Social Security does not contribute to the debt at all, and is solvent if left alone until 2030, when 78% of current rates are payable if nothing at all is done.

Medicare-Medicaid is doing well, it is proven far more efficient and cost-effective than private insurance for the same population, but needs some definitive tweeks. Perhaps we can allow the government to bargain for drug costs, and cut several billion a year over time. Changing duplicate pay policies saves some more. Obama already took 500 billion of waste out for the PPACA.

Oh - and Obama offered a raised Medicare age in the big deal benefits package, according to leaks to Sam Stein, which he published today. The GOP just turned that one down. Sorry. The GOP party of "we screw ourselves" continues.

i feel that if they were able to get obamacare passed, they left plenty undone. i wonder if that was the deal? the reps allowed that to pass, at the expense of other things the dems wanted. wouldn't surprise me a bit to know that backdoor deals like that happen.

social security is funded by iou's. everyone has recognized it needs help, but no one wants to be the one to grab onto that one.
the govt has borrowed from itself-it just hasn't figured out how to pay itself back yet. of course, it can't default on that debt. problem now is that they are so far in debt elsewhere, where will the money come from the pay ss back???

Remember...We have to pass the bill to see what is in the bill...Famous word's of?????

LOL - Yeah. When there's a proposed bill in the Senate committee, and proposed bills in the House committees, and a proposed bill content from the President, and different factions are trying to get their different proposals passed, and a reporter asks the Speaker of the House "What of those options will be in the final bill?", the Speaker rightly answers, "We'll have to pass the bill to see what's in it".

Oh, it's so clever to hear people quote right wing "out of context" nonsense from two years ago! :)

Guess what was said today? Same thing. We'll have to have a final bill, before we know what will be in the final bill.

Why then is the Pres. saying SS checks won't go out unless he's allowed to borrow more money. He's not going to divert SS money to pay something else, like Pelosi's salary is he?

You can't possibly be this stupid.

This is precisely what I mean by your repeated demonstration of your "willful ignorance". We have discussed Social Security, how it works, the trust fund, etc. repeatedly on this board, and you've participated.

It's apparent you don't pay attention in the least to the real world, and you haven't the foggiest notion how Social Security or this country's budget works, let alone what the debt ceiling is and how we borrow and finance our country.

You seriously do not have a clue about these most basic things in our country. Things that have been all over the news the past 4-8 years.

Think really hard, and think of the concept of "cash flow". Good luck with it.

Remember that in the House, all Republicans and 34 Dems voted against it (but it still passed); but in the Senate, a 60 vote supermajority was needed, and all 40 Republicans voting against it, and the Independents joining the Dems to pass it with the 60 supermajority (a supermajority isn't needed for regular bills in normal times, but the Republicans were obstructing every senate vote)

Joe Leibermann at the last minute voted for it, passing it.

and you can't be that naive unless it's on purpose.

And that silly, meaningless answer proves you don't understand what the debt ceiling is, what it is used for, how our government finances the 70-80 million checks we write monthly, and the Social Security trust fund, SS funds and what they are, and how Social Security works; and how we finance this country on a daily basis, and what Treasury bonds are.

If you had just the most rudimentary, basic, elementary understanding of the above, you'd never ask why we would have to borrow money to pay out Social Security checks, yet how Social Security has nothing to do with our deficit, but yes, with the debt ceiling.

Let SS go try and borrow against that 'trust fund' that's solvent till 2030 as you claim. :zz:

Ponzi anyone?

You seriously haven't got a clue. You just contradicted your own original question, along with neglecting to realize you duplicated something I said. While demonstrating again, with your "ponzi" comment, that you don't even understand how SS is set up to work.

Pretty good toll for two sentences.

You make me want to support a poll tax.

its was actually the unprecedented use of the Slaughter rule that got obamacare passed. very very shady

and like i said above, if that bill that so many were against could pass, so could other democrat measures. that's one of the reasons many in his own party are unhappy with obama; he had an opportunity to do more, and he squandered it. because he didn't want to do too much, and possibly lose seats he tried to play it safe and it cost him.

If the SS tax was eliminated today how long would it be solvent? The SS administration is a PERFECT example of a Ponzi scheme in that without new investors (chumps) it would cease to exist. I suppose IOU's could still be sent out as they have plenty of them.

As I've said before. Government has NO business being involved in retirement planning and or a lot of other areas, period!

No. It was not "deemed passed". It was voted upon in a regular up and down vote in the House, and passed 219-212.

Except for the 154 times the Senate Republican minority prevented passage of Democratic bills due to invoking a supermajority. I don't know what you expected the Dems "could have done" when they needed 60 votes for routine matters due to the GOP forcing a supermajority need, and they only had 58 Senators?

Yes, the progressive wing of the Democratic party is unhappy with Obama, because he's not a "left liberal socialist". He's quite centrist.

"Do more" for them would have been to pass single payer healthcare: like that would have happened, when all they could barely pass were the basic insurance reforms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act! ("Obamacare")

Demonstrates zero understanding of how social security was set up and why it was set up that way. Suspects he's uncovered a magical secret!

i just know that i've heard plenty of 'he could have done more' talk-tavis smiley immediately comes to mind. seems like there was a lot of excitement about them having both houses and the exec, and there's a lot of feeling that opportunities were squandered.

The real far left progressives wanted single payer healthcare, immediate withdrawal from all wars, immediate closure of Guantanamo, immediately end DADT, etc.

And a pony.

A bit unrealistic. Turns out the President wasn't willing to say, "Screw you, Republicans, we'll just completely ignore you and shove what we want down your throat" and yeah, there was a faction of his party were mad about that.

Those same folks just held a two-day blogosphere "Obamahatefest" about what they thought was going on within the deficit ceiling talks. They all shut up starting Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday.