What's On the Table For Obama and Social Security?

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Barack Obama has spent the past few days calling out Hillary Clinton on Social Security. What has gotten much less attention is that Obama has changed his position on what to do about the government retirement system's financial problems.

When Obama appeared on ABC's "This Week" last May, he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, "Everything should be on the table" as options for assuring the program's long-term solvency.

"Raising the retirement age?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"Everything should be on the table," Obama replied.

"Raising payroll taxes?" Stephanopoulos asked.
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In a matter of months, Obama has moved from being open to a solution that might include raising the retirement age or indexing benefits to prices rather than wages -- as Republican Fred Thompson has recommended -- to one of making the protection of benefits one of his three core principles for dealing with Social Security.
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http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/10/30/whats_on_the_table_for_obama_a.html?hpid=topnews


right, but Hillary's the flip flopper...


What makes me wonder now is what Obama sees as a fix for Medicare/Medicaid. I'm not supposed to fear a Democrat's veiw on that, am I?


I made a mistake. I changed the fourth paragraph to the one I originally intended to post. sorry for the confusion.

He supports raising the cap, perhaps with a doughnut hole - and will consider other changes as part of a bipartisan effort.

Hillary hasn't said what policies she would consider.

That's the entire point.

Medicaid?

And will that change?

and that's a change in positions? Well that's an interesting way to look at it.

or are we there yet?

Why do you have a problem with Obama stating a couple of his preferences, but no problem with Hillary stonewalling you.

from the article:

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In a matter of months, Obama has moved from being open to a solution that might include raising the retirement age or indexing benefits to prices rather than wages -- as Republican Fred Thompson has recommended -- to one of making the protection of benefits one of his three core principles for dealing with Social Security.


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Its not clarification, its changing positions.


Sorry bout the late edit.

He said in May that everything was on the table, but that he had his preferences. Now he's specified a few prefernces. That's not changing positions.

Regardless, why does this bother you more than knowing NOTHING about Hillary's position.

He could be even more specific, but at least he's addressing the issue and discussing actual ideas. Hillary is trying to avoid the discussion altogether.
The article was trying to deflect criticism from Hillary by confusing the issue. That's nothing new.

On Social Security, the underlying message seems to be that Clinton will not support any effort to keep the program solvent by eliminating the cap on Social Security taxes until she gets elected president and sets up a bipartisan commission to provide political cover. The problem with that, as Barack Obama pointed out, is that you don’t arrive in the White House with a mandate for anything more daring than appointing a bunch of people to do a study. And when you’re talking about taxing income above $97,500 the same way we do income of, say, $30,000, it’s not really helpful to describe it as “a trillion-dollar tax increase on middle-class families.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/opinion/01collins.html?ref=todayspaper

Politicians do that on purpose but the traditional economic definition of middle class is the professionals and business owners between the working class and the multi-millionaire. Everybody thinks they're middle class, but you have to put those two words in context of what a politician is saying at the moment in order to figure out whether they're talking about you or the top 10%.

shortfall. I'm 64 and have paid into SS since I was 16! From my most recent SS statement, I've paid in $39.410 and my employers paid $39,692. That's a total of $79,102! I am eligible to receive $1,442. per month if I retire at 65 years and 10 months.

If you calculate that out, $79,102 divided by $1,442, it means I will begin collecting more than I paid in after a little less than 5 years. Doesn't that sound like something's a bit wrong here?

It seems to me that perhaps we should be talking about increasing the % of witholding a bit. Not a lot, and because I don't have all the numbers of participants, I can't even guess what that increase might be. I would however suspect, if we were only talking about something like rounding it up to 8% instead of 7.6% it just could solve the problems.

Your FICA money was loaned to the government so there is also the matter of treasury bond interest. You have a lot more coming than that. Before we talk about raising rates again, somebody better make it clear that if we hadn't had tax cuts, we'd have been paying down the debt which is the equivalent of making sure there's money in the trust fund to handle the upcoming retirements.

I honestly don't have all the contribution numbers available for the 48 years to be able to calculate that. The numbers on the contributions, ever per year, are so small, I doubt we're talking about big bucks here.

I believe there are 2 realistic solutions to SS. One is to raise the cap which has been done many times over the years without any problem. The other is to minimally rais the contribution rate from 7.6% to 8%.

Neither would have any significant impact on the majority of the population, and also minimal on those catagorized as rich.


I say get of]ver it people and just damn do it!

the amount available, wouldn't it? Maybe triple? My retirement age is 67 so if I've got ten years coming, that takes me to 77 and most people die in their 70's. Right?