Social Security

Under the continued influence of Tea Party insanity, one of the proposals drifting witlessly around Washington DC is to resolve Social Security for once and for all by privatizing it. There is not one sane reason for doing that, and as far as Montana is concerned, there are many. You know some of them, undoubtedly. You maybe are one of them. Those reasons are the thousands of Montanans whose life time of skilled, dedicated and often dangerous work who retired with fully vested pension benefits from the Montana Power Company. Those pension funds made up a substantial part of the cash assets of that once great company. Those people, whose life of effort to The Company had netted them a share of its wealth, fully expected to live the rest of their lives on a comfortable, middle class income. That didnt happen, because a new and supposedly aggressive company management team bet all that money on a risky adventure into the unfamiliar and speculative world of telecommunications. Montana Power went under and with it took all those loyal employees.

Memo to the Republican Party: Dont even try to peddle that snake oil in Montana. Social Security is the single greatest example of Americas greatness and its continued leadership in the worlds economy and all that goes with it. We trust our Government to remember and act on one simple premise: the only source of its power is the continued informed consent of American voters to exercise our power, only our behalf and answerable only to us. During the time of economic despair of the Great

Depression, we created something equivalent to a Mutual Insurance Company a corporation owned and operated by its policy holders. Through nearly universal payroll taxation, we have invested a percentage of our earnings, week by week and month by month, into a common fund, to be paid back to us when, because of disability or old age, we can no longer work. Why do we put this into a government agency rather than create a single, national, private corporation to do the same thing? Simple. The federal government is a single, national public corporation which is already doing it, whose management we elect, confirm or dismiss from office every two, four or six years. We own that corporation. The public corporation which is the United States Government is not allowed by its stakeholders, working American voters, to default on its debts. Although a small and, I pray, unrepresentative, body of economic and political radicals have tried to do to all of us what Baines Capital did so well to the shareholders of companies it saved, they havent succeeded. I am not nave enough to believe that they arent planning right now to pick some non-negotiable issue and deny funding to the agencies of the Executive Branch until they get their way. That theyve been able to shut down the Government briefly on two occasions is unbelievable. It flatly violates the Fourteenth Amendments unarguable directive that The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. The power house of Americas economy is the productivity, work ethic, skills and know-how of middle-class workers. Our immeasurable social asset is the combined skills, experience, talents and commitments of retired people, which could be available to help lift young families in poverty into the middle class. But when retired skilled workers have to take menial jobs or get on welfare to survive, they have neither the time nor the energy to do what the elders of every human culture in history up to now have done. It is the function of the elders to provide service, wisdom, guidance and help to youngsters who are struggling. We can, and I will introduce or cosign, and fight to pass, legislation which will raise social security benefits to parity with a half-century ago. This will be funded by two measures: First, the trust fund must be administered by an independent board at least half of whose members must be elected by by working Americans who are paying into,

anticipating withdrawing from, or currently being paid by the Social Security Administration. Congressional tampering with the trust fund must be absolutely forbidden: Americans do not want their piggy bank be robbed by Congress. Second, the present cap on income, beyond which FICA contributions do not increase, must be removed. The current rate paid by an employee, not counting Medicare, is 6.2%, and is capped at $117,000. This means that a worker paid $40,000 per year contributes around $2500 towards her retirement. An executive in her same company with a $400,000 annual salary does not pay $25,000 into social security, but slightly less than $12,000. The CEO of the company, with an annual salary of a million dollars, doesnt pay $125,000 into the system, but slightly less than $12,000. Because of the cap, the percentage actually taken out to pay FICA taxes decreases with higher salaries. Because of the cap, average workers pay at 6.2% rate while CEOs pay 0.25% or less. Repairing the Social Security network is a major part of the financial reforms I will support and work for from Day 1 of my six year, full time, one term career as a freshman senator. Making money once more the servant of people rather than continuing to force Americans to be slaves to money is an urgent necessity. Please stand with me to send a clear message to Wall Street, K Street and Dallas, that the rights not conferred to the Federal and State Governments are reserved to the people, and that people are living, warm, flesh and blood beings with hopes and dreams, and one vote each. Our American Experiment is based on belief that the will of the people, one vote at a time, is mightier by far than an infinite flood of corporate dollars. Protect your future, and the world in which your grandchildren will live, by repudiating the power brokers, the money lenders, the financial manipulators and the self-serving uber-billionaires, by working for and voting for your independence from them. Footnotes and extraneous thoughts One of the very first things I am going to do after Im elected is give myself the opportunity and pleasure to sit down and meet Massachusetts junior and freshman senator, Elizabeth Warren. I want the opportunity to get to know this wonderful and formidable lady. She is an example of what a dedicated, principled lawmaker with no seniority and no inside track with the Washington, DC power brokers. But I also want one of my very first acts after I am sworn in to

be to sign on to her bill to expand Social Security, rather than cut benefits yet further, as seems to be the plan of the right-over-the-edge fringe of what used to be the Republican Party. Social Security today, at least in part because the Social Security Trust Fund has been used by Congress as a piggy bank for decades, is a tattered caricature of the magnificent security net established during the Great Depression, and strengthened through the 1950s and 1960s. Social Security is not an unearned welfare entitlement as its opponents would have you believe, but a national, portable pension plan into which working Americans and their employers pay a percentage of earned wages. Its structure is not unlike that of a mutual insurance company or a corporate pension plan. One of its advantages was intended to be that it was portable, in a labor environment in which very few Americans work for just one company during their careers. And for those who did, and who paid into a pension plan, we need look no further than life-long employees of the late Montana Power Company, whose company pension plan became a part of the corporations investment hedge plan. In its heyday, Montana Powers stock was extremely valuable, and employee and retirees shares of that portfolio, largely stock in the parent company, were worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Then corporate management decided to get into the communications game and drove Montana Power into bankruptcy. Pensioners went from a comfortable retirement into poverty nearly overnight. The Social Security system is intended to be a national pension plan, investing its assets in the U.S. economy, and not gambling with the funds which belong to all workers who pay FICA taxes, and providing security for their retirement. When my father died in the 1950s, Social Security paid survivors benefits to my family, in the princely sum of $200 a month. That social safety net made it possible for my mother to guarantee a middle class life and college educations for me and my siblings. A 1940s dollar was the equivalent of $16 in 2014. My familys $200 monthly check was the equivalent of over $3,000 today. Yet the typical retired person gets only a third of that money, and those of you who are attempting to live on social security income alone know well that a single person cannot live securely on $15,000 per year. In fact, retired people who dont have other investments and live on Social Security alone live well below the poverty line. The Republican plan to decrease the deficit by decreasing Social Security benefits is, in fact, a proposal to continue borrowing the surpluses produced by FICA income exceeding OASDI benefits paid out between 1983 and 2013, which were loaned to the general fund. The Republicans propose to have the General Fund default on its debt to Americas retired workers, in effect balancing the books by taxing the middle class on a tax theyve already paid once, to

benefit high income tax payers who have already gotten an 80% break on the original tax. Republicans claim that our tax policies are just wealth redistribution schemes, some kind of Communist-Socialist plot. The sad fact is that the tax policies of the United States are now and have been for fifty years or more, plans for the redistribution of wealth from the American middle class to their financial overlords. This policy has been very successful, and the top 1% of incomes in the United States have increased dramatically over the last twenty years, while the constant-dollar earning power of people who belong to what used to be called the middle class have actually gone down.