Krugman: The Latest Round in the Social Security Shell Game
Paul Krugman does the numbers on the latest version of the Bush crowd’s proposals to save Social Security by destroying it: The final insult.
In last fall’s debates, Mr. Bush asserted that “most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans.” Since most of the cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population and more than a third went to people making more than $200,000 a year, Mr. Bush’s definition of middle income apparently reaches pretty high.
But defenders of Mr. Bush’s Social Security plan now portray benefit cuts for anyone making more than $20,000 a year, cuts that will have their biggest percentage impact on the retirement income of people making about $60,000 a year, as cuts for the wealthy.
These are people who denounced you as a class warrior if you wanted to tax Paris Hilton’s inheritance. Now they say that they’re brave populists, because they want to cut the income of retired office managers.
There’s a good deal more to the piece; I only quoted the especially snarky bits. Definitely worth reading if you need some context to evaluate the “we stand for the common man; the Democrats are hypocrites” rhetoric coming out of the privatizers lately.
