It has been almost a week since the President gave his pre-game pep talk about creating jobs and stimulating the economy and the silence from the media on some aspects of his proposal is deafening.
According to reports I read about the contents of the speech from the major media, President Obama included an interesting proposal for a tax cut. He wants to further reduce the amount of money which is being withheld from employees paychecks and the amount that companies have to pay in also. Only thing is, he is not proposing to cut the income tax, but the tax that is paid into Social Security. The plan calls for increasing and extending the FICA tax cut and providing the tax cut to employers. The tax rate, which used to be 6.2% has been reduced to 4.1% and would be further reduced to 3.6% by the President’s plan. Sounds good, right? Unless you are one of the millions of U.S. Taxpaying Citizens who have been paying into what you thought was Social Security for your entire adult life and are now worried because the current Social Security system will be bankrupt within a decade or two at it’s current pace.
Where does it make sense of any kind to reduce the amount of money ostensibly being collected for Social Security when Social Security doesn’t have enough money now? Is this the place to be making a tax cut? Especially when it is going to be offset by raising taxes in other areas? Isn’t this just the President and his party saying keep your eyes on my right hand and don’t look at our left hands that’s reaching into your wallet and taking more money out. Reminds me of a bully telling a little kid, “Here! Take this shining nickel and I’ll take that ugly piece of green paper with the 1 on it.”
On the bright side, if we had honest reporting in the major media, they would be reporting that the truth is now out. The truth being that collecting FICA taxes for Social Security is really just a sham because the money goes into the general treasury and therefore into the greedy hands of politicians waiting to pay for their own pork barrel projects or to buy more votes by funding wasteful “entitlement programs”. But the mainstream biased media (whether left or right, biased is biased), is not going to report this. The same media that jumps to report anything even vaguely hinting at impropriety of individual government officials will not report on the constant theft of public trust which is how Social Security is operated now.
My point? Just a few decades back, the money collected as FICA taxes were placed in a Social Security Trust Fund that was NOT a part of the general treasury. The Social Security Trust Fund was healthy to the point that it was collecting considerable more each year than it was paying out. This created a surplus which was good. The bad part was that politicians saw all that money just sitting there earning interest and said, “Wow, If we could just borrow some of that money we could fund more entitlement programs and buy more votes… err, fund more important government projects.” Problem was they really had no intention of paying Social Security back. They just kept writing vouchers which might as well have been written on toilet paper because that was about how useful they were. From my understanding, not a single penny has ever been paid back to the Social Security Trust Fund and now so much is owed that the government can’t afford to pay it back.
So what did they do? Started counting collected FICA taxes as part of the general budget so they didn’t have to “borrow” from the Social Security Trust Fund. Sure, some money was going into the trust fund but not enough to create a surplus. And then something interesting that apparently no one could foresee happened. More people started retiring and collecting Social Security. So it really isn’t the politicians fault, it’s all of you greedy old people who actually want some of the money you have been paying in for 40 or 50 years back. I mean, you may have thought the premise of Social Security was for you to pay a part of every paycheck when you were working and then when you turned 65 the government would start paying you back with a monthly check. No. You were wrong. The Social Security which you thought was something you earned by paying into it all those years is now considered as an expendable “entitlement” program by our politicians. Why? They need the votes and you’re getting old. They want younger voters. They want the votes of those who don’t work and are on real entitlement programs.
Let’s face it, we are facing an economic crisis of our politicians making. I blame it on the politicians because the economic could have been prevented by taking simple steps 30 or 40 years ago. The first thing that should have been done is a more thorough federal investigation into the ties between the major unions and organized crime. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-union. I believe unions were necessary to force companies to pay decent living wages and provide basic benefits to their employees. Where things went wrong was when kept demanding higher and higher wages (so they could collect more and more union dues) without considering that there was going to be an eventual tipping point where employees costs would be so high that business owners were left with only two choices; 1. pay higher wages, raise the cost to the consumer and then go bankrupt because the consumer couldn’t afford the product, or 2. Move the manufacturing jobs to other countries where the labor costs would be one-tenth or less of US wages so they can stay in business and sell their products.
So what did our politicians do. Nothing. They weren’t about to challenge the unions and lose those important cash election campaign donations or endorsements which would insure reelections. And then they did something worse than nothing. The passed NAFTA which made it easier for major manufacturing companies to move their factories to countries with lower payroll costs. And let’s not forget all the foreign countries given “favored nations” status which made it easier and cheaper for them to import goods to this country. You want to know why there is high unemployment in this country? It’s because politicians have paved the way for all the manufacturing jobs to move overseas. You want to know why we have a budget crisis? It’s because the politicians won’t stop giving taxpayer dollars to foreign countries who give us nothing in return but hatred. It’s because the politicians won’t close some of the tax loopholes that American companies receive while they close plants and move manufacturing overseas. It’s because the politicians won’t raise the tariffs on all goods manufactured in other countries and imported into the US until it makes more sense for the companies to build plants in the United States.
It’s because the politicians are so afraid of special interest groups that they pass laws and regulations that go as far as preventing companies from building manufacturing plants and industries in this country. Look at how many oil workers are still unemployed since the BP spill because the current administration refuses to issue the permits so that they can go back to work. Look at all the identified natural resources in this country that can’t be touched because politicians have bent over behind the collective rear ends of special interest groups.
This country could be saved if the politicians would be willing to stand up and make some had professional decisions for the good of this country. They won’t though, they are more concerned with keeping the money and support flowing into their campaign coffers.
My final question is, “Where is the media coverage?” In my opinion, the media is not reporting this because the media is no longer objective and serving the public interest. At one time, people working in the media objectively reported the news. Now the media has agendas. Depending on whether the people in charge are liberal or conservative, the news that the general public receive is slanted either liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. While no one in the media will admit to it, all reporters have the belief that they are smarter than the general public. The know because it has been written by those above them, that their job isn’t to report the news, it is to tell us dummies what the news is and what it means.
We are not smart enough to be given the facts and then left to form our own opinions. We have to be told what our opinions should be. We have to be told that only liberal democrats are smart enough to run this country. We have to be told that republicans are mean spirited and want only to rob the poor and give to the rich. We have to be told that collecting the money for Social Security and then using it to fund welfare programs and numerous other entitlement programs that are being abused by illegal immigrants is a good thing. We have to be told that we have a moral obligation to send more money over to Third World countries that hate us because we have more than they do.
If we were all smart, liberal college educated citizens we would know that socialism is the only way to live.
Frankly, we haven’t seen unbiased, objective reporting since the early 1960s when liberal college professors started teaching their political views instead of the subjects they were supposed to be teaching.
No. That may be too harsh. I think objective reporting has always been an ideal which has rarely been obtained.
