Friday, July 22, 2011

Letter to Sen. Tom Coburn About His Radical Social Security Plan

I have read your proposals for Social Security with dismay. Having looked over the SSA figures and having read the CBO suggestions for possible fixes, I have seen that it is very easy to fix Social Security for the next 75 years with no benefit cuts. Simply raise the Social Security taxable income cap, and then sometime in the next few years raise payroll taxes by 2% (1% employee, 1% employer) over 20 years.

Your proposal clearly is partisan politics with no basis in reality. It seems quite apparent that you are an admirer of Ayn Rand, who was a proponent of "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism," and that you now believe, as did Rand, that taxation is state sponsored legal theft. This is the politics of greed and social irresponsibility.

We have a Republican party which proposes abolishment of child labor laws, minimum wage laws, anti-trust laws, and consumer protection laws, while striving to enact restrictions on American citizens in the name of religion. We have a Republican party which values free trade over fair trade, resulting in the decimation of the American industrial sector with the concomitant loss of tens of millions of jobs.

You cannot drastically reduce the means and then complain that we are not living within our means. You cannot take just about all of the increase in wealth for the last 30 years and then shift the tax burden to the middle class. You cannot refuse to pay living wages and decent benefits and then wonder why many of the working class need assistance programs.

You cannot pay for retirement insurance by taxing the working class, and then act as if their retirement is paid out of general revenue. You cannot cut benefits or increase the age of retirement for a program that has a $2.6 trillion surplus. You cannot expect people to believe that cuts to Social Security will reduce the national debt, when Social Security does not get money from the treasury to pay benefits. The treasury borrows from Social Security in the form of U.S. Treasury Bonds.

We are tired of your class warfare. Wake up and ask yourself who you really represent.

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