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812, 2014

Conservatives Claim We Can’t Afford Social Security & Medicare While Passing Billions in Corporate Tax Breaks…Again

By |December 8th, 2014|Budget, entitlement reform, Medicare, Social Security|

Virtually the first order of business for Congress after November’s Congressional election was to pass $42 billion in tax breaks going largely to corporations.  The House has already approved these giveaways (without providing the “pay fors” they’ve demanded for bills to help average Americans like unemployment extensions or even disaster relief) and the Senate is expected to follow suit this week.  Incredibly, it could have been much worse as the House originally wanted ten times more in corporate giveaways.  A veto threat from President Obama is all that derailed that plan.  Bill Moyers detailed the original package

“The 10-year, $444 billion package includes a few provisions that were popular with Democrats, but would phase out existing tax credits for clean energy development. Mostly, it’s a boon for some of the top corporate tax-avoiders in America. Some 90 percent of the cuts would benefit their bottom lines. One of the biggest beneficiaries would be GE, which, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, claimed tax refunds of $3.1 billion on $27.5 billion in profits between 2008 and 2012. That means the company had a negative tax rate of 11 percent. Other big winners would include Wall Street financial firms, pharmaceutical companies and computer and Internet businesses.” 

Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, highlights one especially outrageous provision in this legislation: 

“The most disturbing part of this legislation is it provides $6.2 billion in tax breaks to companies that ship profits offshore. One of these loopholes – the Active Financing exception, otherwise known as the GE Loophole – benefits General Electric and big Wall Street banks. Congress should be closing offshore tax loopholes, not continuing them.” 

Citizens for Tax Justice offered this analysis: 

Here are just a few of the problems with H.R. 5771: 

? Most of the tax breaks fail to achieve any desirable policy goals. For example, they include bonus depreciation breaks for investments in equipment that the Congressional Research Service have found to be a “relatively ineffective tool for stimulating the economy,[1] a tax credit for research defined so loosely that it includes the work soft drink companies put into developing new flavors,[2] and a tax break that allows General Electric to do financial business offshore without paying U.S. taxes on the profits.

? The tax breaks cannot possibly be effective in encouraging businesses to do anything because they are almost entirely retroactive. The tax breaks actually expired at the end of 2013 and this bill will extend them (almost entirely retroactively) through 2014. These tax provisions are supposedly justified as incentives for companies to do things Congress thinks are desirable, like investing in equipment or research, but that justification makes no sense when tax breaks are provided to businesses for things they have done in the past.

? The bill increases the deficit by $42 billion to provide tax breaks that mostly benefit businesses, even after members of Congress have refused to enact any measure that helps working people unless the costs are offset. The measures that Congress refused to enact without offsets include everything from creating jobs by funding highway projects[3] to extending emergency unemployment benefits.[4] 

As we’ve said before, budgeting is all about priorities.  Did you cast your vote in November supporting candidates who promised to drain billions of dollars from federal revenues for America’s largest corporations, while simultaneously claiming our nation can’t afford programs benefiting average Americans like Social Security and Medicare? 

Probably not. However, that’s exactly the course currently being charted in the lame duck and beyond to the 114th Congress.


1911, 2014

The Social Security “Crisis” Created by Congress

By |November 19th, 2014|Budget, Retirement, Social Security|

While the well-financed Wall Street-backed campaign to convince Americans that Social Security is in crisis (even though the facts prove just the opposite) has sputtered over time, that hasn’t stopped some in Congress from inflicting a death-by-a-billion-cuts budget strategy on the Social Security Administration’s administrative finances. SSA has received less than its budget request in 14 of the last 16 years.  In FY 2011-2013 alone, SSA received nearly $3 billion less than it requested from Congress to do its job.  A job that is increasingly challenging as the agency serves near record number of visitors as the nation’s baby boomers retire.  Not surprisingly these short-sighted “serve more with less” budgets mean beneficiaries are paying the price:

“Each day, almost 163,000 people visit field offices and more than 348,000 people try to reach an SSA agent for assistance.  In FY 2014 about 13% of SSA’s visitors waited over an hour for service.  Despite agency online service initiatives and the reductions of public service ours, field offices in FY 2014 served 40.7 million visitors.  Field office visitors waited 50% longer in FY 2014 than in FY 2012.  In FY 2014, nearly 5.5 million SSA visitors waited over an hour to be served and over 2 million visitors left without service.  SSA’s 800 number network had a marked deterioration in FY 2014 in answering calls to agents, demonstrated by an answer rate of about 54%.  The field office answer rate was about 67%, which also represents a substantial degradation in performance over the past few years.”  — Letter to Office of Management and Budget, signed by 35 Social Security advocacy organizations, November 2014

64 SSA field offices and 533 temporary mobile offices have closed, which is the largest five-year decline in the agency’s 79 year history. In testimony submitted to the Senate Aging Committee earlier this year, NCPSSM President/CEO Max Richtman urged the SSA to reject suggestions that online and self-service options should replace in-person services currently provided in field offices:

“…the National Committee believes any individual who has paid Social Security taxes has the right to face-to-face service within a reasonable distance of their home. The National Committee also is concerned that seniors and low-income individuals who are accustomed to conducting business on a face-to-face basis will suffer undue hardship when faced with the need for a benefit verification letter or SSN printout.  Many in this population lack access to and are not familiar with computers and printers.  I am also concerned that shifting this administrative burden to SSA call centers will only increase the current average wait time of 26 minutes.” 

Social Security advocates, including NCPSSM’s Max Richtman, SSA Acting Commissioner Carolyn Colvin and Chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) were among the attendees of a Capitol Hill conference on the challenges facing the Social Security Administration. All agreed on the need to fund SSA far beyond what Congress has approved in recent years.  Results of a new national poll were also released showing the majority of Americans want to keep Social Security field offices open to serve the millions of Americans who need the one-on-one attention they provide.

It’s time to end the “starve the beast” politics promoted for decades by those opposed to programs like Social Security.  Annual defunding of SSA fulfills a political goal at the expense of millions of American seniors, the disabled, survivors and their families who depend on Social Security.


1711, 2014

Same As It Ever Was: The GOP’s Post-Election Plans for Social Security and Medicare

By |November 17th, 2014|entitlement reform, Max Richtman, Medicare, Retirement, Social Security|

This article was originally posted on Huffington Post.


Max Richtman, President and CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare

The 114th Congress will see many new faces after the 2014 midterms; however, the face of our nation’s middle class remains largely unchanged – they’re poorer, more diverse, getting older and facing a retirement crisis which threatens millions. How will this new Congress address this old reality? Not one of the newly-elected Members of Congress campaigned on promises to cut benefits to Social Security and Medicare, yet it’s already clear the new GOP majority considers lowering corporate tax rates and cutting benefits to middle-class seniors a priority. Same as it ever was.

The disconnect between many in Congress and average Americans on Social Security and Medicare is certainly nothing new. In poll after poll, the American people clearly do not support cutting middle-class benefits in these programs to balance the budget or bankroll tax cuts for the wealthy or large corporations already dodging billions in taxes each year. Contrary to the current political mythology that the American people aren’t willing to be “grownups” and make the “tough choices” for our nation, the fact is, they simply don’t support the benefit-cutting strategy preferred by many Washington politicians. Not only do they oppose cutting benefits, most Americans support boosting benefits.

A new report by the National Academy of Social Insurance, “Americans Make Hard Choices on Social Security” shows that Americans’ support for Social Security is unparalleled and they are willing to pay more in taxes to stabilize the system’s finances and improve benefits. NASI reported:

Seven out of 10 participants prefer a package that would eliminate Social Security’s long-term financing gap without cutting benefits. The preferred package would:

– Gradually, over 10 years, eliminate the cap on earnings taxed for Social Security. With this change, the 6 percent of workers who earn more than the cap would pay into Social Security all year, as other workers do. In return, they would get somewhat higher benefits.
– Gradually, over 20 years, raise the Social Security tax rate that workers and employers each pay from 6.2 percent of earnings to 7.2 percent. A worker earning $50,000 a year would pay about 50 cents a week more each year, matched by the employer.
– Increase Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment to reflect the inflation experienced by seniors.
– Raise Social Security’s minimum benefit so that a worker who pays into Social Security for 30 years or more can retire at 62 or later and have benefits above the federal poverty line.

Exit polling after the midterm election, even in Republican-leaning states, mirrored the findings in the NASI report. Public Policy Polling found 86 percent opposition to allowing any cuts to Social Security and Medicare with 79 percent opposition among Republicans. Voters say they are also less likely to vote for a candidate who supports making cuts to Social Security and Medicare by 70 points. Of course, this isn’t really a surprise to political candidates. It’s why you will rarely hear politicians telling voters they plan to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for the millions of middle-class families who depend on them. Instead, candidates have successfully deployed a dodge-and-deflect strategy built on Orwellian language in which they say they’ll “preserve” these programs when they actually mean privatize, “strengthen” when they mean slash, or “give you choices” when they mean you’re on your own. While that strategy has certainly worked on the campaign trail, what remains to be seen is if the new Republican majority can successfully govern using the same approach.

Congress’ new leadership may want to give former President George Bush a call. Not so many years ago, he believed his “voter mandate” cleared the way to privatize Social Security – cutting benefits and putting workers’ guaranteed benefits at risk on Wall Street. That didn’t turn out so well for the President simply because the American people understood then, as they do today, the abiding value of America’s retirement and health security programs. Outside Washington, Social Security and Medicare aren’t regarded as political or partisan because they are synonymous with economic survival for millions of workers, retirees, people with disabilities and their families.

The difference between campaigning and governing is vast — something the members of the 114th Congress will discover first hand if cuts to Social Security and Medicare remain on their legislative agenda.

Follow Max Richtman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/maxrichtman


711, 2014

Social Security, Medicare and the GOP Congress

By |November 7th, 2014|entitlement reform, Medicare, privatization, Social Security|

The Senate’s new majority leader has been true to his word…Mitch McConnell still won’t talk about his plans for Social Security and Medicare, even now that he’s been re-elected and will serve as the new leader of the Senate.

However, House Speaker John Boehner has no problem laying out the GOP plan.  There are no real surprises here, it’s basically the GOP/Ryan Budget version 4 (or 5, we’ve lost count) which has only avoided full passage because of the formerly Democrat-controlled Senate. As usual, lowering corporate tax rates while cutting Social Security and Medicare are items #1 and #2 of the GOP 5 point plan.  Lower taxes for businesses, Couponcare for seniors and raising the retirement age for Social Security are now back on the table with the Republican-led Congress.

Is anyone really surprised?


Conservatives Claim We Can’t Afford Social Security & Medicare While Passing Billions in Corporate Tax Breaks…Again

By |December 8th, 2014|Budget, entitlement reform, Medicare, Social Security|

Virtually the first order of business for Congress after November’s Congressional election was to pass $42 billion in tax breaks going largely to corporations.  The House has already approved these giveaways (without providing the “pay fors” they’ve demanded for bills to help average Americans like unemployment extensions or even disaster relief) and the Senate is expected to follow suit this week.  Incredibly, it could have been much worse as the House originally wanted ten times more in corporate giveaways.  A veto threat from President Obama is all that derailed that plan.  Bill Moyers detailed the original package

“The 10-year, $444 billion package includes a few provisions that were popular with Democrats, but would phase out existing tax credits for clean energy development. Mostly, it’s a boon for some of the top corporate tax-avoiders in America. Some 90 percent of the cuts would benefit their bottom lines. One of the biggest beneficiaries would be GE, which, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, claimed tax refunds of $3.1 billion on $27.5 billion in profits between 2008 and 2012. That means the company had a negative tax rate of 11 percent. Other big winners would include Wall Street financial firms, pharmaceutical companies and computer and Internet businesses.” 

Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, highlights one especially outrageous provision in this legislation: 

“The most disturbing part of this legislation is it provides $6.2 billion in tax breaks to companies that ship profits offshore. One of these loopholes – the Active Financing exception, otherwise known as the GE Loophole – benefits General Electric and big Wall Street banks. Congress should be closing offshore tax loopholes, not continuing them.” 

Citizens for Tax Justice offered this analysis: 

Here are just a few of the problems with H.R. 5771: 

? Most of the tax breaks fail to achieve any desirable policy goals. For example, they include bonus depreciation breaks for investments in equipment that the Congressional Research Service have found to be a “relatively ineffective tool for stimulating the economy,[1] a tax credit for research defined so loosely that it includes the work soft drink companies put into developing new flavors,[2] and a tax break that allows General Electric to do financial business offshore without paying U.S. taxes on the profits.

? The tax breaks cannot possibly be effective in encouraging businesses to do anything because they are almost entirely retroactive. The tax breaks actually expired at the end of 2013 and this bill will extend them (almost entirely retroactively) through 2014. These tax provisions are supposedly justified as incentives for companies to do things Congress thinks are desirable, like investing in equipment or research, but that justification makes no sense when tax breaks are provided to businesses for things they have done in the past.

? The bill increases the deficit by $42 billion to provide tax breaks that mostly benefit businesses, even after members of Congress have refused to enact any measure that helps working people unless the costs are offset. The measures that Congress refused to enact without offsets include everything from creating jobs by funding highway projects[3] to extending emergency unemployment benefits.[4] 

As we’ve said before, budgeting is all about priorities.  Did you cast your vote in November supporting candidates who promised to drain billions of dollars from federal revenues for America’s largest corporations, while simultaneously claiming our nation can’t afford programs benefiting average Americans like Social Security and Medicare? 

Probably not. However, that’s exactly the course currently being charted in the lame duck and beyond to the 114th Congress.


The Social Security “Crisis” Created by Congress

By |November 19th, 2014|Budget, Retirement, Social Security|

While the well-financed Wall Street-backed campaign to convince Americans that Social Security is in crisis (even though the facts prove just the opposite) has sputtered over time, that hasn’t stopped some in Congress from inflicting a death-by-a-billion-cuts budget strategy on the Social Security Administration’s administrative finances. SSA has received less than its budget request in 14 of the last 16 years.  In FY 2011-2013 alone, SSA received nearly $3 billion less than it requested from Congress to do its job.  A job that is increasingly challenging as the agency serves near record number of visitors as the nation’s baby boomers retire.  Not surprisingly these short-sighted “serve more with less” budgets mean beneficiaries are paying the price:

“Each day, almost 163,000 people visit field offices and more than 348,000 people try to reach an SSA agent for assistance.  In FY 2014 about 13% of SSA’s visitors waited over an hour for service.  Despite agency online service initiatives and the reductions of public service ours, field offices in FY 2014 served 40.7 million visitors.  Field office visitors waited 50% longer in FY 2014 than in FY 2012.  In FY 2014, nearly 5.5 million SSA visitors waited over an hour to be served and over 2 million visitors left without service.  SSA’s 800 number network had a marked deterioration in FY 2014 in answering calls to agents, demonstrated by an answer rate of about 54%.  The field office answer rate was about 67%, which also represents a substantial degradation in performance over the past few years.”  — Letter to Office of Management and Budget, signed by 35 Social Security advocacy organizations, November 2014

64 SSA field offices and 533 temporary mobile offices have closed, which is the largest five-year decline in the agency’s 79 year history. In testimony submitted to the Senate Aging Committee earlier this year, NCPSSM President/CEO Max Richtman urged the SSA to reject suggestions that online and self-service options should replace in-person services currently provided in field offices:

“…the National Committee believes any individual who has paid Social Security taxes has the right to face-to-face service within a reasonable distance of their home. The National Committee also is concerned that seniors and low-income individuals who are accustomed to conducting business on a face-to-face basis will suffer undue hardship when faced with the need for a benefit verification letter or SSN printout.  Many in this population lack access to and are not familiar with computers and printers.  I am also concerned that shifting this administrative burden to SSA call centers will only increase the current average wait time of 26 minutes.” 

Social Security advocates, including NCPSSM’s Max Richtman, SSA Acting Commissioner Carolyn Colvin and Chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) were among the attendees of a Capitol Hill conference on the challenges facing the Social Security Administration. All agreed on the need to fund SSA far beyond what Congress has approved in recent years.  Results of a new national poll were also released showing the majority of Americans want to keep Social Security field offices open to serve the millions of Americans who need the one-on-one attention they provide.

It’s time to end the “starve the beast” politics promoted for decades by those opposed to programs like Social Security.  Annual defunding of SSA fulfills a political goal at the expense of millions of American seniors, the disabled, survivors and their families who depend on Social Security.


Same As It Ever Was: The GOP’s Post-Election Plans for Social Security and Medicare

By |November 17th, 2014|entitlement reform, Max Richtman, Medicare, Retirement, Social Security|

This article was originally posted on Huffington Post.


Max Richtman, President and CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare

The 114th Congress will see many new faces after the 2014 midterms; however, the face of our nation’s middle class remains largely unchanged – they’re poorer, more diverse, getting older and facing a retirement crisis which threatens millions. How will this new Congress address this old reality? Not one of the newly-elected Members of Congress campaigned on promises to cut benefits to Social Security and Medicare, yet it’s already clear the new GOP majority considers lowering corporate tax rates and cutting benefits to middle-class seniors a priority. Same as it ever was.

The disconnect between many in Congress and average Americans on Social Security and Medicare is certainly nothing new. In poll after poll, the American people clearly do not support cutting middle-class benefits in these programs to balance the budget or bankroll tax cuts for the wealthy or large corporations already dodging billions in taxes each year. Contrary to the current political mythology that the American people aren’t willing to be “grownups” and make the “tough choices” for our nation, the fact is, they simply don’t support the benefit-cutting strategy preferred by many Washington politicians. Not only do they oppose cutting benefits, most Americans support boosting benefits.

A new report by the National Academy of Social Insurance, “Americans Make Hard Choices on Social Security” shows that Americans’ support for Social Security is unparalleled and they are willing to pay more in taxes to stabilize the system’s finances and improve benefits. NASI reported:

Seven out of 10 participants prefer a package that would eliminate Social Security’s long-term financing gap without cutting benefits. The preferred package would:

– Gradually, over 10 years, eliminate the cap on earnings taxed for Social Security. With this change, the 6 percent of workers who earn more than the cap would pay into Social Security all year, as other workers do. In return, they would get somewhat higher benefits.
– Gradually, over 20 years, raise the Social Security tax rate that workers and employers each pay from 6.2 percent of earnings to 7.2 percent. A worker earning $50,000 a year would pay about 50 cents a week more each year, matched by the employer.
– Increase Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment to reflect the inflation experienced by seniors.
– Raise Social Security’s minimum benefit so that a worker who pays into Social Security for 30 years or more can retire at 62 or later and have benefits above the federal poverty line.

Exit polling after the midterm election, even in Republican-leaning states, mirrored the findings in the NASI report. Public Policy Polling found 86 percent opposition to allowing any cuts to Social Security and Medicare with 79 percent opposition among Republicans. Voters say they are also less likely to vote for a candidate who supports making cuts to Social Security and Medicare by 70 points. Of course, this isn’t really a surprise to political candidates. It’s why you will rarely hear politicians telling voters they plan to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for the millions of middle-class families who depend on them. Instead, candidates have successfully deployed a dodge-and-deflect strategy built on Orwellian language in which they say they’ll “preserve” these programs when they actually mean privatize, “strengthen” when they mean slash, or “give you choices” when they mean you’re on your own. While that strategy has certainly worked on the campaign trail, what remains to be seen is if the new Republican majority can successfully govern using the same approach.

Congress’ new leadership may want to give former President George Bush a call. Not so many years ago, he believed his “voter mandate” cleared the way to privatize Social Security – cutting benefits and putting workers’ guaranteed benefits at risk on Wall Street. That didn’t turn out so well for the President simply because the American people understood then, as they do today, the abiding value of America’s retirement and health security programs. Outside Washington, Social Security and Medicare aren’t regarded as political or partisan because they are synonymous with economic survival for millions of workers, retirees, people with disabilities and their families.

The difference between campaigning and governing is vast — something the members of the 114th Congress will discover first hand if cuts to Social Security and Medicare remain on their legislative agenda.

Follow Max Richtman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/maxrichtman


Social Security, Medicare and the GOP Congress

By |November 7th, 2014|entitlement reform, Medicare, privatization, Social Security|

The Senate’s new majority leader has been true to his word…Mitch McConnell still won’t talk about his plans for Social Security and Medicare, even now that he’s been re-elected and will serve as the new leader of the Senate.

However, House Speaker John Boehner has no problem laying out the GOP plan.  There are no real surprises here, it’s basically the GOP/Ryan Budget version 4 (or 5, we’ve lost count) which has only avoided full passage because of the formerly Democrat-controlled Senate. As usual, lowering corporate tax rates while cutting Social Security and Medicare are items #1 and #2 of the GOP 5 point plan.  Lower taxes for businesses, Couponcare for seniors and raising the retirement age for Social Security are now back on the table with the Republican-led Congress.

Is anyone really surprised?



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