GOP will really kill Social Security. American healthcare vs. the rest of the world

Fmr. VP Mike Pence clarified that the GOP is planning to privatize Social Security. Stealthy moves are, in effect, to scare Americans away from healthcare for all with new tactics. We must respond.

GOP will really kill Social Security.

It’s not a scare tactic. The GOP is after our Social Security, and they admit it.

While they do not outright say it on national news programs, they say it in their Conservative conferences, symposiums, and corporate gatherings. Former Vice-President Pence said the quiet part out loud recently, as reported by Common Dreams.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, has voiced support for a Social Security privatization scheme that the George W. Bush administration unsuccessfully pushed nearly two decades ago.

In a closed-door event Thursday hosted by the National Association of Wholesale-Distributors, a corporate trade group, Pence said he believes that “the day could come when we can replace the New Deal with a better deal, literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account that the government would oversee.”

“I mean, a very simple fund that could generate 2% would give the average American twice what they’re going to get back on their Social Security today. And it could save the government money doing it,” Pence said, according to video footage obtained by the Democratic-aligned group American Bridge 21st Century.

The GOP and other Wall Street-purchased politicians would love to give Wall Street another huge flow of your money. It is not enough that they have reduced their taxes so that they can lend it back to the American people to take even more of our money in the form of interest.

We all have got to wise up. We are in the process of becoming a society where most own nothing as the few keep finding ways to extract all our earned, saved, and credit income. Privatizing parts of Social Security would make our retirement system much worse.

Experts have forcefully rejected the notion that private savings accounts of the kind Pence endorsed—which would allow workers to divert a portion of their payroll tax contributions into private investment accounts—would be more beneficial than Social Security’s guaranteed benefits, as the former vice president suggested.

“The popular argument that Social Security privatization would provide higher returns for all current and future workers is misleading, because it ignores transition costs and differences across programs in the allocation of aggregate and household risk,” Olivia Mitchell, John Geanakopolos, and Stephen Zeldes—economists sympathetic to the idea of privatization—wrote in a 2000 paper.

Experts have also said private accounts would not, as Pence put it, “save the government money.”

In 2005, analysts with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that a privatization plan put forth by former Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) and former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would “create $85.8 trillion in additional debt (equal to 93.7% of GDP) by 2050” while not boosting Social Security’s long-term solvency—something Republicans claim they want to do.

“Creation of a system of private accounts would not change the amount of revenue coming into the federal government, but it would increase government spending, because the federal government would be making regular payments into the private accounts,” the CBPP analysts explained. “These payments would represent new government spending. This increase in spending, unaccompanied by an increase in revenues, would widen annual deficits.”

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American healthcare sucks for most. Don’t believe the disguised false statements.

I saw a video on TikTok that made it clear we must be fully engaged in the healthcare debate 24/7. The Health Industrial Complex is very sneaky. They know how to seed our society with influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Toktok, and every platform that we all frequent.

Yesterday a video appeared in my Tiktok feed that I felt compelled to answer with a video. She claimed to be a Canadian. She disparages the Canadian healthcare system, which by all measures is, orders of magnitude, less expensive and more effective than ours. I wrote the following in the caption.

This woman simply does not understand basic math. #HealthcareForAll / #MedicareForAll is my mission. It is a mathematical impossibility for a private for profit healthcare system to be more efficient than a #SinglePayer system. The private system must pay executives. advertising. shareholders, real estate, and many other expenses that ultimately you pay. Additionally, doctors’ offices must hire additional staff to work with a bunch of insurance companies. A single payer system have none of those costs which allows insuring everyone for less. It’s math.

The corporatocracy gets it. Storytelling works. Personal stories, made-up or true, are much better than explaining why any system is better than the other mathematically. The opposition, the money-hungry parasites lying to you about for-profit health insurance, have the cash that you gave them to continue lying to you by paying others to lie for them. But you know what? Posting truthful stories is the purview of all of us. And we can do it for free. But we must do it.

My passion is healthcare. As someone with a wife with chronic disease, Lupus, and a young daughter who has had two strokes, it is both economically, mentally, and physically existential to me and to the millions going through what my family and many others have gone through.

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Miscellaneous NOTE: The oil executive thugs are at it again. They are slowly raising the price of gasoline again. Folks, please start driving less permanently. The pandemic proves that we can bring these economic terrorists to their knees. They are on Wall Street, rejoicing about their massive profits. They are reinvesting those profits in stock buybacks to further enrich their wealthy executives and shareholders instead of in renewables and policies good for the entire country they are pilfering. Remember, when you see them talking about record profits, that is the food out of your kids’ mouths. That is your child’s education. That is the healthcare you had to forego. That is an earned vacation you could not afford for a necessary RnR.

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