Monday, November 23, 2009

New Deal 2009: Social Security

“Looting Social Security” Page 1
By: William Greider

This article says that the changes that the government is trying to pass will greatly affect social security. This article claims that, “The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits”. While the article says that Obama has been very good at keeping his constituents informed on what’s happening in Washington, it also states that Obama is messing around with the conservative advocates. The author feels that social security will be a “defining test for ‘new policies’ in the Obama era”. He says that the only way to protect social security funds from the over; greedy Wall Street investors is for the people to stand up and voice that they want their social security money. It is stated that if the people raise their voices, Congress will listen and makes changes to benefit the people. The current increase in funding for Social Security has come from higher taxes. The reason for this tax raise is because the government has already spent the money that the people had paid previously and the government needs more, so they tax the people more. Every time that the government borrowed money from the Social Security safe hold, they had a legal obligation to pay the money back, but the only way to pay it back is to earn more and the only way to “earn” more is to take it from the people. The article sums up to say that the government will not run out of social security money until 2041 if they continue on the path that they are on now. This is true, however, the article states that the government is expecting an increase in the number of people that will retire which is obviously run out the saved supply of money more fast.

I feel that this article is a very interesting viewpoint. I read the whole article but chose to only summarize the first page because I felt that it was the most relevant to the assignment. In my opinion, William Greider, isn’t really in touch with reality. Though this article was written in March, during the first two months of Obama’s administration, I still some of the points that Greider makes as odd. He claims that if the people rally up against Congress and demand that the Wall Street people cannot borrow their money, that they paid through taxes, to be used on risky investments. People, throughout history, have lobbied and spoken out against Congress on many topics, and in my personal opinion, there hasn’t been too much change. A good example would be the Bonus Army strike. The WWI veterans lobbied for their post war bonus, but the government under Hoover did not oblige and in fact used martial law to get the people out of the city. Even though the Hoover administration isn’t the best example of government at its finest, that does not subtract from the fact that just because the people rally, there will not necessarily be change.
The fact that the government would allow the safety deposits of Social Security to be tapped into is scary. The law states that whoever borrows money has a legal obligation to pay it back. The way the government pays the money back, since obviously the people who borrowed it can’t, is by taxing the people. The point of Social Security was to have people pay money to the government throughout their life so that when they retire, they would get an allowance. If the government just loans out this allowance this is an example of the government setting themselves up for failure. This is a prime example of the how the government is headed into another depression if they keep the illicit loaning up and then save themselves by taxing. Eventually, the people will not be able to pay taxes and the economy will fail. Social Security is a good idea, if the saved money could be protected.
This is a good example of how the view of social security has changed from a program that would benefit everyone who paid for it to a program that the government can just borrow money from and pay back by using the money. However, the money that they get back from the people, is higher taxes taxed to the people.

Web page address: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/greider

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

FDR's Message

. I think the message that FDR was trying to get across was that he wasn't going to be a president who just sat back, like a few before him. He wanted the people to know that he was going to do what it took to get laws passed, and make their lives better without overstepping his constitutional boundaries. In his inaugural speech, he stated that he would try and pass laws through congress and if congress did not approve of the laws, then he would rally the people to help persuade congress and also take the decision to a higher authority. He said that he would do all of this while remaining within his limits pre set by the constitution.

Some examples of his quick action were when he handled the banking crisis on March 5. He closed the bank so that the government could reorganize the weaker ones. In June, Congress created the FDC to guarantee that banks had deposits. He helped change the lives of the farmers by establishing the AAA to combat the depression in agriculture caused by the depression.

Everything that he did was to help the people of the United States deal with the depression and help to solve all of the problems they were facing. These problems not only included the threat of war, but also the money issues that every family was facing. He tried to establish safety nets to catch and then save the industries so that a depression would never happen again.

His messages was not that he would just go on a rampage and try to fix everything all at once, his message was just that he would try his best within his limits to be as productive as possible to try and help the American people better their lives as soon as they legally could.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Great Depression Parallel to Job Loss

I think that looking back at the Great Depression just puts everything into a much larger context for me. As students, most of us hear the media talking about the increase of job loss and the increase of the national deficit and hear about the various reforms and etc but I find that we don't really listen. After reading Introduction and Hard Times to Hooverville, I have really come to grasp just what these numbers and statistics mean. Take the statistic 9.8% and 10.2%. If you look at it as 10 pennies out of a dollar, it doesn’t seem like that much. If you actually pay attention to what the statistic is on and realize that the "pennies" are people and not just double digits, but double digits with about 4 zeros after, the severity of these statistics is shown in and emphasized in a brighter light.

To students, we live a very easy life. We wake up, go to school, text at lunch, facebook after school, eat dinner, ichat, then go to bed and wake up and do it all over again. To parents, a day consists of making sure that your children get to school, get picked up and fed, WHILE balancing a job and a marriage (if there is one). I think that reading the Great Depression shows that the people that lose their jobs aren't just poor people who didn’t go to school and don't work hard every day and live as law abiding citizens. These are people, mothers, dads, adults fresh out of college, etc. who are trying to live their own American dream, but can't because the economy is sinking.

The Great Depression informed me that the numbers aren't numbers that people fool around with to get you to donate money to charities that you just write off on taxes. This article also makes me look around and notice what is happening in the news and not only how all aspects of life were affected then, but how life is slowly changing now. There is definitely a parallel between the events leading up to the Great Depression and events that have happened in the past half century after the Great Depression. To say that the unemployment rate is the highest since 1983 should cause concern for all Americans. The article that I read says that the only way out is through government help and regulation, but this causes one to ask if the reason we are back in this situation of a recession again is because of poorly run and monitored regulation. This article causes the reader to ask if there needs to be more regulation or just reformed regulation and I think that if we sat back and compared the past to now and looked at the outcome of the Great Depression and the problems and successes following it, we might be able to come up with a better solution because adding to the deficit without a plan to pay it back seems like a disaster waiting to happen.