That’s so republican.

In 2011:

Health Care Front Group Provides New Clothes for GOP Medicare Privatization Plan
By Wendell Potter on September 25, 2011 – 9:37pm

If you think Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare is dead, think again.

Last week, the insurance industry and its allies began what I predict will be a massive campaign to sell the public and policymakers on the idea of moving forward with the Ryan plan — albeit with a few tweaks and new a new sales pitch to make it seem more consumer-friendly.

An outfit called the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) announced in a press release a scheme that could be called Ryan-lite, but don’t be fooled: the plan would — to use a favorite industry term — take us down the “slippery slope” toward a complete corporate takeover of the Medicare program. (Insurers and their allies for years have warned Americans that enacting sweeping health care reforms they don’t like would lead us down the slippery slope toward socialism.)

After Ryan unveiled his Medicare privatization plan earlier this year, there was such widespread criticism that it briefly became a political liability for the Republicans.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives approved the plan, which would replace the existing Medicare program with vouchers that beneficiaries could use to buy coverage from private insurance. But Ryan’s blueprint never made it out of the Senate. It’s not hard to figure out why: the vouchers would have required most future Medicare recipients — many of whom like today’s recipients will be on fixed incomes — to pay far more out of their own pockets for coverage than in the existing government-run program.

I wrote at the time that the Ryan plan had the strong support of private health insurers, who would like nothing more than to have the federal government hand the Medicare program over to them. The congressman’s proposal would represent a vast new revenue stream guaranteeing profits forever….

You think you’d get more and better health care for your dollar under that system?

Today, via Twitter from Representative Vicky Hartzler (r), sworn enemy of affordable healthcare in the form of that evil socialist Obamacare and those other icky socialist health programs:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler
Honored to be named a “Champion of a Healthcare Innovation” by @HealthInFocus today at the #HLCExpo [….] 10:37 AM – 3 Nov 2015

Wait, the organization which gave Representative Hartzler (r) their “healthcare innovation” award is the same one that is shopping now Speaker Paul Ryan’s (r) bogus Medicare privatization scheme? How convenient. That’s like the Bank Robber’s Guild giving a bank teller their “Most Courteous and Efficient at Facilitating Large Withdrawals from a Depository” award.

Current and future Social Security beneficiaries, which is to say almost all of us, owe Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill our thanks – and that fact comes as a big surprise. In the past, McCaskill’s support for the program, measured by her actions at least, has been iffy. Her overweening desire to impress the boobwazie with her fiduciary chops has led her in directions that could have had disastrous consequences. She used to be one of the most vocal Democrats voicing support for the Republican ruse to “reform” entitlements such as Social Security- positions that she now seems to eschew, at least officially. Her ill-considered effort to enact a federal spending cap would  have had disastrous results for Social Security and Medicare, forcing what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities described as “draconian cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and many other programs while making it harder for the nation to recover from recession.”

Which is why my mouth dropped open when I heard that McCaskill was one of the senators who put pen to paper and signed a letter opposing the the first volley that the newly resurgent GOP has fired in the War on Social Security that has raged both covertly and overtly since the program was enacted:

After Republicans in the U.S. House voted to allow drastic cuts to Social Security benefits for millions of Americans with disabilities, including veterans and children, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill and several Senate colleagues have appealed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues in the Republican leadership, urging that they not pursue the measure.

The cuts, which could be as high as 20 percent, would impact nearly 250,000 Missourians with disabilities, their children, and their spouses.

“We are deeply concerned that the rule change in the House will impact millions of Social Security beneficiaries,” McCaskill and her colleagues wrote in the letter. “According to its actuaries, the Social Security Disability Trust Fund will be unable to pay full disability benefits starting as early as 2016, meaning that legislative action will be necessary to protect the benefits of nearly 11 million Americans. Instead of taking responsible action to address this issue, House Republicans acted according to their extreme ideology and put these benefits at risk by adopting a legislative rule change that creates a point of order against simple bipartisan technical corrections (called reallocations) to adjust the financing of the Social Security Disability Trust Fund.”

Joan McCarter at DailyKos succinctly describes the rule change that McCaskill refers to in the excerpt above as the first step in a ploy to decimate the program:

The 114th Congress has begun with a Republican party that is emboldened and as determined to cripple Social Security as they have been since President George W. Bush’s disastrous 2005 effort to privatize it. Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price has taken over the House Budget Committee from Rep. Paul Ryan, and has even bigger ambitions to destroy the program than his predecessor, now even talking about privatization, something Ryan would only extend to Medicare. Price told the Heritage Action for America “Conservative Policy Summit” on Monday that he wants to “begin to normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security.” By “normalize, he means cut it:

“[W]hether it’s means testing, whether it’s increasing the age of eligibility […] whether it’s providing much greater choices for individuals to voluntarily select the kind of manner in which they believe they ought to be able to invest their working dollars as they go through their lifetime.”

Price and his fellow Republicans in leadership have set the stage to begin this effort, and as usual did it with some hostage taking. This time the hostages are about 11 million people who receive Social Security disability benefits. That program is expected to hit a shortfall next year, and benefits will be automatically cut unless the program gets an influx of cash. This has happened in the past, in both the retirement and the disability programs. What has always happened in the past-with no big controversy-is that Congress has authorized the transfer of funds from one of the programs to the other. But last week the House passed a new rule that says Congress can’t do that any more unless they also take some action to “fix” (read slash) the Social Security system.

What this could mean, if folks like Claire McCaskill don’t stay firm, is disaster for many if not most older Americans. In 2010, The New York Times reported that Americans over 65 got 40% of their income from Social Security. Subsequent studies showed that our Social Security system sustains our elderlly and provides “the one income stream that is secure and does not fluctuate with the marketplace.”

And, discounting efforts to manufacture crises, and claims previously made by folks like Claire McCaskill, Social Security will be fully solvent until 2033, at which time it will still be able to meet 77% of its obligations. That’s eighteen years, plenty of time to fix what is essentially a revenue problem – it could be fixed right now by raising the cap on FICA slightly. No need for means-testing, raising the eligibility age or, God forbid, throwing seniors on the mercy of a wildly fluctuating private investment market.

That Social Security is a vital program that protects the prosperity of the American middle class is not, however, an important consideration for members of the Republican party. There are, to be sure, many varieties of ideology and personal interest that underly the hostility that animates efforts to weaken and destroy such successful government programs, but at the deepest level, the mindset reflects an ugly, every-man-for-himself ideology. The dominant strain of conservative thought, which has captured the GOP almost entirely, is expressed in such retrograde books as Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance, which Amazon.com summarizes as follows:

Today we are at a crossroads. America’s entitlement state is threatening to bankrupt us, and new schemes such as ObamaCare are hastening the collapse. What should we do? In this provocative look at America before and after Social Security, Don Watkins argues that the answer is as simple as it is controversial: Abolish the entitlement state, starting with the retirement program that created it. This is not another book for policy wonks about the financial trouble the entitlement state is in. This is the story of the role that Social Security has played in eroding the eagerness, energy and optimism that once defined America. And it is a guide for fighting back.

WhooHoo! Battle lines have been drawn and we’ve got to hope that Claire McCaskill has seen the error of her past ways and will help hold the line. It is not reassuring that she is widely viewed as part of the wedge that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will wield to destroy progressive Democratic resistance:

For now, the grouping of senators deserving the most attention is the “centrist seven,” the cluster of Democrats who stand out as the likeliest to get behind aspects of the new Republican majority’s legislative program. And they may be joined once in a while by as many as five others in their party who’ve shown flashes of moderation in the recent past, yielding a universe of potential aisle-crossers who could be dubbed the “dispositive dozen” of the 114th Congress. They are the centrist Democrats most essential to Mitch McConnell in his debut as majority leader.

[…]

Operatives in both parties identify the senators in the current secondary circle of centrists as Michael Bennet, who will be pressed to move toward the middle ahead of his 2016 campaign for a second full term in swing-state Colorado; Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, and three others who have until 2018 before running again in potential tossup states: Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who announced Monday that she planned to continue her political career in the Senate rather than run for governor next year.

No matter what, though, we’ve got to thank her for standing up for Social Security this week and helping expose the GOP stealth attack. But what’s the story going forward? Can we count on Claire – especially in the light of her past history? Do we believe that she’s turned a corner and is beginning to understand that no matter how politically palatable her “moderation” may be, as Barry Goldwater put it, “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”?

Talking Points Memo has some good coverage of the cagematch between our Governor Nixon and Texas Governor Rick Perry that centers on the relationship between tax rates and jobs. TPM raises a point that is significant in view of the upcoming veto session, where at least some state GOP lawmakers will vote to override the Governor’s veto of the disastrous HB253, which would take a tiny nibble out of the income taxes of most middle-income earners and a great big giant bite out of already very low corporate income taxes:

Tax rates, like what Perry and Scott have been flaunting, are oftentimes the favored incentive for governors hoping to lure new business from elsewhere. Actually, Muro said, there is little research to suggest that a business actually sees larger profits or more job creation from moving to a state with a lower tax rate.

“That one’s a particularly fatuous offering because many relocation studies notice that taxes often aren’t a huge part of the operating budget so that that is often the peripheral consideration,” Muro said.

Muro pointed to a study he did with Kenan Fikri, also of Brookings, which found that states are better off trying to foster homegrown businesses rather than through bringing in business from other states.

“The best way to create more jobs in a state is to grow them at home, rather than poach them from elsewhere,” the report said. “Some 95 percent of all job gains in a year in an average state come from the expansion of existing businesses or the birth of new establishments.”

The article notes that Texas has had its credit rating downgraded under Perry’s leadership. Kansas has also seen its creditworthiness downgraded since it started the process of eliminating income taxes – a somewhat cloudy effort it should be noted, since in order to avert total disaster, Governor Brownbeck is trying to come up with more indirect revenue raising schemes, including higher sales taxes.

What is clear about the Kansas experiment, though, is that whether or not there is eventual growth it will be hard times for many years:

What these changes will mean for the Kansas economy over the long-term is a matter of intense debate. A study by the state Department of Revenue predicted 23,000 new jobs for the state by 2020, above and beyond the job growth Kansas otherwise would have experienced. Others are skeptical. A forecast from the Kansas Legislative Research Department, which didn’t account for any economic benefits from the tax cuts, said that they will result in a series of shortfalls that add up to $2.5 billion through fiscal year 2018.

As for job growth, if it ever happens in Kansas,  expect to see low-wage jobs and sweat-shop conditions, especially since wrecking unions seems to be a related goal of the tax-cutters. Bad schools, a poorly educated, poorly paid population with no public services to alleviate their situation, equals a corporate paradise for select types of industry – the type that have mostly preyed on third world countries in the past. As for forward-looking, entrepreneurial businesses offering good salaries, expect to see them thriving in more enlightened parts of the country.

The current employment situation in Texas tends to support this thesis:

As Gov. Rick Perry continues to tout Texas’ low-tax, low-regulation business climate as the secret to the state’s relative economic strength, critics have pointed to Texas’ [high] unemployment rate and low-wage jobs, noting that Texas ties Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum wage workers.

While loose regulatory policies have permitted many environmentally dangerous practices in the energy sector have probably contributed to growth of Texas biggest engine of new jobs, energy extraction, even supporters of the Texas low-tax climate have to admit that as far as the energy industry goes:

… the governor cannot take credit for recent discoveries of shale formations, the price of oil or “many other factors that have provided Texas with a competitive advantage in recent years.”

I have to admit that I am beginning to think that all the talk about growth is a smokescreen and that the point of this tax-cutting is precisely the social service cuts that everybody pretends to deplore. Jobs – who cares? If job creation were to pick up in Kansas while the same folks hold the reins of the state government, you shouldnt expect to see any new revenue going to education, which has been cut way past the bone, or to provide other services – the tax cutting experimenters, after all, are usually the ideologues who oppose the very idea of public education, call for privately-owned toll roads, and privatization of almost all government functions. I suspect that these folks are getting just what they want – and that many of their compères in Missouri, the ones that are capable of figuring out how to open a paper bag unaided, that is, actually want the same thing.

If none of this sounds too appealing, perhaps you should let your state legislators know that you won’t be too happy if they vote to override HB253, Senators can be found here and representatives here.

Good grief, this nonsense is just exhausting. Nothing is ever settled with these people, they have been coming after Social Security for 75 years, and they just don’t quit, no matter how many times they get chased down with walkers and eaten alive by gray panthers. It’s like they are programmed or genetically manipulated, like one of those creepy super-soldiers from science fiction that can’t stop fighting after the war is over, even though they recognize the reality.

Nah, I give them too much credit in that scenario. They are just zombie-nihilists and Social Security is the brain they are driven to eat.

To prove the charges I just filed against them, I offer into evidence Rep. Pete Sessions, of Texas.

House Republicans on Friday introduced legislation that would allow workers to partially opt out of Social Security immediately, and fully opt out after 15 years.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, and several other Republicans introduced the Savings Account for Every American (SAFE) Act. Under the bill, workers would immediately have 6.2 percent of their wages sent to a “SAFE” account each year.

That would take the place of the 6.2 percent the workers now contributed to Social Security.

Another 6.2% is sent to Social Security by employers. Under the Sessions bill, employers would continue to make this matching contribution to Social Security, but after 15 years, employers could also send that amount to the employee’s SAFE account.

Sessions said this transition to a private retirement savings option is needed because Social Security last year began paying out more money than it took in.

“Our nation’s Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve,” Sessions said. “To simply maintain the status quo would weaken American competitiveness by adding more unsustainable debt and insolvent entitlements to our economy when we can least afford it.”

Sigh. They just keep telling the zombie-lie about the trust fund. Okay, let’s do this once more, this time with feeling: There is no Social Security crisis. The trust fund he is pretending to be panicked about was established to deal with the baby boom generation that started retiring and coming into the system this year. It was built up over the last three decades for this very purpose. And Sessions knows this full well. When one tells an untruth that doesn’t square with reality and one knows one is telling an untruth, that is a lie and the person doing the lying is what is known, in the common vernacular, as a liar. Pete Sessions is, therefore, a liar. This is now an established fact, verified by empirical evidence.

The legislation is couched in inoccuous, friendly even,  terms like “employee choice” but the part that they don’t mention and the press hasn’t bothered to report is what would happen if legislation like this were to pass…it would collapse the system.

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. If large numbers of people “opted out” then it would collapse — which is really what the privatizers want, they just can’t come right out and say that.

Now let’s be realistic. This legislation is not going anywhere so long as Democrats control one chamber of Congress and the Presidency. Privatizing Ryan left Social Security out of his crosshairs because even he knows that Social Security privatization is a non-starter. It’s only been six years since Bush floated his privatization scheme, and he never recovered politically from the attempt. The bill has only attracted a handful of co-sponsors and they could all be accurately described as “the epitome of wingnuttery.” There is no rush to bring it to the floor for a vote, and I seriously doubt John Boehner lets one take place, not with the Medicare fiasco still nipping at his heels and threatening the republican majority in the House.

But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from making hay out of it anyway.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) on Tuesday predicted that House Republican plans to let workers opt out of Social Security would fail as voters realize how it will threaten their retirement.

“Seniors who have paid into Social Security through a lifetime of hard work shouldn’t end up in a risky privatization scheme to gamble their retirement on Wall Street,” Israel said. “The public has rejected this kind of Social Security privatization in the past and will again.”

Israel accused Republicans of looking to resolve the government’s fiscal crisis by scaling back Medicare and Social Security while ignoring higher corporate taxes.

“Everyone agrees we need to tighten our belt, but why do out-of-touch Republicans insist on tightening it around our retirees without asking Big Oil companies for one dime of sacrifice?” he asked.

That’s all well and good, and Israel is correct in leveling the charge. But there is another angle I would like to see the Democrats pursuing here, and that is how privatizing the programs that we have established for retirees is of a piece with the GOP’s war on women, because any privatization scheme would hit women especially hard.

Social Security is the single most effective program to keep women out of poverty in their retirement years that the nation has ever created.

Here are some facts about women and Social Security that you may not know, but should.

• 26% of women aged 65-69 are reliant upon Social Security for virtually all of their income (90% or more) and that number climbs as women age.

• Although women are more reliant on Social Security to provide their basic needs in retirement, men receive benefits that are about 25% more than those of women. The average benefit for a woman is around $12,000 per year, while for men it is about $16,000 per year.

• This is especially important for women, because far more American women than men — 11% versus 7% — lived in poverty in 2009 (the last year for which complete numbers are available.)

• It becomes even more important for people who live alone. When older people live alone, the likelihood that they live in poverty jumps dramatically, to 17% for women and to 12% for men.

• Minority women are hit especially hard, with more than 20% of African-American, Hispanic and Native American women 65 and over living in poverty. The poverty rate is 8% for non-Hispanic white females in this age group, and 15% for Asian women.

• Without Social Security, one half of all women over 65 and two-thirds of women over 65 who live alone would live in poverty.

• 3.1. million children received Social Security survivors benefits after losing the support of a parent to death or disability, and those benefits lifted 1.1 million of those children out of poverty.

Since Social Security became the law of the land in 1935, it has proven extremely effective at standing between women and the proverbial poor house, and that is not a pattern that shows any signs of changing any time soon. While it is true that the  gender-iniquities that were part of the program at it’s inception have been righted, women are still playing catch-up. Much of the labor performed by women is uncompensated, and therefore doesn’t pay anything in to the program for her to draw on later. Women still sacrifice large amounts of their prime earning time t
o provide care for young children, aging parents and eventually young grandchildren. This negatively impacts the amount of monthly benefit they receive in retirement — and if republican efforts to gut Medicare and Medicaid see the light of day, the amount of uncompensated work women do will increase dramatically.  What do the privatizers think will happen to women who could not simultaneously care for their families and pay into the system? They certainly aren’t going to deliver us delayed compensation by paying in for us what would be paid in if our labor was compensated.

I sincerely believe that they are intentionally coming after us uppity sluts between 45 and 55. We didn’t burn our bras. We burned the hand of anyone who touched us in an inappropriate way. They’ve been wanting to put us back in our place since high school, and they see this as the best chance they’ve had since the days when Scott Brown was a Cosmo centerfold.

The returns on private accounts would depend on volatile markets and would not have COLAs built in to safeguard against inflation, nor would they provide spousal and dependent benefits. And that uncompensated labor that already impacts women’s benefits in the current system? Privatization schemes would devastate any hope for economic security in retirement, because without the shared risk pool that Social Security represents, many women — especially those who took a time out of the work force to raise families and take care of aged or ailing family members — would quickly outlive their assets and be destitute.

We are not worthless, nor is our labor, and as I have said before, the older I get, the crankier I get about the fact that women are discounted, dismissed and disrespected with distressing frequency, and the sudden flurry of legislation that is aimed at putting all of us, regardless of age or fertility status, back in our place is methodical and intentional and something we have to stop now, before The Handmaid’s Tale comes to read like current events.

*****

This post is part of a series I am writing as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations dedicated to preserving and strengthening Social Security.

More scare tactic campaign mail from an astroturf right wingnut corporatist organization.

Previously: 60 Plus Association – rightwing campaign mail: fear as a tool

This stuff is slick and expensive:

The address side of the mail piece.

Note the scare tactic “IRS Notice.” And then this:

This IRS Notice is NOT real.

That defeats the whole purpose of the mailing, doesn’t it? If it’s not real than you shouldn’t be afraid of it.

The “B” side is just as pathetic:

The back side of the mail piece.

Ah, it’s directed at Representative Ike Skelton (D).

…Social Security….will be bankrupt…

Wrong. They have that much contempt for people in Missouri’s 4th Congressional District – they think voters are stoopid.

Here’s the rich part – this astroturf group isn’t concerned about preserving Social Security. In fact, they have been advocates for privatization.

And as for their scare tactics about Social Security, here are the facts:

Social Security Sense and Nonsense

…Social Security is a well-run, fiscally responsible program.  People earn retirement, survivors, and disability benefits by making payroll tax contributions during their working years…

….Every year since 1984, Social Security has collected more in payroll taxes and other income than it pays in benefits and other expenses.  (The authors of the 1983 Social Security reform law did this on purpose in order to help pre-fund some of the costs of the baby boomers’ retirement.)  These surpluses are invested in U.S. Treasury securities that are every bit as sound as the U.S. government securities held by investors around the globe; investors regard these securities as among the world’s very safest investments.

Investing the trust funds in Treasury securities is perfectly appropriate.  The federal government borrows funds from Social Security to help finance its ongoing operations in the same way that consumers and businesses borrow money deposited in a bank to finance their spending.  In neither case does this represent a “raid” on the funds.  The bank depositor will get his or her money back when needed, and so will the Social Security trust funds.

As far back as 1938, independent advisors to Social Security firmly endorsed the investment of Social Security surpluses in Treasury securities, saying that it does “not involve any misuse of these moneys or endanger the safety of these funds….”

This is the consequence of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (No. 08-205) – astroturf right wingnut corporatist organizations can spend unlimited amounts of money to pervert our elections, and because obstructionists in the republican minority carry water for them, these organizations don’t have to divulge who is bankrolling them.