Granny Bird Award: Alan Simpson

This edition of the Granny Bird Award (given from time to time to those who go out of their way to damage elders' rights and benefits) goes to former Senator Alan Simpson for his work on the bipartisan "cat food commission" and his comments thereafter explaining why Social Security is a socialist plot which was never intended to serve the interests of elders. I could have given him the award months ago, and probably should have, but I was holding off to see how far he could shove his foot in his mouth before someone in the press finally called him on his mendacity.

Michael Hiltzig did just that in a recent column in the Business Section of the Los Angeles Times.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who has long been the go-to guy for obnoxiously know-nothing takes on Social Security, this week uncorked yet another spectacularly misinformed "factoid" about the program's history.

In a letter to Max Richtman, a former Senate staffer who now heads the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, Simpson asserted that Social Security's creators did not design it to be a retirement program. The letter dated Friday was obtained and made public by ABC News.

Simpson wrote in his unbelieveably rude and ignorant letter to Richtman: "You know damn well that the system was never created as a 'retirement' -- it was an 'income supplement' to take care of folks working in CCC camps and who lost everything in the Great Depression."

It's hard to know what to think of Simpson's version of history, but the term "sheer fantasy" comes to mind. ... [Emphasis added]

Hiltzig then proceeds to demolish Simpson's assertion by nailing down the actual history of the legislation and the express intentions behind it. It's clear that Simpson's allegations don't even merit the designation of "truthy", much less truth, but that certainly hasn't stopped Simpson from flapping his gums on the issue.

The man is a liar, and his lies go to the very heart of a program that is keeping a lot of us alive and eating. He is, to be polite, an arrant knave whose head is so far up his netherparts that major surgery would be required to restore any vision to him. Ironically, this is from a man who after three terms in the Senate retired with a cushy government pension and the best health care plan the American taxpayers can provide.

But here's the scary part, and Hiltzig nails it:

Alan Simpson obviously has a problem with the facts, and with the basic concept of civility in public discourse. Yet he's been held up by President Obama as a paragon of bipartisan policy-making. So here's a question for the president: Does Alan Simpson speak for him on Social Security? [Emphasis added]

It is the question that should also be posed to Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the House who has suggested that the catfood commission's suggestions (no report ever issued) must be considered, and to every senator and representative in Congress. Apparently the Democrats have taken this as a fall-back position given the GOP's drive to completely demolish the system in favor of a Wall Street privatized version of retirement funding.

ENOUGH!!

Call, fax, write, email your congress critters and scream long and hard about this travesty. If the funding of the trust fund is such a concern remind them that the easiest, quickest, and smartest solution is raising the payroll deduction cap so that those who make more than $110,000 per year can pay a few bucks more to ensure that their parents and they themselves have a guaranteed income upon retirement.

Do it.

Now.

Restating The Obvious, Again

One of the most maddening things in the world is watching people proceed to make decisions based on assumptions which are clearly unfounded, wrong, even insane, even after they have been told those assumptions have no basis in reality. One can only assume that the folks who operate this way are either crazy or have a hidden agenda. This whole "debate" on Social Security and its solvency is filled with people like this, so it's a constant battle to point out the problem.

Fortunately there are some good souls up to the task, as this op-ed piece shows. Here's the bio for the two writers of the article: "Nancy Altman, the author of "The Battle for Social Security," and Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University, co-direct Social Security Works (socialsecurity-works.org)." Both are obviously deeply concerned by the direction the Cat Food Commission appears to be taking, as evidenced by the preliminary report issued by the co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Allan Simpson.

As the authors point out, both Simpson and Bowles are no friends of Social Security, especially as it is currently constituted. Both have made it clear that they intended to include Social Security in the work of the commission which was called to deal with the issue of reducing the federal deficit. That was their first mistake, one that they keep repeating and repeating. Our intrepid authors point out the fallacy of the assumption underlying that review of Social Security.

In releasing their plan, the co-chairs went out of their way to make clear that they were proposing changes to Social Security "for its own sake, not for deficit reduction." This was an acknowledgement that Social Security does not and cannot contribute to the deficit, because it has no borrowing authority and by law cannot pay benefits unless it has sufficient income and reserves to cover their cost. But Simpson and Bowles just couldn't keep their hands off the program. [Emphasis added]

Memorize this, class, because it's going to be one the test: SOCIAL SECURITY DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEFICIT.

Altman and Kingson then move on to the other parts of the report based on some pretty obvious and quite dangerous wrong assumptions. Here's my favorite:

Bowles and Simpson argue that we should raise the retirement age because people are living longer. But not everyone is. Over the last quarter-century, life expectancy of lower-income men increased by one year, compared to five for upper-income men. And lower-income women have experienced declines in longevity.

The co-chairs apparently think most Americans can work as long as politicians, Wall Street billionaires and others who have all of life's advantages. In effect, the Bowles-Simpson plan says to America's workers that they must work longer for less because the rich are living longer. [Emphasis added]

BINGO!

But the authors don't stop there, they also reiterate the most obvious way to shore up the Social Security Trust Fund for another 75 years: raise or eliminate the cap on payroll contributions to the fund. The wealthy pay far less a percentage of their income into Social Security than the rest of us. Raising the cap to $200,000 would mitigate some of that unfairness and keep the Trust Fund in business for another couple of generations.

This is not rocket science, brain surgery, or even Accounting 101. And Simpson and Bowles are not uneducated and presumably not insane. They are both, however, well-off financially, which might explain that hidden agenda I referenced at the start.

If Congress doesn't fight this proposal and defeat it soundly, 2012 might very well make the 2010 bloodbath look like a walk in the park, as Altman and Kingson suggest. We all need to make that very clear, because that assumption, unlike those of Simpson and Bowles, is founded in reality.