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2020 Democratic Presidential Nominees

The quibble sort of makes sense but they can’t hold stuff forever. If step up basis upon death is changed then Uncle Sam will get his cut eventually.
 
Elizabeth Warren’s Plan for Social Security Looks Smart


When I was a teenager, my mom showed me a statement that she had received in the mail from the Social Security Administration. It included an annual history of her earnings, which showed a big string of zero’s covering the years when she was in her late 20s and early 30s. “That’s you and your sister,” she explained, laughing.

My mom is doing just fine these days, but anyone who spends years as a stay-at-home parent — or an unpaid caregiver of any kind — faces a financial penalty when it comes time to retire. Our Social Security system doesn’t recognize parenting as the socially and economically valuable job that it is.

That’s not the system’s only inequity, either. It also punishes teachers, police officers, firefighters and other government employees. Their Social Security benefits are cut if their pension is large enough, unlike private-sector workers, who can keep their full Social Security benefit regardless of the size of their private pension.

Elizabeth Warren has become famous for her plans, and her latest one, out this morning, is meant to address this unfairness. It would let public-sector workers keep their full Social Security benefits and increase benefits for people who spend at least 80 hours a month as unpaid caregivers for young children, the elderly or the disabled.

The biggest part of the plan, however, is an across-the-board increase in monthly Social Security payments. Every current and future beneficiary will receive at least $200 more per month than under the current plan, and many low-income workers will receive at least $600 more.

“A generation of stagnant wages and rising costs for basics like housing, health care, education, and child care have squeezed family budgets,” Warren writes in a Medium post. “Millions of families have had to sacrifice saving for retirement just to make ends meet. At the same time, fewer people have access to the kind of pensions that used to help fund a comfortable retirement.” Her campaign also released an outside analysis, by Moody’s Analytics, which found that the plan would cut the elderly poverty rate by about two-thirds.

She would pay for the plan by increasing the payroll tax on incomes above $250,000, which are now shielded from it. As income inequality has soared in recent decades, Warren notes, the amount of the country’s total income subject to the payroll tax, which finances Social Security, has declined. She would reverse that decline.

I’ve criticized Warren and other Democrats recently for backing a couple of policies that I think are wrongheaded and unpopular (like forcing everyone to enroll in Medicare). The Social Security plan is different. I’ll want to read what others have to say about it in coming days, especially about the size of the increase, but my initial view is that this proposal is the opposite of mandatory Medicare — substantively smart and politically popular.

True, the economy has been kinder to older Americans than younger Americans in recent years (as Warren is well aware). Over all, I’d like to see federal spending become more focused on children and younger workers. But it’s also true that our high-inequality economy hasn’t been easy on most people over the age of 65. Many deserve help.

And as I’m sure you are aware, people over 65 tend to vote at very high rates.

Related: “Americans are pessimistic about the financial health of older Americans,” Kim Parker, Rich Morin and Juliana Menasce Horowitz of the Pew Research Center recently wrote. “Most say that, 30 years from now, those ages 65 and older will be less prepared for retirement than their counterparts today.”

My colleague Paul Krugman has written over the years about both the long-term finances and the politics of Social Security. “America’s overall retirement system is in big trouble,” Paul wrote in 2013. “There’s just one part of that system that’s working well: Social Security. And this suggests that we should make that program stronger, not weaker.”
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Anybody else feeling blah about this debate? I don't know if it's because of Bucs-Panthers tonight and the UNC game tomorrow or we just had the climate town hall or that I don't want to see another 10 person soundbite fest.
 
the only thing that irks me there is the complaint that pensioners lose some SS benefit. fuckin' A, some of those people can work a state job, retire with a full pension at 50 something and then get another FT job. i know because my and my in-laws family is full of them
 
ConnorEl said:
The last one for me. Yea, I'll watch.
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I'll probably follow here and on Facebook during the game and watch afterward if I'm not too pissed/hype.
 
“I believe the recovery should have been from the ground up, and people with Geithner’s and Summers’ background would never see the world that way—they just don't see it that way,” Warren says. “America works great for the wealthy and the well-connected—that was demonstrated big time during the financial crisis. ... Donald Trump stepped into that and said, ‘If your life isn't working great, blame them.’ His version of ‘them’ is anyone who doesn’t look like you.”
As for the Obama team’s arguments that the financial rescue was a success—the bank bailouts ultimately made a profit, a depression was averted, and GDP growth resumed faster than the aftermath of most financial crises -- Warren considers them obscene self-congratulation.
“Sure, the banks are more profitable than ever, they are bigger than ever, the stock market is through the roof,” she says. “But across this country, there are people who still pay the price for a financial crisis that they didn't cause and that they never had a chance to survive. … That's not a success.”
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This is a winning argument. People can say "But Obama was popular! Why should a Dem run against his policies?" Yeah, Obama was popular. Geithner and Summers were not popular and it's hard to argue they were successful. This reminds me how much I hated Geithner. I did a search and found I started the thread when he announced he was leaving.

PhDeac said:
I think we can get near unanimous agreement about this one.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/timothy-geithner-to-leave-by-months-end-85731.html?hp=t3_3
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By the way, is anybody surprised by this?

Geithner’s upbringing was “very privileged,” he writes in his book. Self-deprecatingly, he admits to being waitlisted at Wesleyan University and Williams College but accepted at Dartmouth College in part because he was a legacy student.
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Screw that legacy CFO special chump.

Anyway, this whole narrative allows Warren to tell a great story. She could say "I came up with this great idea to help government protect you from predators in our economy. They wouldn't let me run it, so I ran for Senate instead and I won. There's still more work to do. Now I'm running for President and I'm going to win this too."

I love this quote:
“Maybe this is what lots of people do who grow up with no money, but I’ll tell you this: I taught everything about money,” she said at a recent rally in Seattle, explaining her zeal for teaching topics like bankruptcy and finance.
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Shorten that to "I didn't have money, so I learned everything I could about it." It could kill on the stump.
 
PhDeac said:
This is a winning argument. People can say "But Obama was popular! Why should a Dem run against his policies?" Yeah, Obama was popular. Geithner and Summers were not popular and it's hard to argue they were successful. This reminds me how much I hated Geithner. I did a search and found I started the thread when he announced he was leaving.



By the way, is anybody surprised by this?



Screw that legacy CFO special chump.

Anyway, this whole narrative allows Warren to tell a great story. She could say "I came up with this great idea to help government protect you from predators in our economy. They wouldn't let me run it, so I ran for Senate instead and I won. There's still more work to do. Now I'm running for President and I'm going to win this too."

I love this quote:


Shorten that to "I didn't have money, so I learned everything I could about it." It could kill on the stump.
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bernie whines, Warren relates
 
ImTheCaptain said:
bernie whines, Warren relates
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Exactly. Bernie supporters don't understand the difference. They also don't get that people aren't really scared of Bernie because he hasn't done shit and he doesn't know enough about the system to scare the people running it. Warren knows and she's been reading the blueprints and has shown how she plans to deconstruct it. Bernie maybe has a wrecking ball.

I love my old posts from this Geithner search. Shows my problems with the Obama administration at the time.

PhDeac said:
Not really. I don't think it matters to Dems if Romney made $20M or $40M in a given year. We already know he's got a ton of money. What does matter is where it came from, how much he paid in taxes, and why.

I think the Dems have people investigating Romney's money trail to see if he dotted his i's and crossed his t's so they can pull out any claim that he dodged his taxes whether it be purposeful or a simple mistake. Now of course, that would be more legit if they had just canned Geithner and saved all of us the trouble of his incompetence.
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PhDeac said:
I've never been that impressed with his cabinet to the extent that you hear from them. Geithner is a horrible front man and I can't imagine he's been in private.

My impression of Obama's advisors is that they don't have much sense of governance, only running elections.

The problem when Obama gets on message is it sounds more artificial than when Republicans do it. It's not his style. He's a professor. That's a tough style to adapt to the presidency.
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PhDeac said:
Geithner is in over his head. Maybe anybody would be in his position, but he looks like a deer in headlights or like he's a kid in time out when I see him.
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ImTheCaptain said:
bernie whines, Warren relates
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Yeah, a President Warren wouldn't have bailed out the banks, and instead we would have experienced a credit freeze and a depression instead of a recession. Sometimes you have to opt for necessary evils and hold your nose. But the ideologically pure on the right and left would never do such a thing.
 
cville deac said:
Yeah, a President Warren wouldn't have bailed out the banks, and instead we would have experienced a credit freeze and a depression instead of a recession. Sometimes you have to opt for necessary evils and hold your nose. But the ideologically pure on the right and left would never do such a thing.
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that doesn't answer her. the winners were banks. losers were/are american people
 
cville deac said:
Yeah, a President Warren wouldn't have bailed out the banks, and instead we would have experienced a credit freeze and a depression instead of a recession. Sometimes you have to opt for necessary evils and hold your nose. But the ideologically pure on the right and left would never do such a thing.
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I don't think you have the correct inputs to say whether or not she would have bailed out the banks, but you better believe she would have prosecuted. Anyway they should have been nationalized like the auto industry (temporarily).
 
cville deac said:
Yeah, a President Warren wouldn't have bailed out the banks, and instead we would have experienced a credit freeze and a depression instead of a recession. Sometimes you have to opt for necessary evils and hold your nose. But the ideologically pure on the right and left would never do such a thing.
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You can bail out the banks but also fix the broken system and put criminals and frauds out of business or in jail.
 
I mean go to 5:50 here:



"They should have put that money into banks with strings attached. Whenever a financial institution gets into trouble [outside this crisis], when new money comes in, say if they go through Chapter 11, you wipe out the old shareholders, you make the old debt take a haircut, you change the management, and you make sure they have a new and different business plan."
 
birdman said:
You can bail out the banks but also fix the broken system and put criminals and frauds out of business or in jail.
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I'm more than fine with appropriately prosecuting fraudulent entities and persons. The problem was supposedly smart people on Wall St were buying up paperless loans from sleazy small mortgage companies and some bigger ones that were designed to fail b/c the mortgage payment was often 50-100% of the borrowers net income. And they bundled these things into mortgage backed securities that were really junk but Moody's and S&P rated them triple A. As long as real estate kept going up, the lender didn't lose much if any money. But once real estate values started to go down and cratered, that's when their losses became massive. The really smart hedge fund managers detailed in the Big Short realized this and bet against it and won big time. But our financial system was teetering on tanking. Near as I can tell, the entities who were most at fault were Moody's and S&P because they let Goldman and others talk them into rating those junk bonds triple A. Richard Fuld became the poster child for running Lehman into the ground, but his biggest sin was really believing in the value of those horrid mortgage back securities. At most he was pretty negligent in evaluating that market. I fault Moody's and S&P more than anyone else, but they didn't get prosecuted.
 
cville deac said:
I'm more than fine with appropriately prosecuting fraudulent entities and persons. The problem was supposedly smart people on Wall St were buying up paperless loans from sleazy small mortgage companies and some bigger ones that were designed to fail b/c the mortgage payment was often 50-100% of the borrowers net income. And they bundled these things into mortgage backed securities that were really junk but Moody's and S&P rated them triple A. As long as real estate kept going up, the lender didn't lose much if any money. But once real estate values started to go down and cratered, that's when their losses became massive. The really smart hedge fund managers detailed in the Big Short realized this and bet against it and won big time. But our financial system was teetering on tanking. Near as I can tell, the entities who were most at fault were Moody's and S&P because they let Goldman and others talk them into rating those junk bonds triple A. Richard Fuld became the poster child for running Lehman into the ground, but his biggest sin was really believing in the value of those horrid mortgage back securities. At most he was pretty negligent in evaluating that market. I fault Moody's and S&P more than anyone else, but they didn't get prosecuted.
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Thanks for the Finance 101 lesson; I too have watch the Big Short, and even listened to This American Life's "Giant Pool of Money" episode. You are describing a broken system. Where the mechanism to keep the system in check (Moody's and S&P) were too cozy with the entities they were supposed to be rating. You also note that the banks (Goldman, etc.) influenced and pressured those ratings agencies. Both are cases of corruption. Maybe not criminal, but that is the kind of thing that needs to be addressed...Create transparency of financial products, regulate derivative financial products, regulate the ratings agencies, Bail out the banks but make them all install new CEO's, etc. The fact that many of those CEO's walked away without any consequences would be abzurd, but most of them walked away with massive severance packages. Warren never said she wouldn't bail them out, she said the bail outs would have come with requirements and strings attached that would lead to needed reforms.
 
birdman said:
Thanks for the Finance 101 lesson; I too have watch the Big Short, and even listened to This American Life's "Giant Pool of Money" episode. You are describing a broken system. Where the mechanism to keep the system in check (Moody's and S&P) were too cozy with the entities they were supposed to be rating. You also note that the banks (Goldman, etc.) influenced and pressured those ratings agencies. Both are cases of corruption. Maybe not criminal, but that is the kind of thing that needs to be addressed...Create transparency of financial products, regulate derivative financial products, regulate the ratings agencies, Bail out the banks but make them all install new CEO's, etc. The fact that many of those CEO's walked away without any consequences would be abzurd, but most of them walked away with massive severance packages. Warren never said she wouldn't bail them out, she said the bail outs would have come with requirements and strings attached that would lead to needed reforms.
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LOL - cville can be so condescending when he's not discussing the intricacies of Charlottesville municipal politics
 
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