The bosses’ media is filled with cries of a “Social Security (SS) crisis,” screaming that SS will “run out of funds” unless taxes are increased and the retirement age is raised. But this is not a crisis of SS. It’s a crisis of U.S. capitalism.
Until 1968, the bosses’ law mandated that all payments into the SS Trust Fund be used only for retirees’ pensions. But that year the Johnson administration broke that law by “folding” the surplus revenue in the S.S Trust Fund into what the bosses called the “Unified Federal Budget”(UFB). Why? Because the cost of their imperialist war in Vietnam was creating a huge deficit. But now, by including those billions and trillions of surpluses from the S.S Trust Fund into the UFB, they could steal those surpluses and use them to reduce the Federal deficit and pay for the cost of that war and all the imperialist wars to follow: Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Gulf War I, Iraq and the longest one of all: Afghanistan — 18 years and counting.
Workers pay a SS tax rate at 7.65 percent (including Medicare) and the employer pays an equal amount. But the employers’ amount comes from the workers’ labor so, in effect, 15.30 percent is being paid by workers to build the SS Trust Fund, ostensibly to cover workers’ retirement and Medicare.
The Federal government is obligated to pay back the SS surpluses robbed from the SS Fund — in the form of Treasury bonds — a robbery which by 2015 left the SS Fund $4.6 trillion short. This leads to their lie that “Social Security is endangered.” But in actuality — as noted in the NY Times (1/21/90) — the government is using the $4.6 trillion of SS surpluses it robbed “to pay for everything from jet fighters to thumb tacks.”
For instance, this addition of the SS surpluses to the UFB made the 1998 “budget surplus…a mirage….about which both the President [Clinton] and the Republicans crowed incessantly.” It “was due to a big surplus in Social Security….The rest of the budget showed a deficit of almost $30 billion. Most of the Social Security surplus, which supposedly goes into the Social Security Trust Fund, was spent on other programs” (NY Times, 11/9/1990). Thus, with a $100 billion addition from a SS surplus, this sleight-of-hand turns an actual $30 billion federal deficit into a $70 billion federal budget “surplus.”
The rulers’ crocodile tears about “saving Social Security” is utter bullshit. The Carter, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama Democrats along with the Reagan, Bushes, and Trump Republicans have all, been using the working class’s pension money to prop up U.S. capitalism, cutting taxes on the rich while paying for the rulers’ imperialist wars.
The deficit crisis is part of the general crisis of capitalism. It will always try to solve that crisis on the backs of the workers who produce all the value in society. Such “solutions” will continue until the working class, led by its revolutionary party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rises up to destroy the bosses’ state power and establishes a society in which retired workers will be provided for by the social value produced by our entire class. Profits, bosses, and imperialist wars will not be part of that picture.
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The bosses shift the tax burden
In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration, with the help of the Democrats, cut income tax rates for the rich from 70 percent down to 28 percent. Corporate income taxes fell by 23 percent. Meanwhile, it raised the Social Security tax on workers’ wages. Thus, the New York Times reported (1/21/90) that, “The burden of taxation was shifted from the income tax to the Social Security tax….[75 percent] of all Americans now pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes.” Thus, “the expenses of government are financed more by a tax on the poor and the ‘middle’ class and less by a tax on the wealthy.”