When I read this I thought it was snark from The Onion or The Daily Show. Nope, it's real. How do you spoof people like this? It's like calling somebody with a swastika tattooed on his forehead a Nazi. Hyperbole becomes impossible.
I had no idea Grandpa Simpson had become a senator!
http://www.politico.com/...
Alan Simpson might need to freshen up on his pop culture.
The co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission tried to scold the elderly on Monday for complaining about their Social Security funds being targeted, but instead he found himself making a reference to “Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg.”
“This is a fakery,” Simpson said on Fox News. “If they care at all about their children or grandchildren, and sometimes I doubt that – I think, you know, grandchildren now don’t write a thank-you for the Christmas presents, they’re walking on their pants with the cap on backwards listening to the enema man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg, and they don’t like them!”
The former Republican senator of Wyoming, who apologized in the summer for comparing Social Security with “a milk cow with 310 million tits,” also denied that his panel had proposed privatizing Social Security. “It is fakery,” he repeated. “We never suggested that!”
More from Simpson: He said the public should stop using the word “cut” in discussing Social Security, warning that younger generations have more at stake than they might think.
“The sinful nature of the discourse is ‘cutting’ Social Security,” he said. “We’re not cutting Social Security – we’re trying to make the stuff solvent for 75 years! And young people say, ‘Well, I know there won’t be anything there for me; I’m not worried about it.’ Well, I tell ya, when you waddle up to the window at 65 and you put 6.2 percent of all your jack in that thing, you’re gonna want something back!”
He then yelled at some kids to get off his lawn! For my 2¢, we should be increasing SS benefits, not cutting them. A simple, and mostly painless, restructuring of the system could accomplish this. This is from Wikipedia
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities states that three-quarters of taxpayers pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.[5] The FICA tax is considered a regressive tax on income (with no standard deduction or personal exemption deduction) and is imposed (for the years 2009 and 2010) only on the first $106,800 of gross wages. The tax is not imposed on investment income (such as interest and dividends).
So, in other words, if we lifted, or raised, the $106,800 limit on the SS tax, or imposed it on investment income, then SS would be flush with cash. We could increase the payout, and decrease the retirement age, and keep SS solvent forever.