Last Call

And the other shoe falls:  Republicans plan to gut Medicaid by turning it into block grants and making states deal with the painful cuts, they play to gut Medicare by turning it into a voucher program and make seniors deal with the painful cuts, and now they plan to privatize Social Security and make everyone else deal with the painful cuts.

Introduced by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who also chairs the House's campaign efforts at the NRCC, the "Savings Account For Every American Act" would allow people to immediately opt out of Social Security in favor of a private "S.A.F.E." account. Eventually the program would expand to let employers send their matching contribution to workers' Social Security to a "S.A.F.E." account as well.

"Our nation's Social Security Trust Fund is depleting at an alarming rate, and failure to implement immediate reforms endangers the ability of Americans to plan for their retirement with the options and certainty they deserve," Sessions said of the plan, according to The Hill. "To simply maintain the status quo would weaken American competitiveness by adding more unsustainable debt and insolvent entitlements to our economy when we can least afford it."

Yes, let's solve the problem of the "rapidly depleting" Social Security trust fund (which is perfectly fine, by the way) by having Americans stop paying into the trust fund and then put their money in the stock market.   That worked out great for everyone's 401(k) over the last five years or so, didn't it?  Now imagine if everyone with a SAFE account lost half their value in another stock market crash, and had precisely nothing to fall back on because Social Security would have been shut down due to everyone pulling their money out now for SAFE accounts?

And even if you scream "the trust fund is a fraud!" look at the proposed solution by the GOP: let's put America's Social Security money into the hands of the same Wall Street tycoons that caused the dot-com bubble, the housing depression, and two recessions in the last 12 years.  The same folks we had to, as taxpayers, spend trillions to bail out...and let's reward them by giving them more of your money to use at the Big Casino tables, eh?

Anyone who thinks Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is welfare is insane.  You've been paying thousands of tax dollars into those programs all your working life.  Now Republicans want to say "Sorry, you're not going to get anything back from that.  We think that's welfare, so we're screwing you out of your money and breaking our promise to you.  But hey, why don't you give your money in Goldman Sachs?  What could possibly go wrong?"

Republicans say "Well you can't trust the government...but you can trust the government when we say you should give your Social Security money to Wall Street!"  Keep that in mind when they tell lies about Democrats being the ones destroying the social safety net.

Does anyone buy that hogwash?  Republicans certainly think you're stupid enough to do exactly that.  But don't pay any attention to issues like this...quick, Anthony Weiner tweeted his junk!