Raising the retirement age is a 19% theft from all the people who have been paying extra into their Social Security INSURANCE for the last 30 years, and who have thereby created its current surplus.
Raising the Social Security retirement age is a theft of benefits with unfair regressive impact, since it hurts those who are most vulnerable, those who already struggle with inadequate income for existence. Many, through no fault of their own, have no other means of support.
Raising the retirement age is even more despicable theft when it is taken from those who have been especially generous: those who have been unpaid caregivers, those who have taken time from (paid) work to raise the next generation – something very necessary to our future. It is despicable theft from those who have been disadvantaged by social inequities.
Raising the Social Security retirement age increases unemployment, at the very time we may be sliding into a second Great Depression. On the other hand, lowering the retirement age to 55 would cut unemployment, and save some of the victims of Wall Street’s greed and corruption from starvation and homelessness. Do any of our leaders care?
Raising the retirement age is theft from the vulnerable - to placate Wall Street! Those who need Social Security have already been seriously injured by Wall Street’s greed and recklessness: unemployment is exploding, people have lost the equity in their homes, and their savings have been trashed, through no fault of their own, by Wall Street’s actions.
FICA is already an unfair regressive tax. Working people pay a much larger percentage of their incomes into it than the wealthy do. If a problem can be predicted, 30 years from now, the equitable way to deal with that theoretical problem would be to remove the income cap on contributions to FICA. The more obscenely rich people are, the smaller the proportion of their income they pay into the Social Security trust fund. That is unjust.
Social security benefits are economically inadequate as they are, and should be increased as a simple matter of decency. Yet many people have nothing else to rely on. There are nowhere near enough jobs, those over 40 are being discriminated against, home equity has crumbled, savings have been trashed – even as Wall Street diverts more and more of our national resources, produces nothing useful, continues the gambling that will lead to another crash, and awards itself incredible bonuses with our tax money.
Please call your senators and congresspeople about this – even the good ones. They really don’t all get it. I recently had a shocking brief conversation with mine (one of the best). DC is a very different world than ours, and they hear more from each other than they do from us. They give the story line in DC more weight than they do what they hear from us (ignorant peasants that we are). Please call and email!
Please call! Please email!
To recap:
- Wall Street crashed the global economy with greed, dishonesty, and recklessness
- We bailed them out with our tax dollars, and they are again rolling in as much money as before.
- They’ve gone back to the activities that destroyed the economy, awarding themselves the same incredible bonuses for it.
- Now, because they’ve cleaned us out and we don’t have any more money to give them, they want to impose "austerity" on the Americans who are struggling to survive! No austerity for the guilty parties, of course.