Say No to Keystone XL in Creative Ways

Credit to Blue Virginia.

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GOP House to the Disabled: Go To Hell

One of the problems with electing anti-government ideologues is that they don't know how to govern. Taking the GOP at it's word, they don't want Social Security funds to be used for other bailouts. In practice and reality though, their new rules are going to screw over the disabled in this country. From Off the Charts Blog:

I’ve explained that a new House rule will make it harder to reapportion payroll taxes between Social Security’s retirement and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds to avert a one-fifth cut in benefits to severely impaired DI recipients in late 2016.  In a revealing statement, co-sponsor Representative Tom Reed (R-NY) says the change is designed to prevent Congress from “raiding Social Security to bail out a failing federal program.”  He’s doubly wrong.

First, far from “failing,” DI has grown mostly in response to well-understood demographic and program factors like the aging of the baby boom, and the program’s trustees have long anticipated the need to replenish the trust fund next year, as I noted yesterday.  Second, DI isn’t distinct from Social Security; it’s an essential part of Social Security.

Social Security is much more than a retirement program.  It pays modest but guaranteed benefits when someone with a steady work history dies, retires, or becomes severely disabled.  A young person starting a career today has a one-third chanceof dying or qualifying for DI before reaching Social Security’s full retirement age  (see graph, excerpted from our DI chart book).

Though they might not even know it, more than 150 million workers have earned DI protection through their payroll tax contributions in case they suffer a severe, long-lasting medical impairment.  Nearly 9 million of them, mostly in their 50s and 60s, receive disabled-worker benefits from DI.  In fact, most DI recipients are close to or past Social Security’s early-retirement age of 62.

I'd love to know if Congressman Reed is saying all of Social Security is a failing program, or just the disability insurance program. Either way, he has no idea what he's talking about, and the result here will be cuts to orphans, 55 year old workers suffering from a chronic injury, and widows. The DI program is a part of the overall Social Security program, so I'm also unsure why he thinks he's not making cuts to Social Security. For that matter, he's screwing 1/3 of our work-force with his stupid move.

Republicans haven't been in charge of Congress 48 hours and they are seeking to destroy Social Security already with their new rules package. The end result is simple- the GOP House is telling the disabled to go to hell.

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Being Successful Has It's Drawbacks

I forget where I got this, but it was on Google, so my apologies.

The recession of 2007-2009 is over. Yes, over. Now I know that it might not always feel like it, and maybe the recovery is a little less than perfect, but it happened. President Obama took the reigns of power at a time when our economy was crashing, millions were losing jobs and homes, and we honestly thought the banks might completely collapse. It was a scary time. Couple with that a nation where 40 million didn't have health insurance, we were in two wars, and the deficit was exploding, and it was a tough time in our nation's history. We have largely moved passed that. Today we're talking about issues light income inequality and real wages, a largely fringe group of terrorists thousands of miles away from America, the Afghanistan War is ending, and the deficit has been cut in half in relation to GDP. As Joe Biden likes to say, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and GM is alive.

What's President Obama's reward? A brand-new Republican Congress where the debates will be over the Keystone XL Pipeline, whether or not he should be impeached, how much corporate taxes should go down, what parts of his health care law should go out the door first, what he covered up in Benghazi, and how high the electric wall on the Southern Border should be built. If we learned one thing in this administration, it's that results don't bring about party victories anymore. Eight years ago at this time we were celebrating a new Democratic Majority in both houses of Congress, and in state houses everywhere. Maybe people don't like having it good?

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