All Posts Tagged With: "Social Security"
Is It a Tax or Not?
In his State of the Union speech the other night President Obama said: Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. [...]
26Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedIt Makes One’s Head Spin
President Obama’s jobs program calls for cuts in both sides of the payroll tax. That tax finances Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare are already taking in less money than they need to pay retirees. So they will have to cash in more of the Treasury IOUs left behind when previous surpluses were [...]
9Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 11 comments | ContinuedWatch Your Facts
When we argue against government programs, it is of the utmost importance that we get the facts right. Otherwise we undermine our credibility and hurt the cause of liberty. (Yes, there are negative externalities.) A popular debating point against Social Security is that when it was enacted in 1935, life expectancy was about 60. So, [...]
5Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedPonzi Unmasked
Social Security was unmasked as a transfer scheme long ago. Anyone who thinks it’s something else just isn’t paying attention.
2Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 24 comments | ContinuedBudget-Cutting Resistance
So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. In the April 17 ABC News-Washington Post poll, 59 percent said that the deficit should be reduced through a combination of unspecified spending cuts and tax increases. But [...]
22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedHad Enough Yet?
Regarding the looming fiscal disaster, it’s best to keep one’s eyes on the forest and not get lost in the trees. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the numbers, but one thing looks certain: Most everyone understands the current situation is unsustainable in the ruling establishment’s own terms. If nothing changes, in perhaps a little [...]
25May2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBudget-Cutting Resistance
If libertarians are to expand the sphere of freedom while shrinking the sphere of force, they first need to be understood.
22Apr2011 | Sheldon Richman | 29 comments | ContinuedWashington’s Lies
During his campaign President Obama and his congressional supporters estimated that overhauling the nation’s health care system would cost $50–$65 billion a year. On June 15 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that Obama’s overhaul would cost at least $1 trillion. It’s clear that Obama’s cost estimates are untrue, and over ten years, it’s likely [...]
22Sep2010 | Walter E. Williams | 6 comments | ContinuedHow to Create the Illusion of Low Taxes
To the surprise of opponents of big government, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that taxes at all levels of government take only 9.2 percent of our income, the lowest rate since Harry Truman was president. USA Today and various news-media personalities, like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, have used this statistic to hammer [...]
22Sep2010 | D.W. MacKenzie | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future
Boston University’s Laurence Kotlikoff is a serious scholar who has devoted much of his professional life to examining Social Security. What he writes on this issue it’s wise to read. The Coming Generational Storm, co-authored with Dallas-based financial columnist Scott Burns, is a worthwhile book. Their description of the fiscal nightmare known as Social Security [...]
13Jul2010 | Christopher Westley | 0 comments | ContinuedSocial Security Is Moral?
A good many people express incredulity with the consistent free-market, or libertarian, position. They consider opposition to the welfare state as something bizarre, rejection of unlimited democracy as almost un-American, and opposition to things like Social Security as bordering on outright callousness. For this reason it may be of some value to illustrate how a [...]
1Jul2010 | Tibor R. Machan | 3 comments | ContinuedWhy Doctors Don’t Want Free-Market Medicine
You may have heard that the AMA and “America’s physicians” favor universal health care. That’s true of the AMA, but that organization represents fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s doctors. And it’s true of many academic university physicians, but anecdotally it is obviously untrue of most doctors in private practice. Many of those docs [...]
29Jun2010 | Theodore Levy | 16 comments | ContinuedA Contemptible Congress and a Derelict Court
What can Congress do that the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional? Or, what can Congress do that a president would veto as unconstitutional? It is not much exaggeration to say that Congress can do whatever it can muster a majority vote for, whether it is constitutional or not. The members only have to worry about [...]
24Feb2010 | Walter E. Williams | 5 comments | ContinuedPresidents and Precedents
America’s 44th president has embarked on a massive expansion of the federal establishment that, if accomplished, will dwarf all previous welfare states in its spending and debt. Americans will largely depend on politicians and their underlings for a significant portion of their heavily mortgaged livelihoods. It’s a path to national suicide that would horrify most [...]
24Feb2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 13 comments | ContinuedWhy the Government Fails to Maintain Anything
As the mad scramble to pass President Obama’s stimulus bill reminded us, politicians love to start new government programs. They gain things they can brag about during their reelection campaigns. But there’s little to be gained by maintaining programs somebody else started. No surprise, then, that in budget battles, maintenance tends to be under-funded. Moreover, [...]
23Sep2009 | Jim Powell | 12 comments | ContinuedIn the Grip of Madness
“Thank God we had the federal government last week to bail out the private sector!” That is what a rather statist friend of mine declared a year ago as the economy tanked, almost gleeful that the financial crisis seemed to be proving how much we all need a massive federal establishment to both regulate and [...]
19Aug2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 37 comments | ContinuedMadoff is a Piker
Bernard Madoff, who stands accused of bilking sophisticated investors out of $50 billion, reportedly told two of his executives that his business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.” Perpetrators of Ponzi schemes lead clients to believe their money is invested and that their profits are the fruits of the money manager’s savvy. But in fact the [...]
1Apr2009 | John Stossel | 2 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
