GOP Hates Seniors - Lie During Health Care Debates & Now Set Out to Attack Social Security

GOP Stacks Debt Panel with Foes of Retirement Security: The ‘Sock Our Seniors Six’

Alliance for Retired Americans President Barbara Easterling points out here that the Republican appointees to the debt commission have long voting records opposing retirement security.

Current and future retirees, alarmed by the extremist Republican members of Congress named to the newly created bipartisan commission to lower the federal budget deficit, have a name for this group: “Sock Our Seniors Six.”

These lawmakers repeatedly have voted to weaken Social Security and sell off Medicare to the big drug and insurance companies. They reflect the failed ideology that fueled George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s efforts to let Wall Street gamble away privatized Social Security on the roulette wheel of the stock market. One look at a recent 401(k) statement shows what dangerous folly that would have been.

The new panel members—Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.), Mike Crapo (Idaho) and Judd Gregg (N.H.) and Reps. Dave Camp (Mich.), Jeb Hensarling (Texas) and Paul Ryan (Wis.)—have a combined 6.5 percent average lifetime rating voting record, according to the analyses by the Alliance for Retired Americans. Criteria include key congressional votes on Social Security, Medicare and other issues affecting retirement security.

The recent appointees call into sharp question the objectivity of this panel, particularly when combined with former Sen. Alan Simpson, who recently was named the panel’s co-chairman. Simpson has referred to older Americans as “greedy geezers,” and as a senator, he wanted to lower Social Security benefits by changing the statistical formula used to calculate Cost-of-Living Adjustments.

The commission must examine the full range of tax-and-spend policies that led to these large deficits. Since 1983, American workers have paid enough Social Security payroll taxes to accumulate a $2.5 trillion surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund. We hope the commission will accurately point out the reckless fiscal decisions that got us to this point, and also reaffirm that Social Security and Medicare are two of our nation’s greatest success stories and have helped generations of seniors stay healthy and out of poverty.

Last week’s developments are an inauspicious start to this new commission. It is a reminder that Americans need to keep a close eye on this panel and stay educated and active on these important issues.

Social Security is Solid, Despite Recession

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Social Security Trust Fund Analysis: Need to Look at the Long
Term
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Social Security took in only $3 billion more in taxes last year
than it paid out in benefits - a $60 billion decline from 2008,
according to federal data.

The recession is blamed in part, as it added to the hundreds
of thousands of workers retiring or claiming disability. USA
Today, using Congressional Budget Office numbers, reports that
the impact of the recession is likely to reduce Social
Security revenues again this year and next.

The slide in revenues occurred sooner than Social Security
actuaries had expected, for several reasons: Payroll tax
revenue that was growing at a 4.5% average annual clip along
with wages flattened out in 2009 because of rising unemployment
and disappearing pay raises; the number of retired workers who
began taking benefits increased by 20%; those taking disability
jumped by 10%; and monthly Social Security benefits were raised
5.8% due to a spike in energy prices the year before.

Edward F. Coyle, Executive Director of the Alliance for Retired
Americans, responded, "The overall surplus of the Social
Security Trust Fund is still $2.5 trillion; this is not a
cataclysm. We must look at the financial picture of Social
Security as actuaries do, over the long-term, which would be
over a 75-year timeline. We cannot allow privatizers to use
temporary recessions - even deep ones - to ruin the system that
has worked for millions of seniors over several decades.