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Trojan Horse In Clinton's Pledge to "Enhance" Social Security: Conservative Means Testing
Last edited Tue Mar 1, 2016, 01:01 PM - Edit history (1)
A Trojan Horse In Clinton’s Pledge To “Enhance” Social Security?
Isaiah J. Poole
Unless you listened carefully, you might have missed the expanse of daylight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders when asked about their plans for Social Security at the CNN Democratic debate Tuesday.
It’s a gap that is alarming people who are fighting to protect and strengthen Social Security – just as the program is getting renewed attention because of today’s expected announcement that Social Security recipients won’t be receiving a cost-of-living adjustment in their checks in 2016.
Clinton was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether “Senator Sanders’ plan to expand Social Security” was “something that you would support.”
“Well, I fully support Social Security,” Clinton began. “And the most important fight we’re going to have is defending it against continuing Republican efforts to privatize it.”
Case closed? Not quite. Bash pressed on: “Do you want to expand it?”
That yes-or-no question got neither. “I want to enhance the benefits for the poorest recipients of Social Security,” she said, singling out “particularly widowed and single women” who didn’t make a lot of money during their careers. “I will focus on helping those people who need it the most,” she concluded.
What alarmed Social Security activists is that underneath Clinton’s positive language – “fully support,” “enhance” – appears to lie support for policies, including from leading conservatives like Pete Peterson – that would actually undermine Social Security.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Ways and Means Committee chairman who is being wooed to take over as House speaker, was broadly attacked for proposing a plan that singled out Social Security’s “poorest recipients” for protection.
Ryan proposed “progressive price indexing” that would reduce benefits for the top 70 percent of wage earners while maintaining benefits for the bottom 30 percent. When Ryan first proposed this in 2010, coupling this with a plan to divert Social Security funds into stock market accounts, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that “the result would be a system in which Social Security is very unattractive to affluent people … These changes would risk undermining the broad-based support that Social Security now enjoys.” Douglas Elmendorf, the former Congressional Budget Office director who will be dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, this week proposed a Social Security plan that was less radical than Ryan but along the lines of what Clinton seemingly would support.
“I would not increase Social Security benefits across the board, as some have advocated, because I think scarce federal resources should be used in more targeted ways,” he wrote. “Instead, we should focus on reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for high-income beneficiaries and raising payroll taxes on workers with high earnings.”
Elmendorf’s plan is a left-right hybrid. Progressive advocates for Social Security have argued in favor of lifting the cap – currently about $117,000 – on the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes.
Some conservatives have questioned whether wealthy people should get the same retirement benefit as a retired low-wage worker, and several Republican presidential candidates have called for means-testing Social Security much like other assistance programs.
Even Donald Trump, who has been outspoken in protecting Social Security benefits for working-class people, embraces cutting benefits for the wealthy. “I have friends that are worth hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and get Social Security. They don’t even know the check comes in,” he said at a New Hampshire forum earlier this week.
Lynn Stuart Parramore wrote in 2012 that she understood why “well-intentioned liberals” end up embracing Social Security policies that would treat the “vulnerable” differently from everyone else.
But she warned that these schemes are “a sneak attack on vital programs meant to weaken and eventually destroy them” and “a highly effective political strategy for getting liberals and progressives to act against their own values and interests.”
Chief among her arguments are the point that Social Security benefits are not “handouts to the needy.” They are “benefits that people pay for as they work. They are also smart social insurance programs that spread risk across society in order to protect everyone at rates no private insurance scheme, with its much smaller risk pool, could touch.”
Like your insurance policy, when you file a claim the size of the check you receive is not based on your income or net worth; it’s based on the amount of coverage you purchased. Car insurance companies that paid less in claims to Mercedes owners, presumably because they are wealthier than owners of a working-class Chevy Cruze, would lose high-end customers – and eventually would collapse.
snip
https://ourfuture.org/20151015/a-trojan-horse-in-clintons-pledge-to-enhance-social-security
more here:
When she was running for president in 2008, she endorsed in at least three debates the idea of a bipartisan commission in which she would have few red lines.
In a September 2007 MSNBC debate, Clinton held up the 1983 bipartisan deal between President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill as a model for how Social Security’s long-term solvency problems needed to be addressed. That was the deal that gave us the increase in the retirement age from 65 to 66 now and 67 by 2027, as well as an increase in the payroll tax.
“I think we do need another bipartisan process,” she said at the time. “You described what happened in ’83. It took presidential leadership, and it took the relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill to reach the kind of resolution that was discussed.”
She also put a heavy emphasis on “fiscal responsibility.” Specifically responding to a question of whether she would support lifting the cap that now exempts earned income above about $118,000 from Social Security payroll taxes, Clinton said, “Well, I take everything off the table until we move toward fiscal responsibility and before we have a bipartisan process. I don’t think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president. You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with.”
Her comments were very much in the spirit of a deal that President Bill Clinton almost pulled off with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. As recalled by author Steven Gillon in the book, “The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation,” both Clinton and Gingrich “were closer than anyone realized” to a deal that would have radically changed Social Security as we know it. “They both believed that any effort to update Social Security would require government to incorporate some measure of choice, and that meant some form of privately managed account,” he wrote. “… In the House, Clinton hoped to bypass the party’s liberal leadership and reassemble the coalition of suburban “New Democrats,” who tended to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and “Blue Dogs,” largely rural, southern conservative Democrats, who passed the balanced budget bill. …. Just weeks before the State of the Union address, the administration started signaling that it would support some form of privatization. ‘Given that we have to work with the Republicans, it’s hard to see a plan passing without some individual account piece,’ a Clinton adviser told Business Week.”
Hillary Clinton’s stance at the time, combined with her husband’s willingness to move toward Social Security privatization, earned plaudits from people like Steve LaTourette, a former Republican congressman who is now president and CEO of the centrist Main Street Partnership. In a 2015 interview with Eleanor Clift for the Daily Beast, LaTourette said, “The appeal she has to me—and I’m not a big Hillary fan—is she would make those choices her husband was about to make.”
In a September 2007 MSNBC debate, Clinton held up the 1983 bipartisan deal between President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill as a model for how Social Security’s long-term solvency problems needed to be addressed. That was the deal that gave us the increase in the retirement age from 65 to 66 now and 67 by 2027, as well as an increase in the payroll tax.
“I think we do need another bipartisan process,” she said at the time. “You described what happened in ’83. It took presidential leadership, and it took the relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill to reach the kind of resolution that was discussed.”
She also put a heavy emphasis on “fiscal responsibility.” Specifically responding to a question of whether she would support lifting the cap that now exempts earned income above about $118,000 from Social Security payroll taxes, Clinton said, “Well, I take everything off the table until we move toward fiscal responsibility and before we have a bipartisan process. I don’t think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president. You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with.”
Her comments were very much in the spirit of a deal that President Bill Clinton almost pulled off with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. As recalled by author Steven Gillon in the book, “The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation,” both Clinton and Gingrich “were closer than anyone realized” to a deal that would have radically changed Social Security as we know it. “They both believed that any effort to update Social Security would require government to incorporate some measure of choice, and that meant some form of privately managed account,” he wrote. “… In the House, Clinton hoped to bypass the party’s liberal leadership and reassemble the coalition of suburban “New Democrats,” who tended to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and “Blue Dogs,” largely rural, southern conservative Democrats, who passed the balanced budget bill. …. Just weeks before the State of the Union address, the administration started signaling that it would support some form of privatization. ‘Given that we have to work with the Republicans, it’s hard to see a plan passing without some individual account piece,’ a Clinton adviser told Business Week.”
Hillary Clinton’s stance at the time, combined with her husband’s willingness to move toward Social Security privatization, earned plaudits from people like Steve LaTourette, a former Republican congressman who is now president and CEO of the centrist Main Street Partnership. In a 2015 interview with Eleanor Clift for the Daily Beast, LaTourette said, “The appeal she has to me—and I’m not a big Hillary fan—is she would make those choices her husband was about to make.”
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She's a DANCER!
This shit just gets sillier and sillier.
The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the scam for Pinochet:
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.
“The mother of all reforms”
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”
But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
It's like grand tragedy and grand theft America, reading this stuff. Then I cry, too, until I remember where they all are going.
