Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The proposed cuts to Social Security

Well, here's the article:

President Obama's Big Deal: Cuts for Social Security, But No Taxes for Wall Street by Dean Baker

And here's the part that really caught my attention:

The average Social Security check is about $1,100 a month. This would be less than an hour's pay for many of the Wall Street honchos whose greed and incompetence brought down the economy.

Yet, when President Obama preaches equality of sacrifice, it is the elderly and the poor who are supposed to do most of the sacrificing. His plan to change the annual cost-of-living adjustment formula for Social Security would reduce benefits for someone in their seventies by 3 percent, in their eighties by 6 percent and in their nineties by 9 percent.

These are huge cuts. The Republicans are screaming bloody murder because President Obama wants to raise the top tax rate by 4.6 percentage points. Imagine that he proposed raising taxes on the wealthy by twice as much. That is effectively what he is proposing for people in their nineties who are entirely dependent on Social Security.


What can I say? It's just horrible.
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