Mitt Romney Earns More by 6 a.m. Than Many Seniors Do in a Year
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Alliance for Retired Americans President Barbara Easterling wrote this at Huffington Post.
In 2010 Mitt Romney made $21.7 million, while that same year the average senior citizen received $14,000 in Social Security benefits.
Put another way, Mitt Romney made more by 6:00 a.m. on January 1 than many retirees did the entire year. His daily income was over four times greater than many seniors’ annual income.
Why does this matter? Shouldn’t his finances be none of our business? To me, it matters because of how sharply it contrasts with his plans to increase the Social Security retirement age, lower benefits for some seniors, and let Wall Street gamble away—and profit from—a privatized Social Security system. It reflects a cold indifference to those less fortunate.
Romney to Seniors: Let Them Eat PB & J
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Alliance for Retired Americans Communications Director Michael Buckley sends us this report.
While presidential candidate Mitt Romney noshed at a recent Palm Beach fundraiser co-hosted by a sugar baron and a pro sports owner, Florida Alliance for Retired Americans members gathered nearby for a more simple meal: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The idea for the “Regular Man’s Picnic,” according to event organizer Tony Fransetta, a UAW retiree and Florida Alliance president, was to contrast Mitt Romney and his financial backers with the daily struggles of seniors in Florida and across the nation. Speaking near the Romney event, Fransetta said:
Those inside are advancing the interests of the 1%, while we are outside today to speak up for the 99% who are too often silenced in this country. Read the rest of this entry »
House Plan Attacks 99%, Benefits 1%
House Republican leaders unveiled a budget plan today in which “once again rushed to the rescue of the 1 percent” by insisting that millionaires should not have to pay one penny in taxes, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Instead,
the House Republican proposal would cut benefits for jobless workers, cut pay for public employees, cut preventive health services, reduce premium assistance for low- and middle-income individuals buying health insurance, and raise premiums for many Medicare beneficiaries. House Republicans obviously have more sympathy for millionaires than for the jobless.
AFGE President John Gage also blasted the Republicans leaders” Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, introduced by House Speaker John Boehner.
This is just another attack on the 99% on behalf of their good friends—the 1%. They are targeting a small segment of people who make $30,000 to $70,000 a year, rather than asking their millionaire and billionaire supporters to pay a little more. It’s not right, and the American people should be outraged.
Social Security’s Impact in Rural America
Those who doubt the impact of Social Security benefits on local economies should look to rural America, where 9.3 percent of total personal income in rural counties came from Social Security payments in 2009. That’s according to a study by the Center for Rural Strategies, as reported by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI).
Says NASI:
Social Security is particularly important to these rural communities because the money received from benefits is largely spent in the community.
Click here to read more and view a U.S. map breaking down the percent of total personal income from Social Security by county.
GOP Plan Offers Cash Bait to Forgo Social Security
If this new Republican idea weren’t so scary, we would be laughing…hysterically.
Asreported by the Washington Post 2chambers blog yesterday, Rep. Jeffrey Landry (R-La.) is proposing that working Americans—already battered bloody by the recession—be forced to give up some of their Social Security benefits if they “opt in” to receive a payroll tax cut. (So much for the Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves.)
Landry’s idea, introduced as H.R. 3551, would cut the payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent—and allow workers to decide each year whether to receive the tax break.
The catch? Workers who chose to take advantage of the tax break in a given year would be forced to have their Social Security retirement age extended by one month, effectively cutting their own retirement benefits. Really? Read the rest of this entry »
Bad Economics: Cutting Federal Workers, Jobs
Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl doesn’t want to to pay for a one-year extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent. He wants to take it out of the pay of federal workers.
Kyl is proposing to maintain the current pay freeze in place for federal workers and requiring the government hire only one new employee for every three who leave the federal workforce. A Senate vote on the the freeze-pay-and-cut-jobs idea from Kyl could happen as early as tonight.
Federal workers have already shouldered an enormous burden, contributing more than $60 billion to deficit reduction because of the current two-year pay freeze put in place about a year ago, according to AFGE.
Across-the-board pay freezes dampen the American economy, and arbitrary federal job cuts prompt federal agencies to privatize services and to hire expensive contractors, which costs taxpayers twice as much, according to a study by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. Read the rest of this entry »
Senate Hearing Room Erupts into Chant: ‘We Are the 99 Percent!’
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Today’s National Day of Action, called by Rebuild the Dream, the Alliance for Retired Americans and embraced by members of the Occupy movement, took an unlikely turn on Capitol Hill, as working and retired Americans joined together to tell lawmakers not to balance the budget on the backs of the 99 percent, as a joint congressional committee has threatened to do through proposed cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
In a packed hearing room at the U.S. Senate, participants in a “Jobs, Not Cuts!” rally, keynoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), erupted into the chant that has come to identify the Occupy movement: “We are the 99 percent!” Most of the chanters bore little resemblance to the stereotyped image of an Occupy protester—many were senior citizens, and the young people in the audience bore a distinctly clean-cut look.
It all served to prove Sanders’ point that mainsteram American wants the wealthiest Americans to pay more taxes, and they want Congress not to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Sanders said: Read the rest of this entry »
Massachusetts Workers Mobilize as Deficit Deadline Looms
AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report.
As the congressional Super Committee’s deadline for a federal deficit reduction plan nears, more than 2,600 teachers, ironworkers, construction workers, nurses and others took to the streets in Massachusetts in recent days with a single message: no cuts.
Labor leaders and workers across the state have petitioned Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to pledge to protect America’s workers from devastating cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and have been making their voices heard—through postcards, forums with their members of Congress, resolutions and even an electronic billboard or two.
“We’re here to say no cuts to Social Security, no cuts to Medicare, no cuts to Medicaid, no cuts to the Postal Service,” Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman told thousands of workers and seniors from across New England at the Wang Theater in Boston,
and we want it for you, we want it for us and we want it for our children and grandchildren.
Republican Reverse Robin Hood Stalks Super Committee
A proposal by Republicans on the so-called “Super Committee” to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare benefit is “Robin Hood in reverse: class warfare against the American middle class on behalf of the top 1 percent,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Click here for his full statement.
More Older Americans Slipping Into Poverty
When the U.S. Census Bureau updated its model for calculating the nation’s poverty rate, it arrived at an unexpected result: nearly twice as many older Americans qualify as poor than had been previously thought. The new data suggest that 16 percent of those 65 and older are poor. Under the old formula, which failed to accurately reflect housing and medical costs, the poverty rate for older Americans stood at 9 percent.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
[M]edical costs are pushing low-income seniors living on fixed incomes over the brink, said Kathleen S. Short, a U.S. Census Bureau economist.
For many, that fixed income amounts to Social Security benefits and not much else, due to the declining numbers of Americans who have a traditional pension.
