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