Campaign Aides to Sinking Biden Come Up with the Most Anodyne Idea for a Campaign Focus

20 years too late and a whole lot of dollars short

PA: Wilkes-Barre Protest Rally Against Anti-Worker Social Security Policy" by AFL-CIO Field is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Panicky Biden campaign aides to President Joe Biden, anxious about his crumbling support in polls, have grasped at what they hope could prove a winner with a large swath of voters, according to a report in the Washington Post. Ready for it?: Tax the rich to bolster Social. Security funding.

If fhat sounds like something you’ve heard before, that’s because you did.

It has been known for decades that the 1983 bi-partisan adjustments in the Social Security program to prepare for the retirement of the huge Baby Boom post-war generation — a package of raised retirement age, increased Social Security payroll taxes on workers and employers and the taxing of a significand portion of Social Secursity benefit checks—would not do the trick (not so much because the reform didn’t raise enough extra money but because medical advances kept increasing the age people kept collecting benefits.

The answer to that problem 20 years ago would have been for Democrats and Republicans — or just Democrats alone when they had control of both Houses of Congress as in Barack Obama’s first year in office — to eliminate the cap on the amount of income subject to the FICA payroll tax. In other words, tax the rich.

But Republicans refused to increase taxes on the rich to support Social Security for ordinary people, and Democratic officials who, let’s face it, were and are almost as beholden to wealthy campaign backers as Republicans, were afraid to push the idea on their own. As a result, over all those so nothing has been done. That meant two decades of higher taxation on the rich to pre-fund the looming shortfall as the wave of post-war babies hit retirement age was lost, and now even doing that won’t fully solve the crisis,

For opponents of the program, which the Republican Party has wanted to destroy since it was created by FDR as a pillar of the New Deal in 1936, are happy to warn younger workers that they probably won’t have Social Security when they reach retirement, in hopes that this will turn them against the program that currently takes 6.2 percent out of every paycheck they receive based upon what they then are being warned is likely a false promise that it will assure them of a retirement income. Meanwhile Social Security’s opponents are trying to gin up a war between generations by promising current retirees that their benefits are safe.

This is of course ludicrous. With 70 million Americans, roughly a quarter of the adult population over 18, dependent upon Social Security benefits to make ends meet, there is no way Congress could allow benefits to be cut by 23% in nine years as it is now commonplace to hear media pundits and members of Congress warn. There would be Elder riots in the nation’s capital were that to happen. Furthermore no children think their parents and grandparents are greedy for pressing for more generous Social Security benefits. If i weren’t for Social Security, children would have to pay for the care of their parents in a society where pensions are virtually a thing of the past, and no on can save money living from paycheck to paycheck.

The purpose of such threats is to condition Americans to accept draconian “reforms” like making the program into a needs-based welfare program—the easier to cut it back later, or to raise the employee payroll deduction, or perhaps further raise the already too high retirement age, say to 72. (Note: Given that US life expectancy is currently down to 79, that would mean the average person would be paying over 6% of wages into the system for 3 years in order to collect benefits for seven years!)

Because Democrats have not acted for decades in the interest of American workers including to protect the only retirement benefit they can count on, why would anyone believe that Biden, who has long favored some kind of a bi-partisan “reform” of the program that would win Republican backing at the cost of severely weakening its support of Elders in retirement, and move towards privatization, would now do something radical like taxing the rich?

The answer is, the idea of having Biden call for taxing the rich to fund the program, as his aides are reportedly suggesting, is to give him a populist slogan calling for something that they and he all know will not be able to get through a divided Congress even if he somehow manages to ride it to a squeaker victory this November. Like earlier calls to “tax the rich,” this empty campaign line will also be tossed into history’s dumpster after the votes are counted.

Democrats have acquiesced to, or in some cases actively advocated weakening workers’ rights to unionize, thus contributing to the loss of power and pension plans. The party and its elected officials have balked at raising the minimum wage, making it impossible for people to save for retirement, and have weakened Social Security in the name of bi-partisanship instead of fighting tooth and nail to keep the existing system strong, much less to expand its benefits. They’ve conspired with Republicans to allowinflation for example to eat up benefits by 36% over the last 20 years by using a knowingly flawed inflation measure to adjust benefits each year, and to never raise the amount of Social Security benefits that are exempt from federal income taxation since such taxation began in 1984.

If Biden wants to get himself re-elected and defeat his virtually already nominated opponent, former President Donald Trump, he’ll need to reinvent himself as more than a tired spouter of decades’ old broken promises to “tax the rich” and respond to the crying demands from the public for a whole “New Deal” of changes to bring America into the 21’st century.

First among these is to get the US out of the global empire business. How can Biden expect people to support pouring hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the war in Ukraine and into underwriting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank when they’re in danger of losing a quarter of their promised retirement program? Why does America, the most powerful nation in the world, threatened by none, need to spend more on war than the next ten nations in the world, including a number of our own allies as well as our leading trading partner? Why is our health care system, from which tens of millions of Americans are excluded, by far the costliest in the world, yet has a third-world ranking (and not even a top one in that category!0 in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality? Why should tax-exempt and taxpayer subsidized colleges, which once were free and the main way for poor workers’ children to move up to middle-class jobs, now cost more in constant dollars than what elite private colleges used to cost just a generation ago, leaving students still paying off debts well into their 50s?

Biden’s braintrust appears to be brain-dead if the best they can come up with to revivify his increasingly moribund re-election prospects is to have him make yet another false promise to “tax the rich” to save Social Security if re-elected.

Why would or should any of us believe such clap-trap since he didn’t take action to do that during the past three years when the same crisis already was well recognized?