A new ad from Teresa Hensley’s (D) campaign:

Announcer: People are turning to Cass County Prosecutor Teresa Hensley for Congress. The Star said, Prosecutor Hensley far outclasses Congresswoman Hartzler. The Tribune says, Hensley’s a moderate law and order type with eminent good sense.

Hensley will do what’s right, protect Medicare, create jobs, put Missouri’s middle class first.  

Teresa Hensley (D): I’ll fight for Missouri priorities in Washington, like I have in the Prosecutor’s Office. Our seniors can count on me to protect Medicare and Social Security.

I am Teresa Hensley and I approve this message.

Previously:

Not something you see in the paper every day (October 30, 2012)

Teresa Hensley (D) in the 4th Congressional District: endorsement by the Kansas City Star (October 19, 2012)

Teresa Hensley (D) in the 4th Congressional District: endorsement by the Columbia Daily Tribune (October 12, 2012)

The Campaign for Community Change started running radio ads today against Vicky Hartzler (r) and Todd Akin (r) for their assault on Social Security. The Vicky Hartzler (r) ad:

Announcer: Around here keeping a promise matters. And when America makes a promise to its seniors it’s one we should keep. But Vicky Hartzler wants to break that promise by privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into vouchers. So let’s tell her with our vote, we won’t let her break America’s promises on Social Security and Medicare.

Campaign for Community Change, wwwcampaignfor communities dot org paid for and is responsible for the content of this advertising. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Smack! On the table.

An ad by the DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) released today:

Narrator: Congressman Todd Akin has a plan for your retirement. Work longer. That’s because Akin would undermine Social Security.

Todd Akin (r): I don’t like it. I didn’t design Social Security. FDR put it in place.

Narrator: Akin would risk your retirement savings with a private investment program that benefits Wall Street.

He’s already taken almost half a million dollars from Wall Street. He’d give them your Social Security money. That work for you?

Congressman Todd Akin, way out of Missouri’s mainstream.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Good question. What happens to your privately invested Social Security when Wall Street has another crash? Are we supposed to invest in cat food futures? Just asking.

Over at the Turner Report you can read press releases (here and here) from Sarah Steelman and John Brunner, claiming the laurels from the last GOP senatorial primary debate. Todd Akin, at least as far as I can determine, seems to think that squabbling about who won after the fact is beneath his dignity. Given the arguments his rivals put forward, he may be right.

It’s hard to know what Akin could add since the debate showed him and his two rivals singing in more or less perfect harmony from the same hymnal – the one favored by today’s more extreme GOP. The debate established that they all want to, what else, eliminate Obamacare, and insure that if the Bush tax cuts are extended, they are extended for millionaires too. None of them made any bones abut their preference to privatize Social Security (along with cutting some benefits). The Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill, reminds us in her post- GOP debate press release that their willingness to sacrifice seniors doesn’t stop with Social Security:

Akin, Steelman, and Brunner’s insistence on privatizing Social Security tonight follows earlier debates in which all three emphatically endorsed dismantling Medicare and turning it, instead, into a private voucher program.

So no big differences where it counts. Which gets us back to the GOP candidates’ press releases noted above and raises the question about what could distinguish one from the others as a winner in the debate – or in the election itself, come to that.  

Steelman wants to set herself apart from the group by claiming that she alone has “a plan.” Her release proclaims that “she was the only candidate who provided specifics and plans of action.”

If you’re inclined to believe this, check out her Website where she lists her “Show-Me Solutions for the First 60 Days.” You won’t find much that’s new – “fight” for a balanced budget amendment, get rid of the President’s “czars” (i.e.,  administrative personal essential to run the executive branch), implement an optional flat tax, put a congressional bit and briddle on the Fed, term limits, yada, yada, yada.  As clever as Steelman obviously thinks she is, we’ve heard all these ideas ad nauseum since they comprise what amounts to Fox-inspired, GOP orthodoxy these days – Todd Akin in particular likes to drone on about the putative “czars” – and they are all still very bad ideas. Nor did I notice any specifics about how she plans to achieve these goals – apart from the rather spectacular implication that Sarah will get all this destruction done in the first 60 days after she takes office. Delusions of grandeur much?

John Brunner, on the other hand, thinks that the way to distinguish himself is to point out that he has no experience doing the job he wants to take on. He somehow thinks that it doesn’t matter that most of his policy prescription are identical to those of his rivals since he isn’t, like them, a “career politician.” There is a certain class of American, I suppose, who thinks that all politics – or at least politics in Washington D.C. – are so evil that we have to continually sacrifice political virgins to the process in order to get a few months of uncorrupted leadership, but experiments with this philosophy usually only prove that folks who vote according to this belief deserve the inept politicians they send to Washington to represent them.

For his part, although he has little to say about the debate as such, Todd Akin is trying to stand out as the most popular kid in class. He is touting the results of the recent PPP poll that showed him one point ahead of Claire McCaskill. Well and good, except that he he completely ignores the Rasmussen poll that shows Steel leading McCaskill by a much larger margin. Note that I’m not saying that I endorse the findings of the notoriously inaccurate Rasmussen polls, particularly as regards Claire McCaskill – just that it’s premature to crown oneself a front runner based on one poll out of several, especially this early in the game.  

Finally, we get a glimpse of what GOP senatorial primary contender, John Brunner, actually thinks about some of the issues that Missourians are concerned about. So far, his approach to public campaigning has been like that of a burlesque fan dancer, tantalizing the audience with hints about what’s behind the fan while revealing almost nothing of interest.

Recently, though, Brunner lowered the fan for a tiny peak at what he’s got to offer. No tax hikes for sure – but we didn’t really expect him to endorse the popular desire to have the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share. He’s running for the nomination in today’s Republican Tea Party after all. Otherwise, he identifies problems he says he would address – like keeping jobs in the country – but seems unable or, perhaps, hesitant to let us know just how he would address them.

Most interesting is trying to figure out how Brunner reconciles his stated desire to “protect” seniors with his subsequent comment that the Ryan plan, which would privatize Social Security and decimate the Medicare, offers a “a fantastic step in the right direction.” To be fair, he adds that he would like to see a Democratic plan as well – seemingly unaware that it’s been on offer for some time. But, of course, financial stimulus to stabilize the economy, raising the cap on Social Security income, and endorsing those parts of ObamaCares that would slow the growth of health care and concomitant Medicare costs are all solutions that run afoul of GOP orthodoxy, and I suspect that Mr. Brunner would find them anathema.

I don’t know about you, but if this is all that Brunner’s got to show, it doesn’t strike me as particularly edifying. Nor does it deviate in any interesting way from what the other two candidates, Sarah Steelman and Todd Akin, have put on display. I hope he thinks that sinking a big chunk of his considerable fortune into the effort of getting himself to Washington so he can read from the same Republican playbook the other candidates have in hand is worth the price.

Photo by Michael Albov from Wikimedia commons      

Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong with Social Security, it is perfectly sustainable for a century and beyond if we simply lift the earnings cap.

Right now, high income earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,800 of their income. Anything over that is not taxed for Social Security purposes. That simple tweak, one line of legislation, would put the program on a solvent path for at least a century. Maybe the fact that people are gradually waking up to that fact has something to do with the White House dropping Social Security “reform” from the grand budget proposal that will be rolled out next week.

President Barack Obama will not include reforms to the Social Security retirement program in his deficits proposals to Congress next week, the White House said Thursday.

Obama upset many fellow Democrats during this summer’s bitter negotiations with Republicans on raising the U.S. debt ceiling when he expressed a willingness to change the way government benefits are linked to inflation.

He saw the move as a way to ensure the federal pension program remains viable in the long-term, but liberal supporters who champion entitlement programs for the elderly felt he was giving up too much ground to Republicans.

White House spokesman Amy Brundage said Obama’s long-awaited deficit reduction plan, to be unveiled Monday, “will not include any changes to Social Security.”

“As the president has consistently said, he does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near and medium term deficits,” she said.

With Obama’s shift in stance, the six Democratic members of a congressional “super committee” charged with tackling the federal deficit would not have to make immediate concessions, giving them more negotiating room with their Republican counterparts. The super committee is trying to find more than $1.2 trillion in budget savings over 10 years by Nov. 23.

Since Social Security became the law of he land in 1935, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program ever conceived of by the American government. It truly is “We, the People” taking care of one another, putting the words that start our owner’s manual into action. It has been especially successful at lifting elderly WOMEN out of poverty.

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.

Not only does Social Security do all that, it does it without adding a single dime to the deficit. The fact of the matter is, Social Security is not only not responsible for our deficit woes, it is independent of the deficit and it is solvent for decades. Period. Full stop.

That CBO report finds that the Social Security trustfund, without changing a thing, will be able to make full payouts through 2039 — it should also be noted that the full payout projections have been pushed downward by the economic downturn of the last couple of years, and those numbers should start moving the other way as the economy recovers. And if that isn’t the case, we have a lot bigger problems than Social Security coming down the pike.

And even if the trust fund were to run out, Social Security would still be in pretty good shape. First of all, the trust fund is a relatively recent creation. It was establisned in 1983, three years before the baby boomers started turning forty, to deal with the demographic bulge headed Social Security’s way in 2011. The last boomers will retire in 2029, ten years before the trust fund is currently projected to be depleted. Essentially, when the trust fund runs dry, it will coincide with the fact that it’s mission will be, for the most part, complete. It will have eased the strain caused by the retirement of the baby boom.

The depletion of the Social Security trust fund is not a pending disaster, it’s by design. The fact of the matter is, in case you are one of the people in this country to whom facts matter, Social Security is a self funding entity, independent of the general fund. It funds itself entirely through payroll taxes, and so long as payroll taxes are collected, retirees will get their checks. The only way that changes is if Congress acts to stop collecting payroll taxes or to outright abolish the program.

There has been a concerted effort to keep Social Security from being one of the lambs that is led to the slaughter. I know. I was one of the Blogging Fellows who received a stipend from the Strenghen Social Security project for the Social Security Works think-tank for writing a series of posts to that end.

I’m going to tentatively pencil in a hashmark in the “win” column because I trust that we made our point and Social Security is still the “Third Rail” of American politics that it’s always been.  But if anyone thinks I’m going to turn off the juice based on one measley win, I have a bridge to sell you.

A letter posted at STLtoday.com asks, “Why won’t Akin meet with constituents?” The question references the unwillingness of Rep. Todd Akin (R-2) or his staff to allow a group of senior constituents to even enter his office – a disgraceful episode that Hotflash described in two earlier posts (here and here). The real point of my bringing up this letter and that incident, though, is that the writer hasn’t had to wait too long for her answer.

According to the Columbia Tribune, at a meeting with a few (according to the report, a very few) Tea Party members, Akin said “he has doubts about the constitutionality of Medicare.” Couple that with his hostile remarks last March about Social Security  and you can imagine that he might not want to face a group of articulate older folks like the group that traveled to his office to ask him what he means by such statements.  

The attack on Medicare is not new for Akin. Consider his effort to defend his vote for Ryan’s plan to defund Medicare –pure, classic Akin:

This thing is really two visions of what America should be. Do we really want to become a sniveling entitlement state, or do we want freedom? That’s the choice that’s before the voters.

In remarks he made subsequent to yesterday’s Tea Party meeting, he seems to be trying to be more careful and qualify his belief by saying that since Medicare has been established for some time, we will have to tolerate it for the older folks who now depend on it – a qualified comment that doesn’t bode well for the future of the program should enough ideologues of Akin’s ilk make it into the Senate.

Of course a video of Akin’s question and answer session at a meeting with some 7th District Tea Partiers offers another answer to the question posed by the letter cited above. At about one hour into the video, after one of the stranger participants in the session gives Rep. Akin a “heads-up” that the Democrats are going to shut down the government during “days of rage” in early October so that Obama can declare martial law and, I guess, thwart the electoral hopes of the law-abiding Tea Partiers, Akin, who does not disavow this hilarious scenario although he does seem somewhat amused, makes a telling statement. He notes that even he is subject to Democratic harassment since his St. Louis County office is near a union hall – folks have been coming over and “going after him.” He adds something to the effect that he justs laughs it off.  

Is Akin referring to the group of seniors who approached his office last week? Does this mean he thinks these senior constituents – all over fifty and many over seventy, at least one in a wheel chair – were union “thugs” or doing the union’s bidding? We often accuse the GOP and their fellow travelers of being singularly divorced from reality – but really isn’t this going a little too far? If he is indeed refering to this group, his cavalier response – laughing at a group of elderly constituents suffering in near 100 degree heat – says all that needs to be said about Todd Akin’s  fitness to represent senior citizens’ interests fairly and honestly.  

Since declaring for the presidency a few weeks ago, Rick Perry, the GOP Texas Tornado – a blast of hot air with a lot of destructive potential –  has been amusing those of us with a taste for political absurdities with almost every utterance. By now, almost everyone in the civilized world has heard that Perry is convinced that not only is Social Security unconstitutional, but it is actually a big government “Ponzi scheme.”  As Jonathan Bernstein observes, such an assertion means only that “Perry either doesn’t understand Social Security, doesn’t understand Ponzi schemes or is simply not telling the truth.”  

Perry may not understand what a Ponzi scheme really is, but the underlying meme – that the Social Security reserve will be exhausted before today’s young workers reach retirement – is a staple of GOP rhetoric. It rears its ugly head right away in a scheme to “reform” Social Security that Missouri Senator Roy Blunt proposed on July 12:

Blunt doesn’t talk about Ponzi schemes explicitly – maybe because, unlike Perry, he actually knows what one is. He does, however, press the case that because the ratio of those paying into the system to those drawing benefits will continue to decrease for some years (he claims, falselly,that it is a permanent situation), it will not be able to support future retirees. Blunt’s argument is that half a loaf is better than none, and that we must cut the benefits of future retirees in order to ensure that they get anything at all.  

 

Problem is, the story about a soon-to-be bankrupt Social Security is pure fiction:

The Social Security trustees project now that payroll taxes will fall below benefit payments in 2010 and 2011, exceed benefit payments from 2012 to 2014, and then continuously exceed benefit payments through 2015 [14]. The interest and principal from the bonds in the trust funds will help to cover the cash shortfall after 2015 through 2037 [15]. The date of final trust fund exhaustion has not changed from the trustees projections made in 2009. The program can pay on average 78 percent of its promised benefits with its tax revenue from 2037 to 2085, if nothing changes

Let’s see – twenty four years down the road Social Security will have to pay out somewhat less to beneficiaries if nothing is done. So why is Blunt claiming that we have to cut future retirees’ benefits when that will happen automatically if we do nothing? And he’s not even telling the whole story about the damage he wants to do. He’s also proposing to calculate cost of living adjustments (colas) according to a chained CPI index that will cost current retirees at least $18,000 in benefits – although he explicitly claims that his proposal will not touch anyone 55 or older. Wonder why he wants to hide that particular fact? You think maybe he wants to be reelected? Or is he just blindly glomming onto the chained CPI index that happens to be popular among the GOP political set right now.

We can actually avoid the unappealing but far from dire benefit cuts predicted for 2035 very easily. Along with cutting benefits via chained CPI and raising the retirement age, Blunt proposes means testing. However, there would be little or no need to cut benefits if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes were to be lifted in accord with any of several scenarios that have been put forward.  Instead of means testing, which weakens Social Security, make it stronger and let the wealthy pay their fair share – which, currently, is not the case:

The cap also means that higher-income individuals pay a smaller share of their income in Social Security taxes than middle-class employees. Including the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare taxes, earners in the middle fifth of the income distribution pay an average effective payroll tax of about 11 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners pay just 1.5 percent on average.

At any rate, it doesn’t sound like today’s 20 and 30 year old workers really need to worry about whether or not Social Security will be there for them – as long as politicians like Roy Blunt keep their hands off the program. Nevertheless, a 2010 Gallup poll showed that 76% of Americans between 18 and 34 do not believe that they will receive Social Security benefits when they retire.

Their misapprehension is not really surprising. Listen to Blunt spin the story about how Social Security will be all gone if we don’t hand the program over to folks like him to fix, folks who, like Rick Perry, think it’s unconstitutional, or, more likely in Blunt’s case, an affront to the sensibilities of their Wall Street cronies, and it’s easy to understand why young Americans are so skeptical about the future of their benefits. Since George Bush opened the war on Social Security with his call to privatization in 2005, we have been bombarded with talk of the coming Social Security crisis. Even Democrats like Claire McCaskill are glad to join in the chorus. In such circumstances, who wouldn’t believe that Social Security will soon be moribund?

Unfortunately, this particular story is not only false, but intellectually corrupt. Speaking of Perry’s Ponzi scheme allegation, Bernstein concludes that:

In my view, saying that Social Security is a deliberate fraud – a Ponzi scheme – is about as irresponsible as truther or birther conspiracy thinking.

As far as I’m concerned, misleading rhetoric and outright falsehoods about the status of Social Security is just as irresponsible – even without the simple-minded insinuation that it’s a conscious fraud – and ultimately far more pernicious.

Addenda:  Here’s what Ezra Klein has to say about Social Security vs. Ponzi schemes. Note that the only thing they have in common is GOP politicians who persist in erroneously comparing them.  

It’s a shame that the hoi polloi doesn’t know how to behave itself when it gets uptown. A couple of hundred people showed up at Roy Blunt’s St. Louis office on Thursday to urge him to recuse himself from Republican attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  But, geez, you’d think they were Tea Partiers the way they were yelling and jumping around.

A coalition of progressive groups got this crowd together to scold Roy Blunt for trying to make the middle class and the poor bear all the brunt of our tough economic times. And I get their point. Doesn’t seem right, does it, that some school districts are forced to go to four day school weeks, and one little town in Texas just fired its entire police force because it couldn’t afford to pay four officers. But Exxon Mobil, the most profitable corporation on the face of the planet, has gotta have its tax breaks.

Our Republican senator from Missouri believes that this is the normal order of life. We, of course, well, … we disagree. But is that any excuse for being boorish and crass at the corner of Bonhomme and Hanley? This rally was in the heart of the high rent district. Clayton even has a local ordinance against the use of bullhorns, so at least the protesters weren’t allowed to embarrass themselves with one.

I mean. Could we please have a little decorum?

Decorum is what we got when two police officers and a couple of suits escorted me and three representatives of the protesters along the hushed, tastefully lit third floor corridor of 7700 Bonhomme, where Blunt has his office. Inside, the milieu was more refined. Two Blunt staffers greeted us cordially, gave us their cards, invited us to sit in the high backed leather chairs and urged the three to speak their minds.

Which they did. Kirsten Dunham, who works with Paraquad, pointed out that it makes more sense to give people in wheelchairs minimal home help to keep them out of expensive nursing homes. Judith Parker, of Alliance for Retired Americans, spoke of the dread many seniors feel for themselves and their children in the face of cuts to social services. And although she represents seniors, she ended by pointing out that one in four children in Missouri go to bed hungry at night. Unbelievable in this wealthy country. The Reverend Carlton Stock, whose Presbyterian church is in a low income neighborhood, talked about the efforts he sees among the poor to survive and indeed to advance themselves.

After Blunt’s office director, Mary Beth Wolf, had asked Rev. Stock a couple of questions to draw him out about the work of his church, Stock asked for a face to face meeting with Blunt before the end of the debt ceiling negotiations. …Eh, that can be difficult, Wolf allowed, considering the senator’s unpredictable schedule. But she would certainly try, she promised.

Well, that’s progress, right? With that sort of civil, earnest communication as a possibility, can we not hope that the two sides will reason together and reach a sensible compromise before we blow the entire economy out of the water? Surely, if Senator Blunt knew what we’re thinking, he would be moved to meet us halfway.

After all,  that crowd on the sidewalk outside, the ones who figure that Roy Blunt couldn’t be depended on to agree which day of the week it is, what do they know?