http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/exposing-republican-partys-sleazy-playbook-destroy-social-security?akid=12779.294211.NLYGJL&rd=1&src=newsletter1031685&t=5
In one of its first actions, the Republican House of Representatives
of the 114th Congress, changed its rules to manufacture a Social
Security crisis.
GOP Representatives Tom Reed and Sam Johnson
introduced a procedural rule change, which was buried on page 30 of 32
in House Resolution 5. It forbids the House from transferring money
between the Social Security Retirement Fund and the Social Security
Disability Fund - a move that Congress has made 11 times in the past,
irrespective of which party was in control. The result is that the
Disability Fund, which is expected to run out of reserves next year,
cannot be helped using money from the Retirement Fund. Without this
“easy fix” - as the New York Times called it - recipients of Social
Security Disability will see a 19% cut in benefits.
At a glance,
this move by the GOP-led House seems irrational, cynical -
counterproductive. But if you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook - it
makes complete sense...
Odds
are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have
become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken
control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been
impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.
In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building
factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into
the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of
nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson
were mostly all dead by 2005, when Jude Wanniski died and George Gilder
celebrated the Reagan/Bush supply-side-created bubble economies in a
Wall Street Journal eulogy:"...Jude's charismatic focus on the tax on
capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four administrations. ...
[T]he capital-gains tax has come erratically but inexorably down --
while the market capitalization of U.S. equities has risen from roughly a
third of global market cap to close to half. ... These many trillions
in new entrepreneurial wealth are a true warrant of the worth of his
impact. Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a
profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold
must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously
defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the
Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the
stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize."
In reality, his tax cuts
did what they have always done over the past 100 years – they initiated a
bubble economy that would let the very rich skim the cream off the top
just before the ceiling crashed in on working people. The Republicans
got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty
years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's
representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came
into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today.
Next
year, when the Disability Trust Fund runs out of money, the GOP’s plan
is for force Democrats to become the anti-Santa, yet again. If Congress
does nothing because the “easy fix” is unavailable due the Republican
rule change, Disability Santa will take a 19% cut.
Reed said of
his rule change, “Anyone who cares about finding a fair solution for
both the catastrophically disabled who depend on SSDI and senior
citizens who depend on Social Security knows that
we must find a long-term solution which
protects both of them rather than a short term band aid which threatens
them both.” It is clear that the GOP plan is to use this unnecessary,
manufactured crisis as an opening to “reform” Social Security -
translated: cut and privatize. Thus, forcing Democrats to become the
Social Security anti-Santa a different way.
When this happens,
Democrats must remember Jude Wanniski - and accept neither the cut to
disability payments, nor the entree to Social Security “reform”They must
demand the the House rule be changed back, and that the fix used many
times in the past, be used again.
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