Social Security Round-Up for 2/28

The latest stories and commentary in the battle to save America’s most successful government program.

I’m writing a series of posts as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations.

(Okay, finally caught up on these, after this post, only new stories with my commentary added…)

*Nancy Altman: The GOP's Latest Plan to Undermine Social Security:

Imagine that you bought an insurance policy that guaranteed you $1,100 a month starting at age 62. When you tried to collect, you couldn’t reach an agent on the phone, so you went to the office during its business hours, but the office was closed. When you finally found a day when the office was open, the overwhelmed employees made you wait hours and then told you that you would have to wait longer than usual to start getting your first monthly check because the agency had decided to cut back its hours, even though it was running a profit.

This could happen to you. You have purchased a retirement insurance annuity, as well as life insurance and disability insurance, and have paid for all the associated administrative costs, through deductions from your paycheck, the ones labeled “FICA” or “Social Security.” Congress places a limit on what the Social Security Administration can spend, but the money is yours, deducted straight from your paychecks, solely for payment of Social Security’s promised benefits and associated administrative costs.

…

But the Republicans in the House of Representatives want to strip away $1.7 billion from the already underfunded agency, money that is needed simply to keep offices open. If the Republicans’ budget plan goes through, the entire agency, including all 1,300 field offices might have to close for a month. A letter in anticipation of this has already been sent out to all employees. The phones would not be answered, and claims processing would halt. Around 700,000 workers who had purchased annuities and paid for the overhead would be forced into a backlog. Even worse, given the well documented need to replace SSA’s aging computer system, the Republicans’ proposed cuts threaten the whole program, if the current system and its backup were to fail before the building of the new system, already behind schedule, were completed.

No business would take these steps with its most popular product. No one is claiming there is waste. To the contrary, SSA is extremely efficient, spending less that one penny of every dollar on administration, with the other 99 cents going for our benefits. A private corporation would love to have this level of efficiency. So why are the Republicans, who claim they want the government to be more like business, deliberately seeking to undermine its most successful product?

*Richard (RJ) Eskow: "Entitlement Reform" Is a Euphemism For Letting Old People Get Sick and Die:

George Orwell would be proud. The latest Washington catchphrase deserves a place of honor in the 1984 lexicon, right between “War Is Peace” and “Love Is Hate.” It’s a virus of the language that’s spreading faster than the stomach flu.

“The President’s budget punts on entitlement reform,” reads a statement by House Republicans. “Our budget will lead where the President has failed, and it will include real entitlement reforms.” “You have to do entitlement reforms if you are serious about this budget,” says Rep. Paul Ryan.

Reality check: Nobody’s proposing ‘entitlement reform.’ That term is a cloaking device for some very ugly intentions. It’s a meaningless manufactured phrase cooked up by some highly-paid consultant, and it diminishes the sum total of human understanding every time it’s used. The phrase is a euphemism for deep cuts to programs that are vital and even life-saving for millions of elderly and poor people, but it’s politically unpalatable to say that. So it became necessary to come up with yet another cognition-killing term designed to numb us from the human toll of our political actions. “Entitlement reform” is the new “collateral damage.”

But this time the collateral damage is us.

*FactCheck Gets It Wrong on Social Security and the Deficit | CEPR Blog:

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