{"id":187464,"date":"2011-06-20T22:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T03:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/06\/20\/what-liberal-pushback-should-look-like\/"},"modified":"2011-06-20T22:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T03:02:00","slug":"what-liberal-pushback-should-look-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/06\/20\/what-liberal-pushback-should-look-like\/","title":{"rendered":"What Liberal Pushback Should Look Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Geoghegan, has just written an OP\/ED suggesting that Social Security and taxation should be increased, not decreases<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of \u201csaving\u201d Social Security. We should not \u201csave\u201d it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker\u2019s preretirement earnings. While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We\u2019d still be near the bottom of the league of the world\u2019s richest countries \u2014 but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to \u201csave\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we can\u2019t afford it!\u201d Oh, come on: We have a federal tax rate equal to nearly 15 percent of our G.D.P. \u2014 far below the take in most wealthy countries. Let\u2019s wake up: the biggest crisis we face is that most of us have nothing meaningful saved for retirement. I know. I started my career wanting to be a pension lawyer. In the 1970s, lawyers like me expected there to be big pots of private pensions for hourly workers. By the 1980s, as factories closed, I was filing hopeless lawsuits to claw back bits and pieces of benefits. Now there are even fewer bits and pieces to get.<\/p>\n

A recent Harris poll found that 34 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement \u2014 not even a hundred bucks. In this lost decade, that percentage is sure to go up. At retirement the lucky few with a 401(k) typically have $98,000. As an annuity that\u2019s about $600 a month \u2014 not exactly an upper-middle-class lifestyle. It\u2019s too late for Congress to come up with some new savings plan \u2014 a new I.R.A. that grows hair, or something. There\u2019s no time. We have to improve the one public pension program in place. Should we means-test it? No. I don\u2019t care if they go out and buy bottles of Jim Beam: let our elderly have an occasional night out at a restaurant.<\/p>\n

The most paralyzing half-truth in this country is that people hate taxes. People are willing to pay taxes that they spend on themselves. Two-thirds of those surveyed in a CBS\/New York Times poll in January were willing to pay more taxes to save Social Security at its modest level. To \u201csave\u201d it, most of us don\u2019t need to pay. We could lift the cap on high earners, the 6 percent of workers who make over $106,800 a year. If earnings above the cap were subject to the payroll tax with no increase in benefits to high earners, there would be no deficit in the Social Security trust fund in 2037, as projected.<\/p>\n

If people are willing to pay more just to \u201csave\u201d Social Security, they should be glad to pay more to raise it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I cannot imagine a such a full throated defense of basic human decency as government policy from any Democrat on the national stage, and that is a large part of the tragedy that is the Democratic party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Geoghegan, has just written an OP\/ED suggesting that Social Security and taxation should be increased, not decreases: As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of \u201csaving\u201d Social Security. We should not \u201csave\u201d it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker\u2019s preretirement earnings. While jaws …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1002,1003,978,1086],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-writing","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-social-safety-net"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187464"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}