come up with cuts and revenue adds that took it to the 1.2 trillion savings for 2025 but then we again voted separately with the little response cards and I think we must have pretty much gone back to our own ideas. I wonder if they thought group think would move us closer?
If you take their notion of getting to the items that garner over 50%, our response card exercise netted these options:
Raise age for receiving full benefits to 69 years of age saving $37 billion.
Raise limit on taxable earnings to 90% of total earnings in America (Some wanted to make this 100%) saving $67 billion
Reduce defense spending 15% (there were those (including our table) that wanted to reduce defense spending 50%) saving $132 billion.
Create an extra $5 tax for people making over a million a year Saving $34 Billion
Raise the top corporate tax to 40% from 35% Saving$68 billion.
Limit Corporate depreciation for equipment. Saving $100 billion. Carbon tax and a tax on securities transactions also made the over 50% Saving $186 billion and $30 billion respectively. And one could argue that there was over 50% support for reducing spending on Medicare and Medicaid and for reducing non-defense budgetary items. The percentages were not agreed upon, but 5% in both cases would save $100 billion and $68 billion respectively.
This is not bad but it only nets 720 billions in savings and not the hoped for 1.2 trillion that this group wanted us to reach.
There was a proposal to reform the tax code but few particulars were given other than deductions and credits would be eliminated to a "significant" extent and no one at our table had much trust in the proposition. There was no discussion of progressive rates either. There was support in our ad hoc comments for progressive taxation. They showed quite significant savings for these proposals and couched them in terms of use 90% to lower tax rates and use 10% for deficit reduction bumping the percentages to 70% tax reduction and 30% deficit reduction. The later was touted to save $618 billion and the former $206 billion. One might be steered towards this for the value added tax $399 billion savings if one couldn't bring oneself to make cuts or up payroll taxes for Social Security and medicare. But 50% wanted none of the tax code reform and the VAT only got 27%.
I've tried to be realistic about this. On the surface it looks very much on the up and up. They have shown us, via our little response chips, that we are a representative group of some 3500 people. On the other hand, we handed them an enormous amount of information about us (gender, ethnicity, age, income) and our viewpoints (liberal to conservative to independent spectrum) and where we would come down on any of the tax or spend issues. And they have shared that information with us. We, OTH, knew they were mostly conservative (Alice Rivlin and Sen. Kent Conrad were who they picked to address us from the so-call democratic side.) They spent a bunch of money in equipment, they paid the table moderators $100 bucks (ours was an older woman (but younger than me!) who was skilled in arbitrating.
I think, however, that the powers that be will use the information, not in a good way, but will use it to frame the issues. I think people are damn sick and tired of the debt and deficit mantra, and I think they are concerned about current events and they want acknowledgment from the President and the Congress that we do, in fact, care and that we are, in fact, watching events unfold. Where we differ as a people is how much kool aid we swallow watching FOX and listening to Rush or taking in smaller doses from the rest of the handicapped media. BUT as an electorate we seem to be able to take all sorts of dissonance and run with it regardless. Frightening thought, but we also seem to be capable of being polite.
But there did seem to be a very real appetite in the attendees for putting animosity aside and rolling up our sleeves for some very real work. We could not brainstorm during this process and brainstorming might have pointed up more of our differences. We could add some things if the table agreed. The format could work for brainstorming. And I think people would enjoy it very much. Which may be the real insidious part to this. We may feel that we have actually had some input when all we really have done is showing what buttons we want pushed.