US social security and medicare going private ?

[DeletedUser16008]

Bare with me as this takes some introducing.....

Looks to me like the big bisiness leeches have a new agenda to suck in and tighten control in fewer hands and this time its going for your social security

The Campaign to Fix the Debt is the latest incarnation of a decades-long effort by former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to slash earned benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare under the guise of fixing the nation's "debt problem."


Is this the white horse coming to save you ? nope on the contrary its the latest scam to seize everything they can and make you subservient to private business...essentially a slave with a private master

In short these very coorporations that often pay negative tax, get bailed out by your money and answer for nothing have cooked up a nice little scheme to privatise the lot.

Oh its coming alright, you'll be told all the hole and deficit is the responsibility of the little people to pay and none of it by big business. You''l be told the debt is yours not theirs, it won't be defence that costs more than the entire world put together cut, these bloobsuckers wont get taxed they get bailouts, it wont be the land grab coorps the small farmers are being targeted by paying, it wont be the tax avoiding corporations or the insanely rich njubjockeys that have had trillions handed over to them to prop up their insolvent pyramid schemes and finance scams... its you and your children who are gonna pay by hook or by crook.

I dont care what state an economy is in but you put social security or other essential services out of public control and into private your done, its over. Welcome to the third world.

I have been under the impression that the US has long been moving to a socialist state or even Facist, seems the rise of Corporatocracy is well and truly here.

I suggest you check out a few of these links for further information.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Fix_the_Debt

http://www.fixthedebt.org/ Is the scam and you can read More BS here.


Da boss Peter G. Peterson


Peter G. Peterson has long used his wealth to underwrite numerous organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security and Medicare, citing concerns over "unsustainable" federal budget deficits. Full of apocalyptic warnings, Peterson failed to warn of the $8 trillion housing bubble, but conveniently sold his private equity firm Blackstone Group on the eve of the financial crisis. He later pledged to spend $1 billion of the money from the sale to "fix America's key fiscal-sustainability problems," launching the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in 2008. As of 2011, the Huffington Post reported that Peterson had personally given $458 million to the Foundation.
Peterson told the Washington Post that he gave Fix the Debt $5 million in funding;Fix the Debt was announced on the Peterson Foundation website and Peterson appeared at the Fix the Debt launch in July 2012.

Peterson was the Chairman and CEO of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers (1973-1977) and its successor firm, Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb (1977-1984). He is also the former Chairman and co-founder of the private equity firm, Blackstone Group, and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was also Chairman for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the founding Chairman of the Institute for International Economics (IIE), and the co-founder of the Concord Coalition.


Like Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, Blackstone was also adept at leveraged buy-outs. As Matt Taibbi documented in Rolling Stone, private equity firms too frequently buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buy-out, they can leave companies so loaded up with debt that they are often forced to start slashing their workforce or employees' retirement security right away.
In 2006, Blackstone looted Travelport, a travel reservation conglomerate, piling on $4.3 billion in new debt, then pocketing $1.7 billion to pay shareholders and themselves.The firm promptly fired 841 workers to meet its new debt obligations. A great deal for Blackstone.

In 2007, Peterson and Shwarzman decided to sell Blackstone Group in a public offering. The entire notion of a private equity group going public was perverse. Private equity was supposed to be private -- dangerous, blackbox investments of the type that only sophisticated Wall Street investors would be able to assess. Some argued that taking these assets public should have been prohibited. The AFL-CIO warned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the Blackstone IPO was riddled with problems. The firm was structuring itself to avoid regulation, its real asset and values were unknown, and it failed to use independent auditors among other problems.
But Blackstone convinced former Republican Congressman Chris Cox at the SEC (who famously led the move to loosen capital requirements on mega banks in 2004) to approve the IPO. The sale for $4 billion at $35 dollars a share, made both Peterson and Schwarzman billionaires.

A year later, Blackstone’s value had dropped 40 percent (see graph here). As of February 2013, it is trading at $18.79 a share, showing no signs of the recovery that other Wall Street firms have enjoyed. Perhaps the SEC should have listened. This guy is a total sleaze ball,

Lets looks at his co cronies shall we ?

co leaders include.

Erskine Bowles
Erskine Bowles, a Fix the Debt co-founder and board member of Fix the Debt's parent organization, the Peterson-funded CRFB, is best known for his co-chairmanship of the Simpson-Bowles Commission and for being Bill Clinton's chief of staff. Yet he has deep ties to the financial industry, which has lobbied heavily on tax issues.UNDISCLOSED CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Bowles has served on the board of Morgan Stanley since 2005 (with annual compensation of $345,000 in 2011). Morgan Stanley played a major role in the 2008 financial crisis and secretly borrowed over $107 billion from the Federal Reserve according to Bloomberg News.His wife, Crandall C. Bowles, is on the executive committee of the board of directors of JP Morgan Chase (with annual compensation of $245,000 in 2011).

Ed Rendell
Ed Rendell is a co-chairman of Fix the Debt. In media appearances, he is only introduced as the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania (2003-2011), yet he has extensive corporate and financial ties.UNDISCLOSED CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Rendell lobbied for KCI USA, a wound care technology company, on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements in 2012. Rendell is special counsel to the law firm Ballard Spahr -- which has been criticized as a union-busting law firm--where he focuses on privatization and housing, with an emphasis on infrastructure. Rendell is also a senior adviser at Greenhill & Co., a multinational investment bank. Ninety percent of Greenhill's revenue comes from advisory assignments, including to public officials. Rendell is a strong proponent of "public private partnerships" (PPPs) in infrastructure, which have been criticized as a dubious form of privatization of public assets. Rendell is also on the advisory board of Verdeva, a firm developing technology to track motorists at the gas pump so they can be taxed for infrastructure revenue, an industry-favored measure for developing the income streams they need to finance infrastructure deals. He has also joined the venture capital firm Element Partners as an operating partner.Element Partners recently invested in oil and gas extraction (fracking) from the Marcellus formation.

Maya MacGuineas
Maya MacGuineas spearheads the Fix the Debt campaign. She is the president of Fix the Debt's parent organization, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is a project of the Peterson-funded New America Foundation (NAF). MacGuineas was dubbed "queen of the deficit scolds" by economist Paul Krugman Although it is not disclosed on her Fix the Debt bio, she has long advocated for the privatization of Social Security (see 2001 testimony.)UNDISCLOSED CONFLICT OF INTEREST: MacGuineas' husband Robin Brooks is a managing director and a currency trading analyst at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs lobbies around federal tax issues affecting banking and securities and is a member of the Managed Funds Association, which lobbies against efforts to make Wall Street pay its fair share such as the proposed "Robin Hood Tax," a a tiny tax on trades that some economists project could raise $1 trillion over 10 years.

Other big wigs involved and looking to get their snouts in the trough are below

The only thing Pyramid about this is them at the top and you underneath... sounds like the mother of all ponzi schemes to me.

Funny how theres always a Pyramid involved with these guys somewhere...

More than 90 Fix the Debt leaders at the state level are current or former lobbyists, and many lobby for Fix the Debt firms, according to a review of federal and state lobbying databases by the Center for Media and Democracy in February 2013.

This isnt any tin foil hat theory but a well funded well run PR exercise with investment of billions by the banks and many private firms. This ball is rolling and it has the whitehouse ears already

What do you think ?

 

[DeletedUser]

It's not something that's going to happen while a Democrat is president. They want more government not less, because government has historically been so much better at business than business. I couldn't see this happen, but I think there is a plan to outsource our Department of Defense to North Korea.

 

[DeletedUser16008]

It's not something that's going to happen while a Democrat is president. They want more government not less, because government has historically been so much better at business than business. I couldn't see this happen, but I think there is a plan to outsource our Department of Defense to North Korea.

You cant get much more government seeing as it dosn't fund itself but on the backs of private jobs tax. Unless Gov wants to nationalise its pretty much stuck and left with little alternative and like you say its so great at running things, thing is they arnt running anything much now because thats all preordained by lobbyists and contracted out anyway.

Don't be so sure about the democrats they are almost exactly the same as the republicans anyway from what I can tell.

 

[DeletedUser15641]

Yeah, but isn't this politics?

Last time I talked about it I got......

I think, well they are puppets victor.

if its at USA's best interest, sure, why not?

If not, I hope it goes better and stop it.

 

[DeletedUser35409]

If you are seriously interested in how to successfully and safely privatize the US social security system over a graduated time frame please research acclaimed economist George Reisman.

Buying out the older generation with a guaranteed annuity which would more than equate their current benefit payouts while allowing younger citizens choice is a gem of an idea.

Of course, this has been proposed before in a much more dimunitive manner and was eliminated from consideration after the usual fear mongers came out of the closet much to the detriment of the recipients, tax payers, and younger generation.

Your best welfare be damned! After all, those big gubmint politicians were just looking after our best interest when they screwed us contrary to sound economic theory (which is based on an ubiquitous set of facts).

--------------For further study see the www.Fairtax.org site. This is a bill perpetually before congress that would simplify the entire Federal tax code and remove all embedded taxes that raise the price of everything you buy. It's revenue neutral, in that the receipts to the government treasury would remain equal to what it is today while eliminating the income tax and the burdensome paperwork on individuals and businesses that come with it.

Ron Paul fans ought to love it once understood.

Greece or Cyprus any one?

 

[DeletedUser]

Ugh, I can't believe you're going to pedal fair tax. Sorry Funny Bone, you've been duped on that one.

 

[DeletedUser35409]

How so? Any mule can kick down a barn. You need to adduce something to buttress a counter assertion.

 

[DeletedUser]

Hehe, easy enough. Once again we subject you to my own words*, yay:

Fair tax calls for eliminating the sixteenth amendment and advocates imposing only one tax, a consumables tax. Essentially, it's a flat rate sales tax on all new, retail purchases. So let me point out the parts:

No tax on wholesale item purchase
Wholesale items are essentially item transfers from a producer to someone who will sell it to the consumer. Thus, there are no sales for items sold between producers and between retailers. This is, essentially, what presently exists in the U.S., so there's no change there.

A tax on new item purchase
Only retail items, sold for the first time to a consumer, is taxed. The advocated tax rate is 30% (Fair Tax Org and other advocates are misrepresenting, and saying it is a 23% tax, but they're just having fun with math and, in doing so, they are demonstrating a degree of dishonesty, which puts everything into question. <click here> <and here>).

An essentials prebate
Also referred to as a poverty prebate, this is basically a nationally-provided debit card that you swipe through the standard credit card machines at a register, to remove tax from the purchase of items, for a set amount based on family size and regional cost of living. It doesn't matter what your income is, every head-of-household gets this prebate.

(an alternative was presented that only provides these cards to those people with an income below particular levels of income, but this is largely rejected by Fair Tax advocates).​

Here's what it eliminates:

• Income tax
• Service tax
• Capital gain tax
• Stock/share gain tax
• Export tax
• Import tax
• Used item tax
• Corporate earnings tax
• Internal Revenue Service
• Accounting expenses for filing taxes

This sounds great, it's idealism at it's best. Revenue is not taxed, only consumables. But idealism has a horrible problem of thinking people won't try to cheat the system, which they invariably do.

So here are the glaringly obvious flaws:

Wholesale - You can avoid paying fair taxes by getting a wholeseller's license and always purchasing items on wholesale (people do it nowadays to avoid State sales tax, so why would it stop, particularly now that the IRS is dissolved and the sales tax is significantly inflated?)

Pre-Owned - You can sell items as "used," thereby ensuring your customers don't have to pay any fair taxes. The motivation for this is obvious, you can sell your items for 30% less than your opposition. The problem with this is that "used" and "new" are arbitrary.

Direct-to-Buyer - As a direct producer, you can avoid the retailer altogether and sell your items directly to the consumers, without a fair tax, and thus at a significantly reduced price. This is a direct fair tax evasion but, without an IRS and without any means to audit production, it is virtually untraceable.

Overseas/Internet - As a consumer, you can purchase your items overseas, sans fair tax, utilizing direct contacts or via the internet. As there is no IRS, your item purchases are untraceable - and - legal.

Service Ambiguity - Do recall, services are not taxable, so you can claim to be purchasing services, but in fact are purchasing items. The only indicator is that which is presented by the seller, who may (and likely will) participate in the collusion, so as to sell their items at a reduced price, but at a higher profit (lower than the fair taxed price, but higher than the untaxed price).

Trade - Since services are not taxable, you can pay for services with items, thereby once again avoiding fair tax. This is commonly referred to as "trade." Trade becomes more popular during periods of inflation, which the fair tax will invariably cause.
​

There are plenty of other means to avoid paying fair tax but, as I indicated, these are the obvious.

Now the Lie
Fair tax advocates are blatantly lying. They claim it is progressive, in that low/middle income people pay comparable tax to the wealthy, but this is simply false. Even with the poverty prebate, citizens paying low/middle income are still paying a greater percentage. In fact, a study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) <click here> determined that the bottom 80% (which constitutes only 15% of this nation's wealth) would pay an average of $3,200 more in taxes per household (a little more than 50% additional taxes), while the richest (top 1%) would pay an average of $225,000 less taxes.

And this, of course, is assuming they continue with "business as usual," which they invariably will not. The wealthy will change how they do business, exploiting every opportunity to avoid paying fair tax. With so many easy, legal, ways to do just that, you can bet the transition will be painless. It will be harder for those of low/middle income to exploit these same options, but do not be fooled into thinking they can't, or won't.

Less Revenue
Assuming "business as usual," a 30% National sales tax is simply insufficient and will result in a loss of revenue. Indeed, Perry inferred awareness of such when, in his book, he stated fair tax, "provides only the modest revenue needed to perform the basic constitutional functions of the federal government." So, of course, implementing fair tax would need to also dramatically change the federal government's spending habits. I.e., implementing fair tax would be putting the carriage before the horse, drying up this Nation's revenue, forcing it to borrow yet more money, before they finally cut spending. And do recall, all loans have interest. Revenue is not needed merely to pay for bloated defense programs, subsidize the looted Social Security, and pay back loans, but to cover for interest on those loans. A dramatic loss in revenue, which will invariably occur due to implementation of fair tax, is simply not the direction this nation needs to take. Particularly not at this stage of our nation's economic crisis.

Happy Corporations
So why is this system being advocated? Well, because of corporate greed, of course. Corporations will not have to pay taxes, at all. Corporations are, essentially, a conglomerate of wealthy people wielding their wealth cooperatively to gain additional revenue. Because corporations have little to no retail purchases (or can work it so such is the case - i.e., wholesale or overseas), they will not be taxed.

Fair tax is yet another means to expand the disparity in wealth, making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and this government in the crapper for lack of sufficient revenue. It shifts the burden of paying taxes onto the poor/middle income, who carry only 15% of this nation's wealth. And, since 85% of all this nation's wealth sits in the coffers of the richest 20% <click here>, such a shift is simply a catastrophic direction.​

* Originally posted here --> http://forum.the-west.net/showpost.php?p=597003&postcount=11

 

[DeletedUser35409]

Your fundamentals are wrong wrong wrong wrong and come from left wing sources that compare apples and oranges. It IS %23 not %30 that your source claims. This is nothing more than a sophistic argument using smoke and mirrors used to confuse people. When compared apples to apples it is NOT that rate.

In order to understand the Fair Tax you must compare it to the current system mathematically.

It is NOT a regressive tax at all. It, through its prebate, absolves the 'poor' of any tax liability entirely.

Furthermore the use in your above post of 'rich get richer and poor get poorer' is evidentially false, even under today's system or any other for that matter. It's apparent your economic philosophy is that of leftover marxism and keynesianism. Those tired old systems now discredited by economists not now appearing on BBC or CNN.

Crack a book once in a while.

edit: p.s. Furthermore your critique above belies a misunderstanding (more accurately a non-understanding) of the function of capital accumulation and the role of profits on a fundamental level. Without the understanding of what those 2 features of the landscape actually are no further learned debate is possible as we are living on 2 different planets.

 

[DeletedUser]

lol, crack a book once in awhile? Well thank you, but I'm sufficiently educated and your ad hominem is noted. In any event, I am quite correct about Fair Tax and I'm also quite sure I do not need your absolution. What I presented are the facts, not propaganda. When you can present an actual argument, with supporting evidence, we can continue this discussion.