The Roadmap To Reforming Social Security
With Republicans taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives this week, the legislative agenda for the body will begin to take shape under the direction of Speaker Boehner and other prominent committee chairmen and ranking members. The media and the citizenry will be watching to see if this Congress, and especially this House of Representatives, continues with politics as normal or if this election did in fact represent a paradigm shift toward freedom and the Constitution and away from government redistribution, loss of freedom, and serfdom. We members of the Tea Party movement surely hope it did.
Representatives have already begun to introduce new rules, such as beginning the session with the reading of the entire Constitution and with promises to introduce legislation to repeal the healthcare takeover. Is this symbol over substance or has the ground truly shifted in Washington? Only time will tell.
Entitlements will surely come into the crosshairs of legislators soon after the session is gaveled to order, as the slaying of the big elephant in the room must surely be dealt with if we are to make any inroads on the path to bankruptcy in America. In 2010, the off budget, mandatory spend on Big 3 entitlements – Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – totaled a whopping 56 percent of the federal budget, not including the interest paid on borrowed money to meet those obligations. And the CBO reports that by 2052, if no changes are made to these programs, they alone will consume every dollar of projected tax revenue – leaving zero dollars for anything else. Needless to say, these programs must be reformed if America is to remain a viable economic force in the world and if we citizens are retain our freedom.
Freedom is a difficult term to get one’s arms around, it entails so much: truly retaining one’s inalienable rights; the freedom of speech and thought; the freedom of the press; economic freedoms to do as one wishes with the fruits of one’s labors. Perspective is important here: imagine that the government says it is going to impose an emergency tax of taking an additional $.25 cents out of every dollar you earn for the foreseeable future to pay for budget priorities. How do we react? Would the hundreds of thousand present at the 9/12 rally grow to millions? Would the Capitol be stormed?
Government has learned that the way to effectively take more of our resources without causing alarm is to do it slowly, over time. And so in the example above, government did not take an additional 25% of our earnings in a single blow; they did it over time. We who pay taxes are now working a full 25% more of the work year to pay our taxes today than we did in 1900, before the Big 3 entitlements were made the law of the land. We need to ask the question then, what would we do with 25% more of the economic fruits of our labors to invest, to give to charity and the like. What would we do with an additional 12% of our pre-tax wages that currently go to fund Social Security and yet return almost nothing.
These are our earnings that are being taken and redistributed to others. Should the government have the power to take this large a percentage of our earnings to redistribute to others to pay for retirement, healthcare, education and the like, or should these be our decisions? Hopefully, these are some of the questions that will arise in the debate about the Big 3 in the upcoming session of Congress.
One of the key points of debate regarding Social Security that must take place is the nature of the reform. A key indicator of how legislation in the House will progress is whether it is based on reform plans like that of Congressman Paul Ryan, who has proposed a “Roadmap For America’s Future” that sustains the federal government’s power to take our resources and redistribute them to others to pay for their retirement, but decreases the amount over time of their taking that we can control – from the current 12.6% to roughly 6% (read details of the plan here).
More interesting will be if alternative plans arise that will fully enable we citizens to control whether we invest in a retirement plan through the federal government at all, or if we are allowed to opt out of the current government plan to private retirement plans that we the citizens choose. Will the same fervor that led hundreds of thousands of citizens to drive thousands of miles to protest the taking of the their freedom by the government be present in legislation proposed by members of the Tea Party and Republicans? Will it dominate the US House of Representatives regarding this issue that is central to a return to the designs of the Constitution? Stay tuned.
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