Save Social Security = end the salary cap of $100,000 on contributions to the program

* The richest 1% of Americans have been getting the Lion’s share of the wealth created in this country for the last 30-plus years. It happened under Ronald Reagan, it happened under George W. Bush, and it is happening under Barack Obama. It is time to save Social Security for the majority of Americans. It is time for the rich to pay their fair share, because when the richest 1% of Americans garner more than 60% of the economic wealth created in the last decade that is the opposite of democracy and the opposite of economic benefit for the majority of Americans. We all work hard to make this country great. There are more than 300 million people in this country, not just 3 million.

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Millionaires, billionaires and Wall Streeters currently pay Social Security contributions only up to approximately $100,000 of their income, and that ain’t right. Remember, we (the taxpayers) bailed out Wall Street and many big names in corporate America (General Motors, Chrysler;special emergency loans to Harley-Davidson, McDonald’s, Verizon, General Electric, Caterpillar). It’s time for Wall Street and corporate America to remember where they come from — a land between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans teeming with hungry people who are still cleaning up after the Financial Crisis of 2008. 

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Read more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-americas-primal-scream.html?_r=0

EXCERPT:

“Three factoids underscore that inequality:

¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/the-war-on-entitlements/

EXCERPT:

“Currently, earned income in excess of $113,700 is entirely exempt from the 6.2 percent payroll tax that funds Social Security benefits (employers pay a matching 6.2 percent). 5.2 percent of working Americans make more than $113,700 a year. Simply by eliminating the payroll tax earnings cap — and thus ending this regressive exemption for the top 5.2 percent of earners — would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, solve the financial crisis facing the Social Security system.”

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/14/opinion/la-oe-sanders-social-20110214

EXCERPT:

“Despite the manufactured hysteria about a crisis, Social Security has not contributed one penny to the very serious deficit situation the United States faces. Social Security is fully funded by the payroll tax that workers and their employers pay; it’s not paid for by the Treasury. Our deficit has been, in recent years, largely caused by the cost of two wars, tax breaks for the rich, a Medicare prescription drug program written by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and the Wall Street bailout — not Social Security.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/business/economy/02fed.html

EXCERPT:

“At home, from March 2008 to May 2009, the Fed extended a cumulative total of nearly $9 trillion in short-term loans to 18 financial institutions under a credit program.

Previously, the Fed had only revealed that four financial firms had tapped the special lending program, and did not reveal their identities or the loan amounts.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

EXCERPT:

“’There’s class warfare, all right,’ Mr. [Warren] Buffett said, ‘but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’”

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