Moneyed class proposes new ways to steal from working people

The excellent blog Capital & Main has an important piece up about the proposal to create a new retirement system in the state for workers who do not have a pension system.

 http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/retirement-board-facing-critical-pension-decision-0325/

As the writer Judith Lewis Mernit well describes, California ( and the nation) is facing a growing retirement crisis and more and more jobs no longer have pensions.  This is an emerging crisis.

For comparison, here is the Sacramento Bee version of the same story. http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article68342897.html

The Capital and Main piece is a good piece on important issues. But, do we really only want to consider the neoliberal finance approach?  For example, the proposal calls for employers to insist on participation, but apparently does not require employers to contribute- as does social security.

Then, the advocates claim it is progressive because of the pooled IRA project.  But, IRA's are still invested in the markets. This is like the Peterson Institute arguing for the privatization of social security.

Hands Off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid- Bernie Sanders

We are not broke. We were robbed !

DSA is a part of the Coalition on Human Needs. ( See list at end of post).  We ask that each of you contact your Senators and Congress people to preserve essential  human needs from Republican budget cuts.   Sample letter below.  Do not allow the Corporate CEO's who are funding the Fix the Debt campaign to cut the budgets for poor and working people.

1. NO tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans.

2. NO benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare or

Medicaid.

SAVE for All

Strengthening America’s Values and Economy for All

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear (Representative or Senator):

Last year, organizations from across the country came together to endorse basic principles to address America’s short- and long-term economic and budgetary problems. These are the imperatives of Strengthening America’s Values and Economy (SAVE) for All: to protect low-income and vulnerable people; promote job creation to strengthen the economy; increase revenues from fair sources; and seek responsible savings by targeting wasteful spending in the Pentagon and in other areas that do not serve the public interest.

We call on you to follow these principles as you face budgetary decisions of immediate and long-lasting national consequence. To achieve sustained growth, fiscal stability, and economic security for all our people we must invest in job creation, ensure that job seekers have the opportunity to work, and protect vulnerable people from hardship. We cannot promote the common good by cutting more and more services and jobs. But we can meet our nation’s needs responsibly by ending tax reductions benefiting the wealthiest two percent and by seeking savings that do not compromise human or military security.

Putting the most vulnerable people at risk is the wrong response to our nation’s fiscal situation. Automatic cuts to domestic programs that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013 under the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act will inflict devastating harm. Estimated conservatively, a year of sequestration cuts1 will deny WIC nutrition aid to 750,000 mothers and young children, prevent more than 413,000 adults and youth from getting job training and deny education and training to more than 51,000 veterans, eliminate reading and math help to more than 1.8 million low-income public school children, deny child care to the low- to moderate-income families of 80,000 children, stop nearly 34,000 women from being screened for breast and cervical cancer, prevent nearly 27,000 infants and toddlers from benefiting from special education early intervention services, force 185,000 households to lose rental assistance vouchers, and stop 734,000 households from receiving home heating and cooling aid. These are only a few examples of the impact of the scheduled cuts. They threaten children’s healthy development, deny security to seniors, throw roadblocks in the way of a competitive labor force, and allow preventable disabilities to hold back our children.

These and other cuts have steep costs, among them hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, lagging productivity, and escalating medical expenditures in the years to come. Coming on top of cuts written into law through FY 2021 they will drop domestic and non-military international appropriations to their lowest levels in 50 years as a share of the economy. Allowing such a wholesale abandonment of investments in education, preventive health, housing, public infrastructure, and nutrition is an affront both to conscience and to common sense. We urge you to avert these sequestration cuts.

Attack on Social Security and the middle class

Attack on the Middle Class!!

First they came for your paycheck. Then your house. What's next?

By James K. Galbraith | November/December 2010 Issue: Mother Jones. 

---

THE REMARKABLE thing about the American middle class is that we still have one, given the job losses, housing bust, and 401(k) wipeout of the past three years—and considering that for 35 years, politicians (and the bankers who own them) have been hammering away at middle-class institutions. The assault began in the 1970s, when New York City's fiscal crisis [1] and California's property-tax revolt [2] marked the start of a long decline in public services. Next came the recession and anti-union policies of the early 1980s, whose whip's end hit the black working class especially hard. (Automakers have long been among the nation's largest private employers of African Americans. In the late '70s, one in every 50 African Americans [3] in the workforce was employed in the industry.) Thanks to the UAW, the automakers provided good jobs and pensions for workers who, in many cases, had a high-school education at best. When Chrysler hit the ropes in 1979, Congress did pitch in with a $1.5 billion loan guarantee [4] (I worked on that bill as an economist for the House banking committee), but the decade that followed still pummeled autoworkers—as they did all of American manufacturing.
The consequences are still unfolding. Total employment of manufacturing workers peaked [5] in 1979, and three decades later, we're in the endgame. Jobs in the sector are down [6] by about a third since 2000—some 6 million lost. Most of them will never be replaced. Nothing can stop the Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others from making shoes and ships and sealing wax at wages we can't compete with. And nothing will.

AFL-CIO President Trumka Denouces Proposed Cuts to Social Security, Medi...

Medicare, Social Security

Respond to the Gang of Six

Have you been watching the debate over whether we'll default on our national debt? Week after week, politicians from both parties have used it as an opportunity to tell us that deficit reduction requires "tough choices" and "shared sacrifice" and "taking on sacred cows." 

But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently said, "So far, the only sacred cows being gored by budget proposals coming out of Washington are working people, the middle class, seniors and the poor."

Tell your senators and the White House: No cuts to the social safety net. Focus on creating jobs, and make corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share: [ http://act.aflcio.org/c/18/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2565 ].

One recent bipartisan proposal in the Senate cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It chokes job-creating public investments. It slashes education for disadvantaged students. It whacks workers with taxes on our heath care benefits and tax credits. And it kills American jobs--by switching to a "territorial taxation system" that gives corporations incentives to ship jobs overseas and shift profits to offshore tax havens. 

Financial Transaction tax

Hello.

This morning we have the usual conservative politics with a new wave.  We have had the Tea Party /Right wing effort to stop an extension of the debt ceiling.

Now we have "moderate" proposal from the Gang of Six, which is essentially the Simpson-Bowles plan. That is another conservative, not so crazy, right wing assault on benefits and working people.   See the post below by Dean Baker, And, since it is not the crazy Tea Party, the press is picking up on it.

Get as many posts up as you can, letters to the editor, responses on web news stories.  In each case argue for the opposite- a financial transaction tax.  The information you need is on the DSA site;  here. http://www.dsausa.org/docs/taxday.html

intro; 

A: Yes.  Despite what conservatives often say, there are several potential sources of money to pay for the needs of our country.  Perhaps the most promising is a tax on the trading of financial assets, a financial transaction tax, often called an FTT or a “Tax on Wall Street Speculators.”

Q:  How would an FTT work?

A: An FTT would be a small tax on all trading in stocks, currencies, and debt products such as treasury bills and bonds (and futures and options contracts on all of these). Think of it as a very small sales tax. It could be a tax of $1 on every $400 of stocks traded (0.25%); one-quarter of one percent, and $1 on every $800 dollars of currency or debt traded (0.125%), one-eighth of one percent.

Statement on the Gang of Six Plan

Statement on the Gang of Six Plan

By Dean Baker.  A progressive economist.

Washington, D.C.- Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), issued the following statement on the Gang of Six deficit plan:

"The budget plan produced by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” offers the promise of huge tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in the country, while lowering Social Security benefits for retirees and the disabled.  Despite claiming that they will "reform" Social Security on a "separate track, isolated from deficit reduction," the plan includes cuts to Social Security that would be felt in less than six months, as the plan calls for a new inflation formula that will reduce benefits by 0.3 percentage points a year compared with currently scheduled benefits. The plan also calls for a process that is likely to reduce benefits further for future retirees.

"The proposed cuts to Social Security are cumulative. This means that after ten years, a beneficiary in her 70s will see a cut of close to 3 percent. After 20 years, the cuts for beneficiaries in their 80s will be close to 6 percent, while the reduction in annual benefits will be close to 9 percent by the time beneficiaries are in their 90s. For a beneficiary in her 90s living on a Social Security income of $15,000, this means a loss of more $1,200 a year in benefits.

Oppose the Republican plan to create a crisis

The Republican plan:

It's not just Medicare.  They've talked about privatizing Social Security... eliminating the EPA and giving polluters free rein to poison our air and water... rolling back public support for education -- everything from Head Start to college financial aid... crippling unions.

They’re pushing hard to cut programs that working families rely on while going to the mat to protect generous subsidies and special tax earmarks for the wealthy and well-connected.  

They won’t even consider cutting the “Bluegrass Boondoggle,” a $126 million giveaway to racehorse owners, but are ok doubling seniors’ health care costs.  

Their vision is basically to repeal the 20th century and go back to the Gilded Age -- let the fabulously wealthy live the good life, to heck with everyone else.

And to achieve this twisted agenda, they're holding the U.S. economy hostage, threatening not to allow the nation  to pay its bills and to drive up interest rates and create another financial crisis if we don’t pay their ransom demand.

In spite of the endless  media claims, the people are not buying this false crisis.  The just-released Pew poll makes it "crystal clear":

•               60% of Americans want to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.

•               61% think people on Medicare pay enough of their healthcare costs.

•               58% say low-income people should keep their Medicaid benefits.

WE should stand firm.  And, we demand that the Democrats not give in to this hostage taking.