Left In Lowell

MA-05: Patrick Murphy on Social Security

11 Responses to “MA-05: Patrick Murphy on Social Security”

1. Jacob Says:
   June 18th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

   We could just deport tax absorbing illegal aliens and gut the welfare system (aka get the lazy fatass US citizens working), but that is just one guy talking.

   If that fails we could, horror of horrors, let the individual, not the state decide where there money goes.

   This guy is an idiot. Taxing corporations (sorry, reducing corporate welfare) will not get more people working.

2. Lynne Says:
   June 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

   Your compassionate and reality-based commentary astounds me. (That’s sarcasm, by the way.)

   Libertarian talking points and screeds are getting really old around here, not to mention, an easily-disputed point of view that fails to face reality about economies, money, power, and government. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. *yawn*

3. Lynne Says:
   June 18th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

   Oh and FYI, keep up the insults like that, and you’ll be banned. I don’t take kindly to someone calling a candidate who comes here and engages voters names. Thanks.

4. Mr. Lynne Says:
   June 18th, 2007 at 10:57 pm

   … yeah… its not like we taxed corperations much during the biggest economic boom of our parent’s lifetime…. oh wait.

5. Shawn Says:
   June 19th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

   Because Social Security is really about the ability of current workers to pay for those who have come before us, the solvency of Social Security largely depends on how productive our workforce becomes in the next few decades. A highly productive workforce can meet the demands placed on the system by retirees. Productivity requires reinvestment and investment requires funds to be available from a high savings rate. Both of these are at all-time lows. We must also expand our workforce toward full employment so that, in a narrow policy sense, more people are contributing to the system.

   Social Security is a pyramid scheme that has a short lifetime unless you do one of two things… reduce the massive benefits (crazy-checks, etc), or increase the number of participants. If you’re not willing to get welfare people working to “increase productivity,” then you must find a process to increase legal, permanent immigration (not just let anyone over the border, pay them under the table, and ship all their income out of the country.. actually create new citizens.. without harming the economy in doing so).

   “Reinvestment and investment” are the job of the private investment segment.. and the fact is that the investment economy has been doing excellently for the last 5-6 years (I know my investments are up well over 50% in the last couple years).

   He is mixing personal savings with that of the investment economy.. two very different issues.

   Reduce the payroll tax to encourage work and job growth, and replace lost revenue through pollution taxes on things we want to discourage like carbon emissions and by raising the payroll tax cap..

   Reduce the payroll tax. Excellent idea. For everyone.
   Those at the bottom need more to be able to take care of themselves, those at the top use more to invest in a greater economy. As he said above, reinvestment and investment are necessary. If you take away all the money from those who have it to invest.. you are harming your own cause.

   And moving the taxes to the pet cause of the month won’t solve the problem for the poor. The cost of milk and food is going up for them too because these taxes are becoming inflationary.

   Reduce the national debt, which is essentially a tax on future generations, by cutting corporate welfare, unnecessary earmark appropriations and tax expenditures, subsidies to oil, mining and timber industries, and the largest farms, and by reforming the tax code for simplicity and fairness.

   Reduce the national debt is also an excellent idea. The first thing to cut is spending. Earmarks for pet projects are always the first to target.. but one person’s pet project is anothers cause. That “bridge to nowhere” was important to that small community in Alaska. Those funds for arts in Lowell are important to you. You’ll never get rid of em all.

   What is “corporate welfare”? Which “subsidies” are wrong? Do we subsidize research in alternative energies? Its the “oil” and energy industries that know how best to work towards those ends (I prefer subsidies based on results. Accountability should be part of all government spending.. from research to public education).

   And I remember Reagan setting that copy of the tax code down on the counter in front of him during that State of the Union speech.. calling for simplification.

   As long as you have people thinking that its the government’s job to socially manipulate society, the tax code will remain complicated. The purse strings are the only real control you ever have.

   Protect private pensions by strengthening the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and ensuring that legal pension obligations are met.

   Encourage work and full employment by providing for a public need unmet by the private sector with a jobs program based on the principles of the WPA and CCC. Projects could provide for a more sustainable public transportation sector and a public energy infrastructure to meet future needs.

   Typical “new deal” thought. Doesn’t work.

   Why should we protect private pensions with public money? Let the pension companies fund their own insurance. And the only way to “ensure that the legal obligations are met” is by punishing offenders using the tax code (doesnt that go against “simplify the tax code”).

   I’m all for encouraging work too, but not by creating a bunch of do-nothing government jobs that will just increase the government spending and national debt.

   The better method to increase jobs is to reduce taxes on capital gains and investment.. as well as encourage corporate reinvestment in R&D via the tax codes.

   Encourage worker productivity by channeling public investment into a better education system and a universal single-payer expansion of Medicare for all Americans. The more productive our workforce becomes, the better we are able to meet demands placed on the system.

   How do you measure “encourage productivity … public investment”? How much more do we dump into an education system that refuses to accept accountability?
   I say change the who education system. Start rewarding academic success, move the best and brightest and hardest workers up quickly. Get back to levels and tracking. The watered down system of trying to equalize everyone has failed us completely. It encourages mediocrity.

   Medicare is another example of the same thing. Basic, lowest level care for everyone. There is be no incentive for the doctors or service industry to do better or improve.(already, there is disincentive for dentists and doctors to get involved in the current system).. But health care can be a topic all of its own…

   Encourage workers’ savings rates by increasing the earned income tax credit, reducing the payroll tax for middle- to low income wage earners and replacing the regressive 401K contribution credit with a more equitable program of matching savings contributions up to a certain capped amount.

   People who make little money, and thus get the “EITC” tend not to save anyways. By definition, they need the money to subsist. Giving the more doesn’t solve the savings problem.
   Again, reducing the payroll tax in any form is good. Why you need to reduce it more for “middle to low income” earners I don’t understand. We already have a “progressive” tax system at the federal level. At what point do we stop punishing people who work hard to succeed?

   Ask any small business owner.. who barely makes a profit, but sees cash flow in the hundreds of thousands, and has invested the same in their business, if they think its fair for them to be punished for working hard while the customer coming in to buy lobster on their government food vouchers are laughing in their face.

   All this liberal, social do-gooder stuff has failed us. Since the Johnson administration and the “war on poverty” we have created a huge welfare class, a society that encourages and often celebrates lack of productivity, and have become a magnet to all throughout the world who want to come here and take from the US without joining in and supporting the system.

   No thanks. I think we’ve had enough of it.

6. sco Says:
   June 19th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

   OMG! I think I just saw a welfare queen drive by in a Cadillac! Someone call Zombie Reagan!

7. Lynne Says:
   June 19th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

   *snort*

   And I think that’s all that’s worth, really…at least the first bits.

   SS is an insurance plan. And it’s not a pyramid scheme. It’s actually quite solvent with just a little tweaking, and that’s needed only because lots and lots of young men came home from WWII and had lots of sex and babies with their wives. It’s doable. And temporary.

   Some of Shawn’s points do bear addressing, though, but I don’t really have time now. He’s very smart, but mostly wrong.

   The most and longest prosperous times in this country are because people realized that government intervention was necessary to even the playing field between haves and have-nots. It’s impossible to become a have for most people if you do not have that even playing field. And now what do we have? The dismantling of that, and the gap between rich and poor growing exponentially, with a shrinking and endangered middle class.

8. Lynne Says:
   June 19th, 2007 at 1:36 pm

   RE government subsidies…I do agree, they are hard to get rid of once in place. But we do need government intervention to get off of oil (it’s just that hard, and impossible to get it done letting the market do it, because by the time that works, we’ll be up to our necks in melted glaciers). I think the subsidies should come in the form of grants and loans to individuals, to help buy the more expensive renewable energy options that are coming down the pike (and for R&D through our universities to constantly improve those technologies). Once enough people start buyng them in large masses, the cost comes down as with every other new technology, and then we can move to the new infrastructure.

   If I could get some (more) help to get solar panels on the roof of whatever new home I buy, I’d do it in a heart beat.

9. waittilnextyr Says:
   June 19th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

   “and the fact is that the investment economy has been doing excellently for the last 5-6 years (I know my investments are up well over 50% in the last couple years).”

   Don’t be too sure of that, as it is only play money you have earned. Try to buy something tangible (like a house, oil, gasoline, gold) with it, and you may find out you have actually lost ground.

   And when on the topic of spending, why not consider the $1T wasted on a preemptive war that has no end?

10. Patrick Murphy Says:
    June 21st, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    A few clarifications in response to Shawn:

    I thought I was clear enough in suggesting that we must do more to encourage work and, as importantly, the availability of work in our society. The unemployment rate is not calculated simply as those who do not work. It is a calculation of those who are both willing and actively seeking work, but cannot find it. The calculation also omits those who have become either discouraged or complacent to the point that they are no longer seeking work. This represents a great failure in both our private and public sectors, and is why I suggest that if, after my other policy suggestions for encouraging work and a productive work force, there is still an unemployment gap, that government should fill it with projects that produce infrastructure necessary for future economic growth. Such a policy is based on the belief that there is no acceptable statistic for unemployment, that we must put people before poorly reasoned economic theory, that work gives an individual so much more than a simple federal subsidy—that work provides the means for a good life, the opportunity for people to develop their faculties and fulfill their potential, and finally, the chance to be a part of a productive endeavor larger than themselves. Work does not simply feed families, it nourishes the soul. A jobs program hardly increases spending if unemployment benefits are used instead for the benefits of employment in this effort, but substantially increases public investment.

    It is you, Shawn, who has mixed up what investment means. I use “investment”—whether public or private—not in the narrow sense of your booming stock portfolio (the interest on which is not “earned income,” but in the wider macroeconomic sense of how we are spending our limited resources to provide for a stronger future. This has, of course, everything to do with both personal and national savings rates. If consumption is driving most of our economic growth then we are not reinvesting for any future and more widely enjoyed growth. The more we save, the more is available for reinvestment. If the private sector seeks only profit and not an agreed public good, then our government must direct investment spending toward those goals to which we give priority—education, health care, infrastructure and research.

    Corporate welfare and government subsidies which go overwhelmingly to the biggest businesses are the result of compromised Congressmen who have been bought with campaign contributions. They effect a consolidation of power within various industries—oil being the most infamous—and weaken or drive out (as in the case of the farming business) smaller businesses who cannot compete with such unfair advantages. If you are unwilling to cut this large and largely ineffective spending, you will certainly have a tough time cutting the national debt. Oil companies may know best how to find alternative fuels and energy, but they have not done it. Why? Because knowledge is not enough; wisdom is needed to direct that knowledge toward the greater good.

    Our whole education system must indeed be changed, but “tracking” misunderstands what education is and what its benefits are. I also do not argue for the “lowest level of care for everyone,” but instead for the highest level of care for everyone. The current system of Medicare can be dramatically improved for seniors, and simultaneously expanded for all children, and then for all Americans. This plan will, in fact, help both small business employers and employees, many of whom work hard but are still unable to gain access to affordable health care insurance. One more policy point: calling Social Security benefits “massive” shows a real lack of a working knowledge of the system. After a lifetime of hard physical labor, my 56 year-old cousin with whom I work has at least eleven more years to go before receiving his 1,200 dollars a month. Massive? Will health care, housing, food and energy be cheaper after the next decade passes?

    I’m running independent of any party or political affiliation. I do not believe in these simplistic liberal or conservative or party labels which are necessarily a reduction, a shying away from truth. I choose to define myself. But if others (like yourself) wish to define me, I can think of no better a description than seeking simply to “do good.”

    all the best,
    Patrick

11. Daniel Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 7:02 am

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article MA-05: Patrick Murphy on Social Security, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

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