to more politics thank you for having well right off the bat let me just put the question to you a social security or no no and in fact no one is arguing that it's broke that the congressional budget office says there's enough in the social security trust fund to pay benefits through twenty thirty nine and the trustees for the social security trust fund says this enough to pay benefits through twenty thirty seven so we know that there is a two point  point six trillion dollars surplus in the social security trust fund and there's no one who's claiming that it's broke now what they're saying is that it won't be able to pay full benefits after twenty thirty seven or twenty thirty nine and so they want to talk about trying to do something now to deal with that as a service to social security has it sometimes oh goodness yes i mean social security is has it's had its enemies since it was first created in one nine hundred thirty five and those enemies continue to this day there are many people who are mostly frankly on the republican side who don't want to see the government play the role of having programs that provide for people's needs how social security was known as the fear of real world politics you think that's not true anymore well i'm afraid it's not and that's and that that is very distressing it would appear now that there is a reasonable chance that we're going to have a big fight and at least a very broad bus debate about social security and what is going to happen with social secur and all of us pay into it employers and workers we all pay into it and that money goes into a separate fund a dedicated fund that's there to pay social security benefits when people are eligible for it so in a whole variety of areas but if we are worried about social security's ability to pay full benefits one hundred percent of benefits after twenty thirty seven all we need to do is get rid of the cap on income for social security right now people who earn over one hundred six thousand eight hundred dollars pay not one penny of social security premium on everything they earn above one hundred six thousand eight hundred dollars there is no cap on medicare we eliminate that cap and social security can pay debt benefits and be improved for over the next one hundred years story even though the baby boomers represent this bunny or this rabbit in the boa constrictor you're still that it's not going to last that national budget well in one nine hundred eighty three they were planning for the baby boomers who were going to reach retirement age at that time they raise the social security premium that employers and workers pay and they also increase the retirement age they staged it in up to age sixty seven so now we have two point six trillion dollars and surplus of the social security trust fund it's going to go up beyond that to around six or seven trillion dollars over the course of the next seven or eight years and then as the social security as the baby boomers start retiring they're going to begin to use that surplus and social security is not broke no no it's not broke and i don't know how many of us would like to be in the position where we could say hey we know we can look out and see we're going to be just great until twenty thirty seven and then after that we can make minor adjustment what would be only fair because there's no good reason why people who earn over one hundred six thousand eight hundred dollars shouldn't have to pay part of what they are into the social security trust fund since they're to be receiving social security benefits is due a little bit of a show again who are social security is mixed with medicare and medicare so all the numbers and all the impact on the federal budget in the deficit or a little bit confused well the funding mechanism for medicare and medicaid is very different from social security so as i said before social security has a separate stream of revenue that goes into the social security trust fund medicare and medicaid the t that are paid on medicare they go into the general fund medicaid is paid partially out of the general fund the federal general fund and partly out of the state's general budgets and so those are separate separate mechanisms not that we shouldn't be fighting for good programs there as well medicare and medicaid but i think there's a genuine issue of health care costs that we have to deal with in terms of the deficit that we're facing now and we're working on that but it's a separate issue from social security which has a dedicated funding stream and a dedicated trust fund now i want you to explain it a little bit for me i know it confused me when i first really stumbled on this idea the social security trust fund how does the funding of social security really work well what happens is all of us who work for a living and i worked in you know for a living until i retired we pay six and a half percent of our income into the social security trust fund an employer's match what we pay and that goes into the social security trust fund what happens what exactly was the well the what has happened is that that money has been borrowed by the by the congress by the federal government and they've issued treasury certificates which is supposed to be as good as cash the treasury certificates they issued those certificates and then those certificates come d over a period of time you can buy em for ten years twenty years thirty years however long they are the life of the treasury certificate and they pay interest so what has happened is that the federal government the congress has borrowed money from the social security trust fund to fund a number of different programs and given these huge tax cuts to the very wealthy in our society the bush tax cuts so we're funding two wars and the bush tax cuts and if they want to deal with the deficit those are the first two things they need to deal with the social security trust fund is like a cookie jar right children work really hard no one was putting in term dollar duels over a long period of talk and of course in the she social security fund would be reaching two points in it's true and you can understand why the government would be tempted in this case we use this analogy of parents being tempted to borrow from the cookie jar as long as it's borrowing now if the parent goes to the cookie jar and takes out the money and doesn't pay it back that's not a good analogy well especially if the parent is living here which means right into a plastic if the parent is borrowing the money and is paying it back to the kid then that's a legitimate comparison and if the parent issues particularly paper his treasury significance that says i am by taking this money making an obligation to pay you back plus this amount of interest now you've got yourself a really good analogy well they don't know we come to the crux of the problem we have ious the government has to pay back what it does want to and so it now has the attackers only attack to basically put social security on the table for entitlement cards number one i think that it is incorrect to refer to social security as an entitlement it's like an insurance policy when you pay your premiums for your auto insurance or you pay it for your homeowner's insurance you pay those premiums and then if something happens there's an obligation to pay the cost or some portion of the cost of the loss that you experience that's what the social security trust fund is like so it's not an entitlement it's something that people have paid for and are now collecting back it is true that historic enemies of social security are now trying to use the deficit as an excuse to go after the social security system and against social security payments now they would never say that they will instead say well we have to deal with this because it's part of the deficit problem but it's incorrect that's an incorrect characterization social security has not contributed one penny to the deficit what social security has done is it's provided a source of money for them to utilize because of the deficit that they created by the bush era tax cuts and these two wars well the people who don't really depend on social security seem to be rather adamant about cutting it because they can avoid taxes think that you have some of the india logical enemies of social security who are adamant about raising the retirement age about a means testing social security i think you have some of the enemies of social security who are putting that out there for example the deficit commission was chaired by one of the people who chaired that deficit commission that was appointed by president obama was alan simpson who's hated social security for years and so you are finding them using any excuse they can to attack social security and this goes back to the point that he does depend on social security that social contract with him probably isn't very strong well probably that's right but there are many people who are in the same income category as alan simpson who are extremely supportive of social security and understand that it makes no sense to cut social security but let's remember that social security was created in one nine hundred thirty five because so many seniors seventy five percent of all seniors were living in poverty and it was expanded since then so now it provides benefits to children whose while who've lost a parent or people who are eligible for social security disability these are people who would live in abject poverty of there was no social security and my organization puget sound alliance for retired americans we have particularly a number of older women who did not have jobs where there were unions and there were no pensions and they are living solely on social security social security is the only source of income for them and if they don't have social security they would be on the streets and there may be some people who know hey if i lose social security i'm going to be just fine but that's not the bass majority of the population in this country whether they're on social security now or will be on social security in the future do you think that there's a need for a lockbox no i don't agree with that i think that it doesn't make sense to take the money and just put it underneath the mattress and not have it collect and if you're going to collect interest then it's going to be out there it's going to be in the market and the money is going to be borrowed to do other things as long as it's not just subsidizing the tax codes right right absolutely you know a bit but that's an issue that we have to take up it's a separate issue from social security and certainly the bush era tax cuts were implemented by people who were no friends of social security and back they were also implemented by the same people who wanted to privatized social security and the people in this country stood up and said you will not privatized social security but what about goldman sachs or chomping at the good of all goldman sachs is chomping at the bit they want to get their hands on either they'd like to get their hands on some of the money from the social security trust fund trying to get them to invest it and wall street or their preference is to have private accounts but i think that people in this country are too smart for that we all know that number one  defined benefit pensions pensions where you know you're going to get a certain amount of money as a result of being employed by a particular employer for a period of time they're going away now we have these four a one k s that as a resell to wall street irresponsibility over the course of the last three or four years have become one no one case and why don't you mean who just lost value they've lost value and people were relying on those not only to remain there but to grow and instead they went the other way that's there's no reason to believe that goldman sachs acts would not show the same level of a responsibility as they did with people's money and therefore a one if you put this in the context of defined benefits going away as well you know this is with dire story that you're saying what i'm saying is that people are going to be more and more reliant working people people who are earning you know anywhere from eight hundred thousand dollars a year to ninety thousand dollars a year they're going to be reliant on social security when they no longer able to work to be able to have a life of dignity and respect and it's our responsibility to puget sound alliance for retired americans to make sure that our kids and our grand kids have it there and it's there for them to deal with what we know is inevitable aging is relentless and we're all going to be facing it and we're going to be faced with the fact that we have to have an income to have a retirement of dignity and respect and you will basically bring up the idea of the social contract is there a social contract what do social security well i think that it's the same kind of social contract that you have with an insurance company that you pay auto insurance to or an insurance company that you pay for your homeowner's insurance and yes there is that responsibility when you pay your premiums when the time comes and you have a need you've had a loss then you are to be paid back and there's a contract to do that now i know that there was a supreme court decision that i was going to add a judge to a slimming versus ness i know you you know and i know about that supreme court decision but the reality is that the people of this country have the ability to demand that when we pay into this system all of our working lives that it pay us back and it pay us back in a reasonable way maybe we'll learn a little bit from the people in egypt but it's not just seniors that benefit  right you know for example at our seventy fifth birthday party for social security we had a woman come and tell her story of her husband dying when she was when he was in his forty's and she had two young sons and were not for social security they would have lost their house they would have lost everything there survivor benefits for social security and there's also social security disability those are two really really important programs that have helped millions and millions and millions of people in this country i think that there are about six or seven million kids in our country who are receiving social security benefits as a result of having a parent to die it's not a generous amount  all i do know it she said it made it possible for them to survive now weather and allow them to stay in their home and allow them to continue to live a life that was very comparable to what they were living before her husband but you know there are some who put  argument it's just not government's role to be insuring people for their retirement this is an individual right or responsibility well i know that's the argument of those who hate social security and we made a decision that it was just fine for the government to be the insurer of people when they get into old age and that as long as people pay for it which we do when we work every single one of us and what we what we get and social security benefits is pegged to what we earn when during our working lives that it's just fine for the government to do it we'd rather the government do it then have some private insurance company do it the administrative costs for social security is less than one percent you don't get that from any private insurance company and you sure as heck don't get that from wall street as long as there's long as it operates on a pay go move since it's administered very well that's what you're saying yeah i mean it's administered very well and right now it's not pay go it's not right now the situation where what you're paying in goes out right now there's a sufficient surplus so that social security is earning interest and the interest plus the income is paying for social security benefits and we'll pay for social security benefits until twenty thirty seven so actually what you're saying is that we're doing a lot better than pedro oh absolutely and if if they do nothing if they don't scrap the cap but they don't get rid of the hundred  six thousand eight hundred dollars cap then by twenty thirty seven that we're going to be on a situation where what goes in comes out and they'll be paying benefits at about seventy six percent of the level that that would be one hundred percent but that seventy six percent on the pay go basis on what goes in comes out would still be almost a thousand dollars a year more than what social security benefits are being paid now on average well i know there was a commission or some study but i think its recommendations were implemented world the age is going to cruise for retirement so while the ages now rick increasing up to age sixty seven that's that and it's slowly increasing so that people who are now retiring they have to be sixty six years in some months i'm not sure what it is and it will go up to sixty seven and that was the one nine hundred eighty three people who are starting out more today cannot retard before they're sixty six and while the people who are starting out at work today are going to have as their retirement age sixty seven the people who are in their fifty five fifty six fifty seven they're go able to get full benefits at some point while they're sixty six and that's that's going up that's generally going up until it reaches age sixty seven we do need to talk about fixes to social security it seems like there's always talk about cutting some programs to make sure it's on a sound footing right what are the sorts of social well we've talked about it already if you want to assure the life of social security for the next one hundred years just eliminate the cap if you eliminate the one hundred six thousand eight hundred dollars cap social security you will have a nuff premiums coming in to pay benefits with cola us with cost of living increases for the next one hundred years and we could look at improving social security as well there are some improvements that should be made and could be made number one we ought to be paying low income people working what would be considered now the working poor we could be paying them a higher percentage of the income that they have earned and social security benefits too we should change the cola that's used in fact senator cantwell has introduced a piece of legislation that would the cola or the cost of living index for social security to take into account what the actual costs are for seniors when you know because seniors have higher medical expenses then the rest of the population that's not that wasn't that wasn't yeah that was not related to the cap what the tax compromise that they worked in december did was it lowered for one year the amount that workers pay and to the social only workers what workers pay into the social six security system by two percent to four and a half percent and they agreed that one hundred twenty one billion dollars of revenue that was lost to social security trust fund would be paid back by the general fund now we did not like that because for the first time it linked social security and the funding stream for social security to the general fund which is their objective which is you know certainly that's why people bought off on it so we were disappointed in that compromise but it is supposed to snap back to six and a half percent at the end of two thousand and eleven so it's not really related to the cap the cap remains at one hundred  what we have done is we formed a very large coalition here in washington state called social security works washington and it's made up of some forty fifty organizations that are working together to help educate people about what's going on with social security and also to put pressure on our elected representatives to make sure that they do not something that do something that is going to hurt social security seventy fifth birthday party for social security where over three hundred people came and learned a lot about social security we have an education program that we're putting together that's going to help educate people but we're not just about education we're about political action if they raise their heads again and try to do something to injure social security we're going to do everything we can to bop them on the head and send him back down into the hole that they deserve to be and if they don't mess around with social security or we're getting help from our citizens more we are at this point senator maria ca well are being extremely helpful as is representative jim mcdermott they're being very helpful only mission representatives other representatives are dragging their feet on his curates i would say that that's correct all of them are the ones that we've spoken with at least the democrats that we've spoken with that now were opposed to privatization so they've all kind of staked out their anti privatized nation but on the issue of raising the  social security's overwhelmingly popular i mean they did polling on it and i forget what the latest poll said but it's bipartisan it's both republicans and democrats and they are very clear that they do not to social security you know when you ask there was a recent poll that was done that suggested that were people concerned about the deficit and people expressed great concern about the deficit but then when they were asked well should we do something to cut social security benefits to deal with the deficit the response was overwhelming seventy eighty percent said absolutely not and the reason why is because people have been paying into it and they know they've been paying into that program and they intend to be able to reap the benefits that they paid for if there is an effort to try and you know get rid of their obligation to pay those treasuries to ficus we got to fight we've got to fight really hard to make sure that they don't get away with it we are engaged in a very serious fight to make sure that retirement age is not increased people can not work longer and besides that making people work longer means that young people  less opportunity to enter the job market we've got to fight hard to make sure they don't do that we've got to fight hard to make sure they don't reduce benefits and we have to fight hard to make sure that they make the kind of improvements that these times call for this option for loophole closures well i do know that there are some corporations that are paying somewhere actual tax rate of around one point one percent two point two percent while there are others that are paying the thirty five percent tax rate so we need to change the system to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share and they can't take advantage of some tax loopholes so keep social security off the table and put traction loopholes and the high income tax credit the high income tax cuts we ought to get rid of them we ought to get rid of these tax loopholes and we ought to do something about what we're spending on the wars in afghanistan and iraq what about that or do you think that people are living longer it was never interested pretty good actually well that's that's incorrect the only ones who are living longer are frankly fairly well to do white men fairly well to do white women are at about the same life expectancy as they were ten years ago or even fifteen twenty years ago and for people of color actually the the life expectancy has declined so it really is income based in terms of life expectancy so just to conclude we can job yours social security is not broke it's not going to bust the budget of the federal government it's well what we can say to viewers is not just that that it's not broke we have to say to viewers you've got to be prepared to get it gauged you've got to be prepared to fight because there are those out there who are determined to try and use this deficit as a way to attack social security and we're going to have to rise up as people organize and say do not mess around with social security you need to find other ways to fix your deficit problem do not screw around with social security while the story i want to thank you for it while your discussion on social security thank you for inviting m