Rep. Cooper (D-TN) says a category 5 fiscal storm is approaching, and the Bush Administration is "cruel" enough to let the storm it created devastate our Social Security and Medicare benefits.
And everyone laughed at Al Gore's lockbox for Social Security.
Snippets from the article by the Tennessee Democrat, Rep. Jim Cooper, are pasted below.
"The biggest absurdity in American politics is the fact that virtually every federal lawmaker promises Social Security and Medicare benefits that are, somehow, omitted from the budget. If the federal government were run like a business, its budget would include those promises. But it is not.
If you look closely at the annual letter you receive from the Social Security Administration, you will see that the benefits you’ve been buying with your payroll taxes are only “scheduled.” That’s a fancy word for maybe. The federal government can revoke them at will, according to the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Fleming v. Nestor. Wait a minute! Most people, including most politicians, think that America has at least a moral obligation to pay every nickel of those benefits.
Some budget experts object to making Social Security and Medicare benefits “contractual” like private-sector pensions so that seniors could have a legally-enforceable right to them. Preserving congressional flexibility is not two-faced in their eyes, but necessary to cope with an uncertain future.
I disagree. I think that you must count Social Security and Medicare promises as if they were genuine; otherwise, you have no chance of making them so. They don’t have to be contractual in order to count them as such. Refusing to count the promises at all is tantamount to lying.
A little-known government committee, the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, or FASAB, voted this summer to require Congress to account for these entitlement program expenses, as if politicians meant what they say. That may seem like common sense, but the vote was only 6-4. The private-sector members of the board favored sincerity but, sadly, the bureaucrats preferred duplicity.
For America to admit to itself and the world that it is $46 trillion in debt would be alarming, but it would be honest. The consequences will be worse if we fail to admit the truth. In that case, generations of Americans would not only be exposed to cruel cuts, but a government that was so cruel that it did nothing to prevent them."
Bush Rep. Cooper Social Security Politics News Medicare Tennessee Democrat
