{"id":7862,"date":"2010-11-24T16:55:13","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T21:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7862"},"modified":"2010-11-24T16:55:13","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T21:55:13","slug":"giving-thanks-for-clarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7862\/giving-thanks-for-clarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving Thanks for Clarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

So maybe the era of big government really wasn\u2019t over when former President Bill Clinton declared it so.\u00a0 Jim MacDougald of the Free Enterprise Nation<\/em> explains that the balanced budget Clinton delivered was the product of a shell game<\/a> with the Social Security Trust Fund, not a profile in political courage.\u00a0 From a blog entry discussing the history of Social Security and Medicare:<\/p>\n

The federal government recognized that beginning in about 2011 the transfer payment system wouldn’t work. There would be too many recipients of benefits and not enough workers to take money from to pay for it. To avoid the financial catastrophe that loomed ahead, in 1983 the government substantially increased employer and employee contribution requirements to (at least partially) pre-fund for 2011 and thereafter.<\/p>\n

Planning ahead for an event that would occur 28 years in the future was a commendable and far-sighted act by our elected officials. \u201cBaby-boomers,\u201d who made up the majority of our workforce, were subsequently \u201ctaxed twice,\u201d with matching contributions from employers. One portion of their tax was to pay for those on Social Security who had already retired, the second portion was to pre-fund a part of their own retirement benefits.<\/p>\n

Congress took this excess tax revenue and put it in a \u201ctrust fund\u201d to pay future benefits. But the trust fund they established was an enormous shell game because the money was treated as general revenues\u2026a huge windfall to the federal government. It enabled President Clinton to announce at a State of the Union address, that the deficit was “exactly zero.” Even today, people are still congratulating Presidents Clinton and H.W. Bush for having balanced budgets and reducing national debt. But Congress had accomplished that feat by taking and spending all of the \u201cexcess revenue\u201d that was coming in from payroll taxes for Social Security, and there was a lot of it to spend! From 1983 to 2008, the federal government took $2.5 trillion more than required to pay current Medicare and Social Security recipients, and they “bought Treasuries” with it. In other words, they spent it all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, it makes a lot more sense how the federal government could \u201cbalance\u201d the budget so quickly with nary a squeal heard from entrenched interests.\u00a0 As MacDougald makes clear in the rest of his article<\/a>, starting next year there are no more games to play.\u00a0 The 2011 budget for Social Security and Medicare is $1.22 TRILLION<\/em> \u2013 more than all of the federal income taxes paid by all of the workers in America last year.\u00a0 In order to pay for the payments owed to Baby Boomers (who, as a cohort, begin reaching 65 in 2011), every American worker will have to pay at least $10,000 in new federal taxes every year<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Add this to the cost of ObamaCare and….pass the tryptophan and bring on the food coma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So maybe the era of big government really wasn\u2019t over when former President Bill Clinton declared it so.\u00a0 Jim MacDougald of the Free Enterprise Nation explains that the balanced budget Clinton delivered was the product of a shell game with the Social Security Trust Fund, not a profile in political courage.\u00a0 From a blog entry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1898,501,2118,2117,235,35,461,71],"class_list":["post-7862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-balanced-budget","tag-bill-clinton","tag-free-enterprise-nation","tag-jim-macdougald","tag-medicare","tag-obamacare","tag-social-security","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7863,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7862\/revisions\/7863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}