This page was last updated on December 8, 2010.
Letter distorted Social Security; Daniel A. Bosh; Beaver County Times; December 8, 2010.
If you’ve read Mr. Bosh’s letters over the years, you recognize him as a died-in-the-wool leftist. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Bosh was a Democrat national delegate committed to Dennis Kucinich. Mr. Bosh is a representative of the Steelworkers Pension Trust. There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Bosh representing the USW but it means Mr. Bosh isn’t an impartial observer when it comes to labor union issues.
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“The Nov. 21, letter ‘Socialist Security is poor gauge to use’ is another misrepresentation of Social Security.”
[RWC] The letter Mr. Bosh references is one I wrote in response to the Dan Cogley letter entitled “Elderly will be hit under GOP policies.” Previous Bosh letters attempting to defend Socialist Security were entitled “Ignore GOP tactics on Social Security” and “America needs Social Security.”
“To begin with, there is no ‘sleight of hand’ in the taxation. Everyone knows, or should know, that the employer match is money that is earned by the worker.”
[RWC] Mr. Bosh contradicts himself and unwittingly confirms what I wrote. Since “the employer match is money that is earned by the worker,” how can it be an “employer match?” “[M]oney that is earned by the worker” belongs to the employee, not the employer. The accounting sleight of hand I referred to is calling “money that is earned by the worker” an “employer match.” The feds require this accounting sleight of hand to hide the true magnitude of Medicare (2.9%) and SS (12.4%) taxes, currently 15.3%. That’s because lefties prefer telling us we pay “only” 6.2% in SS taxes, not the 12.4% we really pay.
“The fact that money paid into Social Security is, as the writer claims, ‘confiscated,’ means that it cannot be stolen by overpaid CEOs who would reduce workers’ wages by that amount and pay it to themselves in bonuses, or by the crooks on Wall Street who would invent a new crap game to swindle people out of their savings.”
[RWC] Other than getting into a completely unrelated lefty drive-by rant about CEOs and “Wall Street,” what is Mr. Bosh talking about? If Mr. Bosh is talking about what would happen if SS taxes didn’t exist, here’s what would really happen. Business owners determine the economic value of each job. The economic value of the job determines the total compensation the employer can offer an employee while providing the business with its target evil profit. Once he subtracts things like overhead, workman’s comp, et cetera from the job’s economic value, the employer can determine the total compensation offered. Total compensation includes wages/salary, the cost of benefits, and the mythical “employer’s contribution” to Medicare and Socialist Security taxes. If Medicare and SS taxes didn’t exist, the employee would receive more in wages/salary and/or benefits. If not, the employee would be undercompensated according to the market and he would choose to work elsewhere.
“Social Security provides a guaranteed base of income, a foundation on which working people can build a secure retirement. It is a prudent and highly successful way of insuring against poverty among the elderly, the disabled and surviving dependent children of people who pass away before their families are raised.”
[RWC] “Social Security provides a guaranteed base of income?” As a representative of the Steelworkers Pension Trust, Mr. Bosh knows better. Socialist Security does not “provide a guaranteed base of income.” As noted by the CATO Institute, SS benefits “are not guaranteed legally because workers have no contractual or property rights to any benefits whatsoever. In two landmark cases, Flemming v. Nestor and Helvering v. Davis, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Social Security taxes are not contributions or savings, but simply taxes, and that Social Security benefits are simply a government spending program, no different than, say, farm price supports. Congress and the president may change, reduce, or even eliminate benefits at any time.”
As for “insuring against poverty among the elderly,” if you plan on Medicare and SS benefits as the sole sources of your livelihood during retirement, you plan to live in poverty. Even the SS Administration tells people not to depend on SS as their sole source of income.
If anyone is “distort[ing] Social Security,” it is Mr. Bosh.
“It’s one of the few things that people can count on anymore, and for millions of people it is comforting to know it is there. If anything, it should be expanded.”
[RWC] Let’s ignore the whole pesky individual liberty thing for a second. Has Mr. Bosh looked at SS’s financial situation? Of course he has. Repeating what I wrote in my critique of a previous Bosh letter, “According to the Social Security Trustees in their 2010 report to Congress, SS was to go into deficit (benefits paid exceed SS taxes collected) in 2016, the Disability Insurance portion of SS will be bankrupt in 2018, and the overall SS ‘trust fund’ (the equivalent of a stack of federal government ‘IOUs’ for revenue already spent by the feds for other programs) will be exhausted by 2037. Because of the current recession, news reports indicate SS is already in deficit, a full six years ahead of the 2008 projection. That’s because SS (as well as Medicare) is a Ponzi scheme.”
Did you notice Mr. Bosh didn’t address the central theme of my letter? That would be my comments that “Countries should be gauged by the freedom citizens have to prepare to take care of themselves, not by how dependent government can make the elderly on politicians, political appointees, and government bureaucrats” and “It’s amazing how many of us don’t see how dangerous it is for citizens to be made dependent on government for their livelihood. Government should be controlled by ‘We the People,’ not the other way around.” I’m guessing that’s because Mr. Bosh believes we can’t take care of ourselves. Perhaps Mr. Bosh is projecting his perceived personal shortcomings on the rest of us.
© 2004-2010 Robert W. Cox, all rights reserved.