Big Money Trying to Destroy Social Security
Tell Market Place, Peter Peterson Spent $1 billion of His Own Money to Cut Social Security |
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| Friday, 19 November 2010 05:56 |
BusinessWeek editor Peter Coy told Market Place radio listeners that Peter Peterson spent $1 billion of his own money to inform people about the budget problems facing the country (emphasis in original). This is not true. Peterson has consistently pushed for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He has never supported the presentation of a balanced picture of the country’s budget situation. For example, even though it is easy to show that the projected long-term budget deficit is entirely attributable to projections that per person health care costs in the U.S. will rise to three or four times the average for rich countries, this fact is largely concealed in Peterson-financed budget projects. Peterson has almost completely excluded any discussion of financial sector taxes (the source of his wealth) from budget debates, even though there is wide recognition that the sector is a source of massive waste and rents. He has also routinely misrepresented the state of Social Security’s finance in his public statements, repeatedly insisting that there is no trust fund. This is completely untrue and is an invention of Mr. Peterson. As can be seen in the Social Security trustees report and numerous other budget documents, the trust fund currently holds more than $2.5 trillion in government bonds. |
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November 22nd, 2010 @ 11:49 am
Imagine a bank account that you have to pay one dollar to withdraw one dollar. If you had a billion dollars in the that account could you say that your trust fund of a billion dollars exists? In an inane ontological sense, yes, it exists; however when the issue is a huge organ of government we have to consider the kind of existence that only includes real objects.
The social security trust fund consists on non-negotiable US bonds leaving the US government has the only buyer. Just like fathering your own uncle the government gets the proceeds from buying it’s own bonds. So when the government needs to draw from this trust it must provide the money, dollar for dollar, of the notes’ value.