We need to decide upon a Social Security and Medicare schedule of benefits that we want, as a society, to provide for our seniors, that design to include the age from which those benefits should be paid: decide on a period of phase in for any change from current plan.
Go back to the original design of Social Security and create trust funds that are properly ring fenced, make the whole of Medicare (including parts B and D), part of the “paid as earned” plan. Require that social programs are fully funded to meet earned benefits.
Phase in period during which current underfunding is amortized.
Cutting across this is the question of universal healthcare – one version of which makes all healthcare provision a current government expense.
Phase out all Social Security and Medicare programs – to be ‘fair’ the phase out should be over an entire working life, e.g.:
Given this policy, federal government will be ‘out’ of providing retirement benefits early next century.
Social programs already accounts for over 50% of federal government non interest expenditures and this will grow towards 60%, all else being equal, by 2040.
This is the big item – increasingly, federal government is a savings and insurance plan.
– It is perfectly rational to see the role of federal government in these terms (as provider of income and healthcare in our old age): so long as we face up to the cost that this imposes on all of us and make sure that the federal government has the resources to meet promised benefit obligations.
– It is also perfectly rational to hold the view that this is NOT the federal government’s role, but in objecting, understand and accept that we are where we are, with a lot of Americans who are retired or about to retire and who are entirely reliant on federal social programs for their old age (and who have been paying payroll taxes for their whole working lives to entitle them to those benefits) and there is no way of wishing away that truth.
Higher Taxes
Current level of social provision:some social safety net, current Social Security and Medicare provision in old age which assures dignity and some level of comfort underwritten by the federal government)
Lower Taxes
Reduced social provision (which means, potentially, more cases of poverty/reduced government access to healthcare – for seniors in our families and anyone upon whom hard times fall). (40% of us rely mainly on Social Security/Medicare for our retirement)
Both positions are fine (and plenty in between). Not fine is to be ‘for’ lower taxes, and not reduced social provision: (the math does not work)
The 48 senators and 170 or so (Republican) House members who have signed the Americans For Tax Reform “Tax Payer Protection” pledge have made their choice (but have not been specific on how social provision should be reduced: it is time they are specific).
At the same time, it is time for the other 315 members of Congress to get specific.
So, for this biggest of all issues, scarcely debated at all, we have, in the
Electoral politics in 2020.
But the issue does not go away.
