According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only one tenth of entitlements go to unemployed dead beats. The rest go to the elderly, disabled, or working poor. So where do we cut?
It only makes a lot of sense if you are a conservative or have bought their and phony arguments that there is some big crisis in social security. Enemies of social security know that if you turn it into a welfare type means testing scheme then it will lead sooner or later to a lack of supprt from upper class earners and its death. This is why they are so hot to do it. If you check that aside from libertarian type ideologues the anti-social security scare is funded by the fiancial service industry that hates that they can't make all of the ordinary person's pension or safe money be in accounts they can make a percentage on. Medicare is in worse shape as we insist on paying medicare dollars for inefficent costly private medicine with its wealty CEO's, profits, marketing and other excess non-medical costs. People paid for those benefits and it is wrong to cut those benefits. They don't have to be cut if we take sensible steps. Google Dean Baker and social security crisis for instance. I think at the very least it makes sense to start taxing the wealthy at rates which we had back after World War II the Reagan counterevolution. We need to stop starting needless wars.
This is true if you look at the SS Trust Fund as an independent entity - but it's not. Yes, there is a big surplus in the trust fund - but we've already spent that to support the rest of our government over the last many decades. So while we'll be technically eating into a surplus that has already been spent, in reality, it will explode our annual budget deficits, and that's a major problem. I do agree that overall, the SS problem is not that difficult to fix. I would suggest a combination of raising the retirement age, broadening the base by raising the max income (and maybe lowering the actual rate), and means-testing so you're not paying SS to people who don't need it would solve the problem fairly easily. I think this is far-fetched -we have lots of social programs for the non-wealthy that have solid support. We have limited funds as a government, and we should be prioritizing that spending based on what's most important. And providing extra income to wealthy people is at somewhere near the bottom of the list of my vision of government's priorities. It's not nearly that simple, but yes, Medicare's problems are directly correlated to problems in the general health care industry.
