Next Big Issue? Social Security Pops Up Again

[groovedaddy]

WASHINGTON — Now that landmark legislation overhauling the health insurance system is about to become law, addressing Social Security’s solvency could well become the next big thing for President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

Central to the health care changes are hundreds of billions of dollars in reductions in Medicare spending over time and expansions of Medicaid. As some administration officials acknowledge, that effectively takes those fast-growing entitlement programs off the table for deficit reduction just as Mr. Obama’s bipartisan commission to reduce the mounting national debt gets to work.

That leaves Social Security, the other big entitlement benefits program and one that Mr. Obama has suggested in the past that he is willing to tackle. While its looming problems are not of the scale of those afflicting Medicare, it now stands as the likeliest source of the sort of large savings needed to bring projected annual deficits to sustainable levels, many budget analysts agree.

And, they say, packaging future reductions in the retirement program that Democrats zealously defend with tax increases that Republicans typically oppose would have the makings of a grand compromise to shrink the debt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/us/politics/23fiscal.html?th&emc=th

[Renew Deal]

1. Immigration seems to be next on the list

:hide:

[notesdev]

2. Heh

Suddenly people want to address SS solvency, just as the baby boomers start to retire. Good luck with that one folks. Retirement age 80 here we come?

[Lasher]

3. Way to go, NYT. Slander ACORN into bankruptcy, then pile on the bandwagon to gut Social Security.

They're doing just as well as the New York Post.

[SharonAnn]

4. Military Spending: "the other big entitlement benefits program"

It's around half of our current budget, isn't it?

[Citizen Worker]

5. Social Security is NOT an entitlement

Social Security is an insurance program to which each and every wage earner contributes 8.7% of her/his income and the employer contributes an identical amount. Please refer to it as an insurance or savings program and not an entitlement that many may deem a giveaway akin to being on the dole.

But I fear that just as it took a "democrat" to "end welfare as we know it," ram "free trade" down our throats it will take a "democrat" to "reform" Social Security and it will be accomplished through Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission thus giving cover to the political class just as was done with Reagan's Social Security Commission. That effort resulted in the largest tax increase in history on the working class and the politicians claimed they were only following the recommendation of the "bipartisan" commission.

We must be vigilant because the first boomer retirement wave will wash ashore in 2011.

[groovedaddy]

6. I agree. How can it be an "entitlement" if we've paid into it all these years? I do realize some

may receive more than they put in, but, still, for the bulk of us, it's drawing on what we've put into it. Using the term "entitlement" seems an awful lot like a set up.