Joanna
Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
Seems like it. Greenspan said the USA can't afford the retirement benefits promised to baby boomers and urged Congress to trim them. This is a "cohort" theory of perpetuating capitalism, according to which "what you deserve" depends on your age, and if by a ceryain age you haven't got the cash together, then you don't deserve social assistance. With this new allocation principle, you can of course rip off a whole bunch of new people. If you have to drastically cut expenditures, then a whole new ideology has to be developed to justify "who deserves what".
In 2002, the US benefit figures were as follows:
Old-age/survivors/disability/health insurance benefit $710 billion Government unemployment insurance benefit $53 billion Veterans benefits $30 billion Family assistance benefit $20 billion
That's a total of $813 billion, or about 8% of the total personal income received by all Americans (only about half of that total personal income is wages and salaries).
You cannot actually cut those benefits very much, so the revenue gain is not actually very great, but the advantage is, that many of those people are in a weaker position, and so you can attack them, without them being able to do very much about it.
But it doesn't solve much as regards balancing government budgets. What they should do first of all, is drastically rationalise and reduce military spending.
I think Greenspan possibly argues that many baby-boomer retirees are wealthy anyhow, and thus not deserving social assistance to which they are entitled, but a closer look at the facts would show this has very limited validity.
Basically the bourgeoisie is telling the working class to go whoring, instead of receive social assistance benefits for which they were previously taxed by their own elected government.
But if you are a pensioner, then you are unlikely to want to go whoring, if anything the probability is greater that you'd be buying sexual services. The real question then is, why should the bourgeois elite get it for free ?
Greenspan's new "deregulation" argument is a bit like depositing money in a bank, and then later the bank manager says "instead of paying you interest on your deposit, I am deducting interest from your deposit, and if you protest, you won't get your deposit back at all".
Jurriaan
