{"id":575766,"date":"2010-05-21T17:38:02","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T21:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/northwestvoices\/2011924610_salvagingsocialsecurity.html?syndication=rss"},"modified":"2010-05-21T17:38:02","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T21:38:02","slug":"salvaging-social-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/575766","title":{"rendered":"Salvaging Social Security"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Trust Fund roll call for baby boomers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When Social Security was first instituted, current wage-earners\u2019 payroll taxes were used to fund current retirees\u2019 benefits. This worked as long as the numbers of wage-earners and retirees were approximately the same.<\/p>\n<p>In 1983, former Speaker of the House Tip O\u2019Neill and former President Ronald Reagan foresaw an crisis in Social Security \u2014baby boomers, as retirees, would greatly outnumber the wage-earners. Their solution was to double payroll taxes on current wage-earners. \u201cBoomers\u201d would finance our parents\u2019 retirement benefits as well as our own. Surplus tax collections would be held in a Social Security Trust Fund. This additional payroll tax was set to \u201csunset\u201d in about 2035 as I could recall, by which time many boomers would no longer be around to collect benefits.<\/p>\n<p>This worked for a year or so. Then Reagan wanted to balance the budget while keeping his tax cuts. The \u201cexcess\u201d cash sitting in the Trust Fund proved irresistible and every president since then \u2014regardless of party \u2014has regarded the Trust Fund as his administration\u2019s personal ATM.<\/p>\n<p>Now that boomers are retiring, it\u2019s time to pay us the benefits we have earned and paid for instead of blaming us for the \u201ccrisis\u201d and \u201ctweaking\u201d us around!<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014 Paula Joneli, Des Moines<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trust Fund roll call for baby boomers When Social Security was first instituted, current wage-earners\u2019 payroll taxes were used to fund current retirees\u2019 benefits. This worked as long as the numbers of wage-earners and retirees were approximately the same. In 1983, former Speaker of the House Tip O\u2019Neill and former President Ronald Reagan foresaw an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575766\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}