January 03, 2011

Investment banker hates Social Security!

Pete Peterson and his henchman David Walker keep shrieking that entitlements will kill us all unless the middle class gives them up. It's instructive to see what he really thought of them as far back as 1994:

To Peterson, the Concord Coalition, "Lead . . . or Leave," and others, Social Security is an expensive scandal. "We will no longer be able to afford a system that equates the last third or more of one's adult life with a publicly subsidized vacation," Peterson wrote in the Atlantic, hyperbolically implying that the average Social Security recipient lives to be 100. "Unfair and unsound . . . Social Security is a generational scam," Jon Cowan and Rob Nelson of "Lead . . . or Leave" wrote last year in the New York Times. "The Concord Coalition believes that reducing [Social Security] payments to people with mid-level and higher incomes is not only fair but also the only realistic way to get control of the deficit."
The fact that Social Security was running a surplus at the time and continued to do so up until this year (due to massive unemployment, people aren't paying into it as had been expected) seems to have eluded those folks. Or else they were lying. You choose.

Via Digby

Posted by Linkmeister at January 3, 2011 02:52 PM | TrackBack
Comments