Two Crises: One Real, One Fake

Trey Smith

The truth about Social Security is that it is not in crisis. After all, 2033, or even 2031, is a long way off from 2013. Two decades off in fact. What other crisis facing the US can you think of that Congress is preparing for two decades in advance? The answer is none. I can, in fact, think of a real crisis that is two decades off that Congress is blithely ignoring, and that is the global climate crisis. In two decades, if there is no major action to reverse the pace of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, it will be too late to do anything to stop runaway heating of the seas and the atmosphere, which will be a much more serious disaster than exhausting the Social Security Trust Fund! Yet Congress and the president are doing nothing about climate change. Why? Because corporate interests, which only care about making profits over the next quarter or at most the next year, don’t want to be burdened by regulations and taxes designed to force them to reduce their carbon emissions. Those same corporations, and especially the financial interests on Wall Street, happen to want to destroy Social Security in order to force workers to invest in the stock and bond markets that they now thoroughly manipulate, instead of relying on a retirement system that has worked well for over three quarters of a century! [emphasis mine]
~ from Wall Street Pulls the Strings: Social Security Under Attack in February by Dave Lindorff ~

Here we have a looming calamity -- one that will impact all life on this planet -- and yet both our political and corporate leaders have, at best, a ho-hum attitude. Over the past two decades or so, scientists keep coming up with one dire prediction after another and, even worse, we keep exceeding the benchmarks from previous forecasts. All signs point toward a "point of no return" and yet no one in Congress or the White House seems all that concerned.

Instead of focusing on this one REAL crisis staring us in the face, the oligarchy, in conjunction with the mainstream media, manufactures fake ones. As Lindorff and many others have made clear, the Social Security Fund is NOT in crisis. It IS true that it MAY face a 25% shortfall in twenty years time, but as Lindorff points out, there is (and always has been) an easy solution.

All it would take would be to eliminate the cap on income subject to the FICA tax, which is currently set at $113,000, and to levy a small FICA tax either on investment income (not including retirement savings accounts), or on stock and bond trades that are not held in retirement accounts. In other words, if the wealthy and their employers were required to pay the full FICA tax on all their earned income, and to pay FICA taxes on their so-called “unearned” income, there would be no shortfall at all, right through the retirement years of the Baby Boom generation and beyond.

You see, the way the tax code has been written, rich folks aren't required to pay into the system at the same rate as poor folks. While most of us in the middle and working class are required to pay Social Security taxes on 100% of our earnings, the wealthy can pay as little as 1% on their total earnings. Talk about a tax break!!

But we won't hear about this easy solution in Washington or the mainstream media simply because it doesn't benefit Wall Street. And that's what really matters in this country!