Thanks to Glenn Greenwald, I'm pointed to this, from Ezra Klein, writing Sunday in the Washington Post (my emphasis):
There are a lot of things Congress doesn't know right now. What to do about jobs, for instance. Who'll be running the House come January. How to balance the budget. But there is one thing that both parties increasingly seem to agree on: You should work longer.Ezra's turned into one of the good guys on Social Security, and I'm glad to see him on the team. He's a listened-to voice.
Raising the Social Security retirement age has become as close to a consensus position as exists in American politics. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) supports it. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) has said that "we could and should consider a higher retirement age." And for a while, I agreed with them, too. It seemed obvious: People live longer today, and so they should work later into life. But as I've looked at the issue, I've decided that I was wrong. So let me be the skunk at the party. We should leave the retirement age alone. In fact, we should leave Social Security alone -- unless we're making it more, rather than less, generous. ...
That doesn't mean that Social Security shouldn't be on the table when we look at how to balance the budget. Everything should be on the table. And Social Security is our single largest program -- though Medicare is projected to overtake it in the next couple of years. But if you really put everything on the table -- the health-care system, the tax code, military spending, farm subsidies, etc. -- then raising the retirement age or otherwise cutting Social Security stops looking so good.
If you recall, it was Klein who stood up to Lawrence O'Donnell on that shameful Countdown segment where O'Donnell caught benefit-cutting fire and Klein tried to douse him out. In that segment, by the way, Klein came out for ... (gasp) raising taxes, specifically the FICA income ceiling. (Click through to watch the vid; Klein comes through like a champ.)
Raising the income ceiling is also my preferred solution. It now stands at $106,800. I think people who like that extra $4 million in their pay envelope should be taxed on it, just like the rest of us. But that's me; I'm a bit of an egalitarian.
Thanks, Ezra. We look for more from you.
GP
