On the other hand, it isn’t like an iron worker or tree surgeon or pastry chef (in my case) can actually retire at all, given that most of our savings and investments have been flushed down the toilet. If we have nothing but work to supplement Social Security, than work we’ll have to continue, if we can. Maybe the Republican plan to privatize SS and repeal any type of government assisted medical assistance is to try and reduce life expectancy.

If real workers (as opposed to pols) have to postpone retirement in order to let Wall St campaign contributors get their mitts on social security funds, it’s a small price to pay, dontcha think?

Left hand? The faux left, but real corporate hand knows exactly what it is doing.

If child incinerating obama want the SS money for war , no matter the posturing, it’s a done deal.

He’s an 11 dimensional genius you know.

The gutting of the New Deal continues, now with help of the Dinocrats. Is this the Change and the Hope we all voted for?

Why not cut a slice from the $708.2 billion going to this worthless entity?

The thing that really irritates me about the possibility of raising the retirement age is that we aren’t making any head way in longevity. In fact, end of life for most people is worse than it once was.

So, of course, the obvious answer to the “entitlement” question (excluding congress, of course) is to raise retirement age AFTER they passed that crappy non-health care reform bill.

What complete idiocy!

Time to retire Hoyer.

Is whining all that is left to us? The idea that the budget can be balanced only by gutting social security is absurd as is our desire to change regimes which has marked our foreign policy for at least fifty years. Clearly the Washington gang is not of a mind to change things. The only question worth discussing is-is there anything we can do about it?

What is important is how long people are physically and mentally able to work, not their increased life expectancy. The catfood commission is simply using the age issue so that they can continue using the payroll tax to support general government expenses, eliminating any need to raise taxes on the rich.

If Congress wants to raise the Social Security retirement age to 70, they should also raise the age for receiving Congressional pensions – fat chance!

SS is not bankrupt no matter what they say. But if they insist, let them raise the cap. That is the only sane thing to do.

Steny Hoyer can go to hell.

Increase the full-employment rate to 100-percent; outlaw age discrimination (which is rampant in the United States); remove the SS cap….Americans work longer and harder than any other industrialized country.

Now Steny Hoyer wants to make us life-long slaves.

I keep wondering how much more tolerance we have for the Steny Hoyers before our rage and anger turns into something less fortunate for the bastard and all like him.

To a your qs in order: yes; no.

Corporate concubines are good at message confusion and double speak; old HOyer especially.

Life expectancy has added several years in recent decades — but only for the wealthiest. Life expectancy for the poorest has remained almost the same. So using average change in life expectancy gives you the wrong answer for Social Security purposes. And the 1983 did factor in higher life expectancy; they didn’t ignore it, as Social Security destroyers claim.

Hoyer and Clyburn need to be forced into retirement NOW, before they ruin our retirements.

Raising the retirement age doesn’t fix anything. It simply forces old people to hang onto their jobs longer, creating a shortage of jobs for younger people and a lot of age-discrimination suits, if employers push older workers out the door during this new period of ineligibility.

I think the worry and stress of having to work until 70 will cause many of the elderly to die sooner than otherwise. Oh, wait ……the gov’t has a plan?

This is entirely upside down. We need to LOWER the retirement age, at least temporarily, to about 58 or 60, in order to acknowledge the current emergency. An emergency, by the way, not caused by retirees or near-retirees but by Pete Peterson’s pals, the Hedge Fund Pirates and Bankers.

Lowering the retirement age will recognize that employers simply do not hire the laid-off older Americans whose jobs have disappeared. It will also clear the field for the laid-off and recently-graduated younger Americans who need jobs to start or resume their lives, and allow them to support their familiies with dignity.

I’m happy to have a discussion about the retirement age, with actuaries and accountants, but only if the discussion is about exactly what age to lower retirement to, and for how long.

Raising the age, or even leaving it where it is now, is simply a non-starter. It solves nothing and punishes the least among us.

So, eCAHN, it is all over, but for the eulogy and being laid out for the body breakers and the buzzards to pick the bones clean?

Forgive me, but such surrender as that is remarkably akin to the behaviors of one Barack Obama.

Have you (or any of the rest of us) a “retirement plan” that matches Barack’s?

You know, large speaking fees and seats on the boards of directors, eschewing, of course, in “our” cases, the role of “elder” statesman and the, of course, possession of genius to the eleventy-eleventh degree.

Do you wax hot and cold on this, or are you committed to the acceptance of less and less decency, humanity and reason, and more and more destruction, loss, and defeat?

Buck up! I say and commune with the bees, dance among the flowers and go hug you some trees.

;~DW

and punishes the least among us.

You’re missing the point. The point is, that’s how these asshats get their rocks off.

Appreciate your response, but also appreciate eCAHN’s gallows humor.

Teddy Partridge has a fresh cross-post up: Hey, BP!? WTF Does “Set Aside” Mean? Feinberg Needs Funds, Now

As do I, ghost, as do I.

DW

So what, the SS eligibility age will end up being, like, 90. Sure, if I haven’t killed myself I’ll still be working. Or maybe not; the law firm I work for is, in our office, largely dependent on transactional work in commercial real estate, bond work and corporate acquisitions. Given the lending climate, we ain’t getting shit done because our clients can’t get funding. No lending = no transactions.

It’s way more likely that I’ll get canned RIF’d and then I can end my days in dignity, under a bridge, in solidarity with my Irish forebears. Future generations can call it the Great Cash Famine.

Back OnT, Hoyer needs to keep his big fat yap shut. The only message we Dems need to be sending is: you want to mess with Social Security, “Fuck you.” You want to mess with Medicare, “Fuck you.” You want to repeal health care reform, “Fuck you.” I am certain that if we say “Fuck you” enough, the people will come.

If Oilbomber eviscerates Soc Sec, I don’t how the A list pwoggie blogger–or any “liberal”–can support the Dem Party. I mean the level of masochism would be astounding!

. . .this is Sergeant Dayen . . .we’ve traced the call, it’s coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE !!!

This stance must be because Hoyer is running for re-election. I can’t imagine that raising the retirement age to 70 is good for the country or the people. 70 is OLD and too many old people hording jobs, could stifle opportunities for the young. Anyway, I learned the hard way. No matter what Reagan said. Some people may be good to work into their old age, but if Reagan hadn’t had so many people holding him up, his alzhimers would have been exposed sooner and perhaps our country would be better off today. Steny, I am watching, wondering and questioning why??

Obama’s Cat Food Commission is going to recommend these changes, moving retirement age to 70 for SS, god knows what to Medicare….it WILL get a vote in the House and Senate….and all of the GOP and all of the Blue Dogs, plus the Obama lap dogs, will vote for it.

What in the world is the game plan at this point to stop it? Maybe the best idea is some sort of website or something like that, or media blitz with a long list of Democratic voters who pledge to never donate or vote for Democrats again if they allow this robbery to go through. I see nothing else that will stop it, unless they understand that it will end the Democratic party.

Obama’s Cat Food Commission is going to recommend these changes, moving retirement age to 70 for SS, god knows what to Medicare….it WILL get a vote in the House and Senate….and all of the GOP and all of the Blue Dogs, plus the Obama lap dogs, will vote for it.

It appears that Obama wants a Republican takeover of one or both houses of Congress. If the conservatives have a veto-proof majority, there’ll be no blood on his hands as the middle class gets raped, pillaged, and plundered.

Yes, the threat of mass numbers of people leaving the Dems would make them stop. Hopefully. Knowing these folks, you never can predict. That was the idea behind Nader. Build up an alternative to the Dems slowly, so they have to listen to the hippies. Nader had it right! At this point, this is the only option left. Mass exodus. But it must be organized.

You figure you take 5% away from the Dems. That’s big time power. Can it be done? Why the hell not? People need courage, and I fear that’s the ultimate problem.

I haven’t met many politicians, but with one exception, the ones I have met are dumb as posts, just plain stupid, with one or two ideas that got lodged in their heads that they keep repeating to have something to say.

The only thing they truly understand is fear of losing their office.

They steal Billions of SS# money and leave I.O.Us! So this deficit commission has the job of reporting to Congress at the end of November,during a lame duck Congress! It’s obvious what their recommendations will be and that this is happening under a Democratic Administration,makes it more suspicious!
IMHO—-what they are doing is trying to hide the massive theft of the program by the eventual cut in benefits for future retirees and by doing that will be able to sweep the Trillions of Dollars of fraudulent promisary notes under the rug!!!!!!!”

I agree, raise or remove the cap altogether and stop using SS funds for other government expenditures. It is a simple and easy fix. The smoke and mirrors is simply criminal. The DEMs are as bad as the GOP on this for not making such a simple argument for the American people. And, as for Obama, it is just another disappointment in a long line. The man has absolutely no political courage at all.

I attended the America Speaks event in Overland park, Kansas. Afterward, I began to correspond with a moderate Republican who I thought might be willing to entertain some more sensible arguments than the event presented for “Saving Social Security”. I began our discussions by trying to show evidence that the trust fund was not a “special kind of security” that didn’t require the government to pay back the $2.4 trillion it borrowed from the trust fund, which is what David Walker is claiming in his book. I got no response, other than he trusted Walker, not me. I then asked him why he would trust someone who claimed that the government stole the money, but wanted to save the program by giving the same government more money and asking them not to steal it this time. I got no response, other than “the trust fund is bogus”.

Long story short, every time I would attempt to explain the facts to him, he would either not respond to what I was saying, or he would quote Walkers book. Last night, he finally asked me to stop emailing him, because in his opinion, I was disrespecting him. I probably was getting snarky, because by that point, I was so frustrated by his complete lack of interest in any facts that didn’t reinforce his ideology that I was beginning to question his ability to think independently about the issue.

There is such a complete lack of critical thinking going on in this country that I’m afraid there is no hope of finding any real solutions to any of our real problems. by the way, he also accused Jane Hamsher of not thinking critically and being negative, which according to one author he reads, is really being unpatriotic. In other words, America, love it or leave it.

I felt like I was still protesting the Vietnam war in 1968.

The man has absolutely no political courage at all.

This is the wrong meme. Obama created and staffed the Cat Food Commission. It’s not that he lacks the courage to stop this. He’s the one doing it.

I was so frustrated by his complete lack of interest in any facts that didn’t reinforce his ideology

This is your average Republican voter. My father for instance. It is very much like religious belief. They have “faith” that something is true, and any fact that goes against that belief is suspect, “crazy”, “ridiculous”, etc. If it doesn’t fit into their narrow framework, they can simply discard it without much contemplation. It’s a comfortable way to live.

But it isn’t just Republicans. My wife doesn’t want to hear anything about this country, the world, history, etc. that strays from the corporate media’s “accepted wisdom”. She’s got enough things to worry about that she doesn’t want to have to think about some “hairbrained idea”. The vast majority of our country is intellectually lazy, and doesn’t have an open mind about any new ideas.

You seem like a nice guy, dude. Why waste your time with people like that? Plus, the wonks here at Fire Canine get all bogged down in stats and caps and such. That’s also a waste, as well. Sorry wonks–

Look, the capitalist elite are determined to turn this country into Brazil. That’s their plan.

Anything else is butter.

Thanks for the nice guy comment, I try not to be too mean to people.

I was hoping to at least open a dialogue that might get passed on. I really thought that since he seemed to be an intelligent person with some good comments at the America Speaks event, that this was my opportunity to make some inroads, but you’re right, it was definitely a waste of time.

I don’t want to become so cynical that I believe there is no hope, but it’s getting harder to stay positive.

I enjoy nature and animals myself. And this wonderful earth. Humans, not so much.

Keep being positive, though. I’ve lost faith in this system. It really can’t be reformed. I like the Buddhist take on things. Enjoy the moment. Oilbomber and the vile capitalists can’t take that away from us!

I might feel differently about the whole thing, if they’d passed a “real” health care reform bill. But they didn’t.

It looks like my retirement plan is a shotgun and a bottle of vodka.

Now that’s a movement I can get behind!

There is one possibility — dim, but since it is a possibility, as real as any in the set. And that is that Hoyer is simply saying that everything is on the table in order to say later that ‘we considered the notion of raising the age and find it wanting.’ They do this all the time. They are ‘considering’ Elizabeth Warren, but in the end she will be found wanting. The game is fixed. I happen to think it is fixed to keep SS more or less as it is; but they have to make noises saying that they are going to ‘examine’ it.

The bill comes due in three years. Nothing will be done prior to the 2012 election, and believe me, when taxes have to be raised to pay the SS debt in 2014, there won’t be many congressional voices prepared to screw voting babyboomers. This is all kabuki, like the whole rest of the fucking show.

Agree, and plus. Our model isn’t like any other society’s simply because our working-class population (including minimum-wage busboys and neurosurgeons) is huge. Lowering the retirement age, as you point out, allows the job ‘market’ to refresh and to replace many higher-paid workers with entry-level applicants, whose FICA employer costs are small by comparison. But we know in our society the bosses didn’t propose the eight-hour workday, sick leave, or health care benefits.

A year or so ago, Jane Hamsher hinted that it would be great if someone wrote an informed diary about the so-called Protestant Ethic (work is Good, as in ‘goods and services’) described by Max Weber, and how its embedded influence has damaged us and will destroy us if it’s inextricable. Hint hint.

Paul Volcker admitted that cutting SS benefits will have no effect on reducing the debt even though he supports cutting benefits to show the foreign markets that the U.S. is serious about the debt. This is all a compltete sham and an excuse for the enemies of SS to destroy it once and for all.

“Stats and caps” are indispensable when $$$ are heavily in the mix, and they are ‘our’ dollars. It’s virtually illegal to authorize expenditures larger than petty cash without solid data for the rationale. As much as you, I wish it were otherwise; I wish the brilliant talents who contribute diaries and reports here at FDL could be only elegant and consciousness-raising, even poetic. But they have to present hard data to be able to persuade the data-driven constituencies who require Sigmas, Medians, and Standard Deviations.

“debt” or ‘deficit’?

LOL. Nice post.

The Great Orange Behemoth has even more wonksters. And some of their stats might be false, if that expose is right.

Needless to say, capitalism is dying, so I don’t know if wonkism can help–but carry on soldiers!

It’s more important for Democritters to cut benefits than to win an election.
Now what does that tell you?

It’s not a binary or I/O enterprise, our economy. Capitalism has failed to become monolithic, and it won’t become the dominant economic system. But it won’t disappear. Its myopic adherents are noisy fuckers but their days of sway are numbered, as you implied in your fashion.

Raising the ‘retirement age’ to 70 for full benefits isn’t a “cut” or even a reduction in benefits, unless you want to call a delay a “cut” or a reduction. You can still retire ‘early’ (at 62) with reduced benefits. I took early retirement, giving up 20% for life, but I feel like I get my full benefits. If you ask me, I’d say when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, that was a reduction and a cut in benefits since it brought ever-more morons into the voting process and reduced and cut the benefits of experience and wisdom, or diluted it. Guess who ‘cutting’ and gutting Social Security appeals to the most?

That’s why anarchism holds so much promise, my friend. Decentralization is our future.

Actually this is the organization of the REAL death panels. No retirement, no health care. They’ll just drive around in commuter vans and collect all the old farts. Save money, kill the old. Will they use gas chambers or drugs? That should have been obvious when Obama signed his little Executive order forbidding high risk women from abortions. Just kill the unhealthy things. That’s Democratic party policy now. Sounds like death sentence by executive order for being a sick pregnant woman.

It’s so easy now. First they forced us into Wall Street controlled retirement funds. Then they emptied the funds into their pockets. This whole thing about retirement age thing is quickly becoming moot as more people over 45 lose their jobs. How can you retire from no job?

I read that book. Did you? Who would have thunk that the Dems could be worse than the Repugs?

The real question is whether the general public is just going to roll over and die. Hating Hispanics, Blacks, Muslims, and Gays is a distraction for them to not notice. Hating will not pay the bills but all those guns will now become useful. Have you noticed the increase of family deaths by murder-suicide?

Anarchism has always been my counter-ideology of choice. But it’s a theoretical system, as such. Like Nader’s candidacy was always theoretical at most. Unlike nihilism, anarchism mandates inside agitation rather than refusing to participate. I think some of the great contributors at FDL who work tirelessly to effect change are closet anarchists; and I hope they keep themselves that way so they aren’t marginalized more than their ‘progressive’ self-identification has marginalized them.

Raising the ‘retirement age’ to 70 for full benefits isn’t a “cut” or even a reduction in benefits, unless you want to call a delay a “cut” or a reduction.

Horseshit. Everyone is going to live to a finite age (except me, I’m immortal)….say the average is 77 (whatever)….they have just lopped 3 years off of everyone’s payout. You aren’t going to “make up” the three years they chop off from 67 to 70 at the back end. It’s gone; i.e. a benefit cut. If it wasn’t going to save them money (less going to us) they wouldn’t be so fucking determined to do it, right?

It is heavy on theory–anarchism, that is. But you will find many, many pamphlets out there that lay out concrete, pragmatic plans for how to structure human society. Colin Ward comes to mind. It’s too bad many liberals dismiss such a wonderful and vast tradition.

Now I’m really getting off-topic!

You’re trying to combine two distinct financial issues into a single notion. The political and economic notion of moving the full-benefit retirement age from the current 67 (which only applies to the cohort born in and after 1960) to 70 (for the cohort group born, I dunno, in and after 1970?) is for long-term planning and budgeting at the federal level. As such, it is intended to relieve fiscal pressure (on investment projections) beginning as soon as it is passed, even though it wouldn’t affect any ‘person’ for many, many years to come. And, hey, it can always be revised to suit folks like you. You can call it horseshit, but when you do, you’re probably listening to someone else who’s pretending to be Evelyn Mulwray (and well-chosen as a card-carrying SAG member who needed the work).

The mother of all existential questions is “Why bother?” If you’re addicted to food, drugs or whatever why go through the agonies of cleaning yourself up? You die anyhow. Fate holds the high cards, but I choose to play the game on my terms until the great beyond trumps my ace. Pick a vision for the future (mine is utopia) and try to figure out how to get there.

Hierarchy resembles a parent child relationship. Children have far more power than they imagine, but long standing habit born of that initial dependence keeps most of them in line. Our kids are starting to feel their oats and it’s about time. We might come up with something were we to shed the hierarchical state of mind starting here.

Yeah, and but yet as an anarchist, I wouldn’t be comfortable trying to apply idiosyncratic analyses, like from Britain, to the kind of society we’re part of in the US. I’m not familiar with Ward. Other British writers have had a limited but deep appeal to me, like Bertrand Russell and Jill Tweedie, probably because their anarchism seldom extended beyond the individual and her or his intimates. It would have been great had Emma Goldman and Albert Schweitzer mated and raised children who grew up and had children who became writers for FDL.

is for long-term planning and budgeting at the federal level. As such, it is intended to relieve fiscal pressure (on investment projections) beginning as soon as it is passed, even though it wouldn’t affect any ‘person’ for many, many years to come.

wat.

What a lot of hand waving nonsense.

“is for long-term planning and budgeting at the federal level”

No shit.

“it is intended to relieve fiscal pressure (on investment projections) beginning as soon as it is passed”

Shorter version: It is intended to relieve fiscal pressure on the government paying us back for the Fica contributions they “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund; i.e. our money.

“even though it wouldn’t affect any ‘person’ for many, many years to come.”

Right, they are going to take it from middle aged Americans, and it is part of our retirement package (hopefully) that we will need many, many years from now. How does that make it okay?

I’m going to have to go take a nice stiff drink from the air conditioner to feel better after that nonsense.

What can I say? You’re right. When you’re right, you’re right.

Like I sad, Oilbomber is modeling the US after Brazil…rich people on the top of the hill and the urine soaked peasants in massive shanty towns below.

Our future…

Obama is bad for glass.

Who needs Democrats when they are doing the job that the GOP would do?

Speaking of horseshit, you probably know, that in the original script, Noah Cross fans his Stetson over a mound of it and tells Jake he loves the smell.

Hoyer and Clyburn, like most politicians, are projecting onto everywoman their expectations of a long and happy, expense account- and lobbyist-paid lifestyle, courtesy of “working” for the legislative branch of the federal government. Apart from the government- and lobbyist-paid bennies (such as funding John Boehner’s addiction to golf), and a workload they individually set for themselves, the perks include security services and the best health care for life that taxpayers’ money can buy. And invitations to sit on the boards of companies their favorite lobbyists represent.

Imagine what they might say about the “mandatory” retirement age and the plushness of Social Security if they woke up one morning and instead of being chauffered to Capitol Hill, they had to catch the No. 9 bus to the local Walmart in order to open its doors and greet the other seventy year-olds who found it the only place they could afford to shop. And the only health care they got what was they could buy over the counter for cash at the Walmart pharmacy.

I realize that empathetic politician, like military intelligence and airline food, is an oxymoron. But do Hoyer and Clyburn have to prove it so often?

It should read deficit. Though yearly budget deficits contribute to our overall debt.

Actually, the current system provides full retirement benefits at age 66. If you wait until you are age 70, the benefits increase at rates that are determined by your birth year, with the top rate increase of 8% above the full retirement benefit.

So, yes, they are cheating everyone out of some percentage of their retirement income if they move the goal post to 70 instead of 66 for full retirement benefits.

This is entirely upside down. We need to LOWER the retirement age, at least temporarily, to about 58 or 60, in order to acknowledge the current emergency. An emergency, by the way, not caused by retirees or near-retirees but by Pete Peterson’s pals, the Hedge Fund Pirates and Bankers.

Lowering the retirement age will recognize that employers simply do not hire the laid-off older Americans whose jobs have disappeared. It will also clear the field for the laid-off and recently-graduated younger Americans who need jobs to start or resume their lives, and allow them to support their familiies with dignity.

This is a very good point, and exactly what Hoyer et al (who can go to hell) do NOT want to be confronted with. Somebody should ask them why they want to take people’s Social Security away right when they need it. Job market’s impossible for anyone over 50. ***Edited in Moderation***

***Mod Note: Alluding to violence is not allowed.***

Sorry.