"As it turns out, pension funds, now (1995) worth more than $5 trillion in the United States alone, have served as a forced savings pool that has financed capital investments for more than 40 years. In 1992, pension funds accounted for 74% of net individual savings, more than one-third of all corporate equities and nearly 40% of all corporate bonds. Pension assets exceed the assets of commercial banks and make up nearly one-third of the total financial assets of the U.S. economy. In 1993, pension funds made new investments of between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. If companies continue to marginalize their work forces and let large numbers of employees go, the capitalist system will slowly collapse on itself as it is drained of the pension funds necessary for new capital investments.
http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/art/rifkin02.htmWell, for the past 12 years, companies HAVE continued marginalizing their work forces with mass layoffs and dropping both healthcare and pension benefits.
Saving social security will require the realization by the richest one and a half percent, Bush's base, that their financial survival --along with that of the current capitalist system--will require that they pay more into that financial asset fund in order to keep the entire system from collapsing on itself.
The cap of $97,500 on SS taxation being removed can save the system; the Medicare for all that is coming, and cannot be denied, will also require more money along with the NON-PROFIT status of hospitals and participants...the Third Sector that Rifkin promotes in his writings. This is what has 'saved' capitalism at every turn in the past. It will do so again.
David Lindorff's article,
A New Campaign of Lies
The Assault on Social Security
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff02032005.htmlshows us that..."Tomorrow's senior lobby won't feel constrained by current law, which makes workers foot half the bill (we're talking about their own kids, after all!). We can thus expect to see more of the tax burden shifted onto employers. We can also expect to see future Congresses pressured into passing reforms that will remove the income cap on the Social Securities tax. (And here's something the president has not told people: if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, currently set at $90,000 in wages, were eliminated so all income was subject to the tax, there would be no shortfall in the trust fund--not in 2042, not in 2075, never.) We can also expect to see private pensions made fully portable, so that employers can't pocket years of contributions every time they let go workers before they are "vested." As well, we can probably also expect to see a movement to expand Medicare from a niggardly program that only barely covers the medical care of the elderly, to a full-fledged national healthcare program that covers everyone."
The corporate world is scared, but these are problems they've gambled on by offshoring jobs to countries without pension or healthcare systems, see the July 2004 article The Benefits Trap,
The Benefits Trap
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_29/b3892001_mz001.htm"Why are retirees being left out in the cold? An unsavory brew of factors have come together to put stress on the retirement system like never before. First, there's the simple fact that Americans are living longer in retirement, and that costs more. Next come internal corporate issues, including soaring health-care costs and long-term underfunding of pension promises. Perhaps most important, in the global economy, long-established U.S. companies are competing against younger rivals here and abroad that pay little or nothing toward their workers' retirement, giving the older companies a huge incentive to dump their plans. "
They've offshored jobs to their 'competition', ahem, their own corporate subsidiaries, and then said to the US workers "we can't compete with those lower wage workers so we're dropping your pension and healthcare benefits". The management and shareholders all make out well. But it can't last and they know it.
We know it too and now we're getting wise to the game.
(As an aside, kudos to Jeremy Rifkin as one of the instigators of the Winter Soldier investigations during the Vietnam war)
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