Morgan Stanley Director ERSKINE BOWLES Calls for CUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY And MEDICARE

:mad: :puke:


" Morgan Stanley Director Erskine Bowles, along with his sidekick former Senator Alan Simpson, once again used the Washington Post oped page http://www.washingtonpost.com/todays_paper?dt=2011-10-02&bk=A&pg=19 to call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The two made the call in the context of a piece urging the congressional "supercommittee" to produce a large deficit reduction package.



They argued that it was necessary for cuts in "entitlements" to be part of any deficit package. "Entitlements" is the preferred euphemism for Social Security and Medicare for people who want to cut Social Security and Medicare.



It is once again interesting to note that in a call for shared sacrifice, Bowles and Simpson once again never mention the possibility of financial speculation tax (FST), which could raise over $1.5 trillion over the course of the next decade. Such a tax has been used in the UK for centuries and a proposal for such a tax has recently been put forward by the European Commission. It is remarkable that the elite political figures in the United States show so little interest in an FST.


- Of course as every budget analyst knows, the whole long-term budget problem is the result of our broken health care system. If the United States paid a comparable amount per person for its health care as people do in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at huge surpluses, not deficit. This point is rarely mentioned by Bowles and Simpson. http://www.cepr.net/calculators/hc/hc-calculator.html


http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/morgan-stanley-director-erskine-bowles-calls-for-cutting-social-security-and-medicare



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has started. What do these geniouses think will happen?

right--the elite must be preserved as the 99% gets thrown under the bus.

Or so goes my summary of the message.

:mad:

Yet, some try to tell us that SS/Med cuts aren't the actual agenda of the Obama Administration and Congressional leadership.

Erskine Bowles is one of the co-chairman of President Obama's deficit commission. He gained notoriety recently by revealing the fact that he had no clue as to the size of the country's deficit problem even after engaging in a lengthy serious of secret meetings on the topic over the last few months. He had told the National Governor's Association that annual interest payments will be $2 trillion a year by the end of the decade. The Congressional Budget Office projects that even in a worse case scenario interest payments will be less than half this amount. Oh well.

Some may wonder how much people get compensated for such extraordinary displays of ignorance. This is easy to answer. One of Mr. Bowles paying gigs is as a director of Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street investment bank that was rescued from bankruptcy by the taxpayers two years ago. Mr. Bowles gets $335,000 a year for that job.

By comparison, this is almost 25 times as much as the average Social Security benefit that Mr. Bowles has said he wants to cut. It is more than 10 times what the median household over age 65 earns. Such are the rewards of ignorance.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/15/erskine_bowles_and_the_price_of_ignorance_335000_a_1/

just sayin'...