What do you think of the Senate and Congressional Retirement Package?

Our Senators and Congresswomen DO NOT pay into Social Security and, of course, they do not collect from it.

You see, Social Security benefits were not suitable for persons of their rare elevation in society. They felt they should have a special plan for themselves. So, many years ago they voted in their own benefit plan. In more recent years, no congressperson has felt the need to change it. After all, it is a great plan (This year they voted themselves a payraise of $5400.00)

For all practical purposes their plan works like this:

When they retire, they continue to draw the same pay until they die. Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments..

For example, Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may expect to draw $7,800,000.00 (that's Seven Million, Eight-Hundred Thousand Dollars), with their wives drawing $275, 000.00 during the last years of their lives.

This is calculated on an average life span for each of those two Dignitaries. Younger Dignitaries who retire at an early age, will receive much more during the rest of their lives.

Their cost for this excellent plan is $0.00. NADA..! ZILCH...

This little perk they voted for themselves is free to them. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. The funds for this fine retirement plan come directly from the General Funds;

"OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK "!

From our own Social Security Plan, which you and I pay (or have paid) into, every payday until we retire (which amount is matched by our employer). We can expect to get an average of $1,000 per month after retirement.

Or, in other words, we would have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for another 68 years and one (1) month to equal Senator Bill Bradley's benefits

Social Security could be very good if only one small change were made. That change would be to:

Jerk the Golden Fleece Retirement Plan from under the Senators and Congressmen. Put them into the Social Security plan with the rest of us

Then sit back.....And see how fast they would fix it. stories-that-need-to-be-told.blogspot.com...

By Laura Thomas - bio | email

HORRY COUNTY, SC (WMBF) - Horry County has cut the pay for all of it's nearly 2,000 employees by a little more than 2 percent.

Elected county officials don't have to to take this pay cut. However, many WMBF News spoke with are taking it, like County Coroner Robert Edge.

"We are county employees just like everybody else, with the exception that we're elected," said Edge. "I don't have any problem taking the 2 percent."

Friday’s Labor Department report, revealing that US payrolls were cut by 80,000 jobs in March and that 232,000 jobs have been lost in the past three months, can only mean new levels of social misery and raises the specter of a severe economic slump, perhaps the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The March decline in jobs is the largest in five years. The number of private sector jobs has dropped by 300,000 since November 2007.

Millions of Americans face the prospect of a sharp decline in living standards and conditions of life. Because of their commitment to the profit system, no section of the US political establishment—neither the Bush administration and the McCain campaign nor the Clinton and Obama camps—is capable of proposing any measures that will materially assist those seeing their jobs, homes nor social benefits disappear or devastated by the present developments.

The figures contained in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey are bleak. The number of those officially counted as jobless rose by 434,000 in March to 7.8 million. The unemployment rate rose from 4.8 to 5.1 percent (the highest since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005). In the past 12 months, 1.1 million people have been added to the jobless rolls and the official jobless rate has climbed by 0.7 percent.

The number of people unemployed because they lost jobs climbed to 4.2 million; that figure has grown by almost one million in a year.

www.globalresearch.ca...

This is what happens when people vote Republican and Corporations instead of people are allowed to rule

The trickle down theory does not work people and we're all in this mess because of the moron we had for president for eight years.

Bush Jr. bankrupted the two companies his daddy bought him and he's now bankrupted our country.

Thank you to everyone who voted for this moron and now you expect Obama to clean up the mess and take paycuts.

Why didn't the people demand this of Bush and his 500 days of vacation during his presidency (we paid for).

The Republicans are still playing games in DC.

www.cedarcomm.com...

Since 1938 the Democrats have held the White house for 35 years, the Republicans for 36. Over that time the national debt has increased at an average annual rate of 8.5%. In years Democrats were in the White House there was an average increase of 8.3%. In years the Republicans ran the White House the debt increased an average 9.2% per year. Those averages aren’t that far apart, but they do show a bias toward more borrowing by Republicans than Democrats even including World War II.

If you look at the 60+ year record of debt since the end of WWII, starting with Truman’s term, the difference between the two parties’ contributions to our national debt level change considerably. Since 1946, Democratic presidents increased the national debt an average of only 3.2% per year. The Republican presidents stay at an average increase of 9.2% per year. Republican Presidents out borrowed and spent Democratic presidents by a three to one ratio. Putting that in very real terms; for every dollar a Democratic president has raised the national debt in the past 63 years Republican presidents have raised the debt by $2.84[5].


Prior to the Neo-Conservative takeover of the Republican Party there was not much difference between the two parties’ debt philosophy. They both worked together to minimize it. However the debt has been on a steady incline ever since the Reagan presidency. The only exception to the steep increase over the last 30 years was during the Clinton presidency, when he brought spending under control and the debt growth down to almost zero.

Comparing the borrowing habits of the two parties since 1981, when the Neo-Conservative movement really took hold and government spending raced out of control, it is extremely obvious that the big spenders in Washington are Republicans and their party’s presidents. The only Democratic president since then, Mr. Clinton raised the national debt an average of 4.3% per year. The Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush, and Bush II) raised the debt an average of 10.8% per year. That is, for every dollar a Democratic President has raised the national debt in the past 30 years, Republican presidents have raised the debt by $2.52[6]. Any way you look at it Neo-Conservative Republican presidents cannot or will not control government spending.

www.cedarcomm.com...
For the first eighteen years after WW II, Truman (1945-53), Eisenhower (1953-61) and Kennedy (1961-63) all worked vigorously to keep spending under control. Of the seven years Truman was in office, the national debt came down in four. In 1946 & 7, with a Republican Congress for his first two years in office he brought down spending. The following year, with a Democratic Congress he reduced what was commonly called the “War Debt” again. Two of the eight years Eisenhower served as President saw debt reduction during the years when Democrats were in charge of Congress, 1956 & 7. Kennedy reduced the debt by over 4% his first year in office, 1961, then it went up slightly his next two years. JFK was dealing with a Democratically controlled House and Senate when he managed to reduce the debt.

Since 1961 the United States national debt has never gone down.

It is interesting to note who controlled Congress versus what party was in the presidency during the seven years that the debt was reduced throughout the terms of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Three times the Democratic Party controlled both Houses of Congress and the Presidency (1948, 1951 & 1961). The other four years all had a mix of control, with Republicans in the White House (1956 & 1957), in charge of Congress (1946 & 1947), but never both. At no time since 1945 when Republicans have been in total charge of both elected branches of government have they ever reduced spending. They talk about it a lot, but they never deliver.

While the debt did go up every year during Johnson’s time in office (1963-69), he was the last president before Clinton to submit a balanced budget, and Johnson did this during a time of a very hot Cold War. Johnson’s average was a debt increase of 3% for the six years he served. He had a Democratic Congress to work with all his years in office.

Even Nixon (President from 1969 to 1974, when he resigned in disgrace) only had one year when he raised the debt more than 6%, 1971. His average was 5% for the six years he was in office. Between uncontrolled inflation and Ford’s conservative bend the debt increased 17% his first full year in office (1975), and 13% his second (1976). Ford’s plan to impose a policy of price controls failed to bring government overspending and inflation under control. Both these Presidents faced an opposition Congress controlled by Democrats during their time in office.

Starting in 1977 President Carter tried to control government spending even during inflationary times. The national debt increased an average of 9% per year while he was in office, and his policies eventually brought inflation under control with the help of a semi-cooperative Democratic Congress. He was thrown out of office after one term for making and implementing the hard decisions required to cut spending and deal with the energy crisis. (Had we followed his policies all these years we would not be dependant on foreign oil as we are now under Republican leadership.)

As President Reagan entered office in 1981 he repeatedly called for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, yet never submitted a balanced budget himself[7]. Many on the right reflexively blame the Democratically controlled Congress for the “big spending” during his administration, even though Republicans controlled the Senate for the first six years of his two terms. Only during the last two years of the Reagan administration was the Congress completely controlled by Democrats, and the records show that the growth of the debt slowed during this period. It appears that the frequently referenced Reagan’s Conservative mythology is contrary to the truth, he was an award winning, record setting liberal spender and government grower.

The fact is that Reagan was able to push his tax cuts through both Houses of Congress, but he never pushed through any reduced spending programs. His weak leadership in this area makes him directly responsible for the unprecedented rise in borrowing during his time in office, an average of 13.8% per year. The increase in total debt during Reagan’s two terms was larger than all the debt accumulated by all the presidents before him combined. From 1983 through 1985, with a Republican Senate, the debt was increasing at over 17% per year. While Mr. Reagan was in office this nation’s debt went from just under 1 trillion dollars to over 2.6 trillion dollars, a 200% increase. The sad part about this increase is that it was not to educate our children, or to improve our infrastructure, or to help the poor, or even to finance a war. Reagan’s enormous increase in the national debt was not to pay for any noble cause at all; his primary unapologetic goal was to pad the pockets of the rich. The huge national debt we have today is a living legacy to his failed Neo-Conservative economic policies. Reagan’s legacy is a heavy financial weight that continues to apply an unrelenting drag on this nation’s economic resources.

George Bush Sr. meekly followed in Reagan’s shadow after his election in 1988, by increasing the debt on average a mere 11.8% a year during his four years as President. In his last year in office he quite responsibly worked with Democrats to raise taxes to help reduce the massive yearly increases in the national debt. This bipartisan plan got the growth down to under 11% in 1992, but it was too little too late and didn’t make much difference in the overall trend. The Neo-Conservatives controlling the Republican Party rewarded him for putting the nation’s future above his party’s ideology by throwing him out of office even though it had hardly been a year since he was credited with winning the Gulf War.

In 1993 President Clinton inherited the deficit spending problem and did more than just talk about it; he fixed it. In his first two years, with a cooperative Democratic Congress, he set the course for the best economy this country has ever experienced. Then he worked with what could be characterized as the most hostile Congress in history, led by Republicans for the last six years of his administration. Yet, under constant personal attacks from the right, he still managed to get the growth of the debt down to 0.32% (one third of one percent) his last year in office. Had his policies been followed for one more year the debt would have been reduced for the first time since the Kennedy administration. Contrary to the myth fostered by our right-wing friends, under a Democrat, revenue increased and spending decreased.

www.cedarcomm.com...

When President Bush II came into office in 2001 he quickly turned all that progress around. With the help of a Republican controlled Congress he immediately gave a massive tax cut based on a failed economic policy; perhaps an economic fantasy describes it better. The last year Mr. Clinton was in office the nation borrowed 18 billion dollars. The first year Mr. Bush II was in office he had to borrow 133 billion[8]. The first tax cut Bush pushed through a willing Republican Congress caused an upswing in government borrowing that was supposed to stimulate the economy, but two years later Bush had to push through yet another tax cut. The second tax cut was needed because it was clear that the first one did not work. Economic history tells us the second did not work either. As a result of all his tax cutting with no cutting in spending, in 2003 President Bush set a record for the biggest single yearly dollar increase in debt in the nation’s history. He did it again in 2004, increasing the debt more than half a trillion dollars. Since 2003 total borrowing has typically been around $500,000,000,000 per year. Even Mr. Reagan never increased the debt that much in a single year; Mr. Reagan’s biggest increase was only 282 billion, half of GWB’s outrageous spending. As a result of the fact that the debt was already pretty high when Bush II entered office, his annual rate of increase is only averaging 7% per year so far. In 2006 he was holding press conferences bragging that the debt was increasing at the rate of only 300 billion dollars a year, yet in reality it was twice that. Again the facts do not match Neo-Con rhetoric.

Of course 7% growth is a misleading figure as it does not make clear that by so drastically increasing the total debt, the amount of the annual US budget dedicated to service the debt has grown to almost 10%. Thanks to misguided Neo-Con ideological thinking, over a tenth of our budget does nothing to contribute to the growth or health of the nation. If interest rates go up our country will be in real trouble.

It does not matter if you call it a war or an occupation, supporting Iraq is expensive. It just boggles the imagination of any fiscally responsible person that the Republican Congress and President have repeatedly cut taxes during this overly aggressive and very expensive era for our military. The nation is borrowing money so that we can spend more on our military than all the other nations on Earth combined, and still the Neo-Cons are calling for even more tax cuts and even more military spending.

Mr. Bush is constantly claiming that the economy is great! What he leaves out is that he is buying that simulated good economy with his borrowed dollars; it is a false economy that is starting to crash. Recent bank and insurance company failures are proving that this federal borrowing can not go on forever, but what is the answer we are being given to this problem – borrow more money to cover the bad debt already out there! If a Democrat was suggesting this course of action you can bet a bevy of Republicans would be screaming in unison that Congress is Socializing Wall Street.

History has shown that the “trickle down theory” does not work. Republican President Hoover tried the “trickle down” theory (his words) to solve economic problems during the last few years of his only term, when the greatest economic depression this country has ever faced began. It is often called the Republican Depression because it was their financial philosophy that led to the collapse of the economy. Tax cuts for the rich did not work and things got worse. (We are seeing the same problem repeat itself encouraged by the deregulation of the financial industry.)

President Roosevelt got into office, raised taxes on the rich, created jobs for the poor and turned things around. Mr. Reagan employed Hoover’s failed trickle down theory again in the ‘80s and again it did not work. The rich got richer, but the poor got poorer and the economy declined. Mr. Bush Sr., who always had a problem with the “vision thing”, continued the failed policy of his immediate predecessor.

Mr. Clinton took a more progressive approach and, as Roosevelt had done, turned the Hoover model upside down. Instead of making the rich richer in the hope that they would spend that money and thus create demand and therefore jobs, he created a tax environment that encouraged the creation of jobs directly. It was an economic environment where everyone could get rich, not just a few, and it worked. Lots of jobs and lots of new millionaires were created while Clinton was in office. More new millionaires were created during the Clinton administration than at any other time in our history.

President Bush II slipped into office and once again applied the Neo-Con manta of the old trickle down tax model and immediately created a need to raise the debt level to pay for an unjustified tax cut in 2001. Predictably (and before 9/11) the nation lost jobs and there were fewer new millionaires. Not learning from his past mistakes, Bush pushed through yet more tax cuts in 2003, 2005 and 2006 -- all while expanding the military, the largest single component of the budget. He and his lap dog Republican Congress never learned from their mistakes. As a result, the national debt has increased an average of $1.5 billion per day since the beginning of 2002.

While it is a great jabbing sound bite, the facts show that the “tax and spend” rhetoric Republicans often spew about Democrats is not as bad as it sounds. Taxing before spending actually reflects good government. The facts also show that it most often takes a Democratic President to control and reduce spending. The truth is that the Republicans are the party of “borrow and spend”. They hate taxes, but love to spend; their solution is to put off paying till later for our security today. They prefer to see our children pay for their debt. Neo-Conservative thinking has run up over an 9.5 trillion dollar debt that will not be paid off for a generation or more, and is still increasing at an astounding rate with no end to deficit spending in sight.

Every time we have seen massive tax cuts there was a bubble in the economy followed by a recession. Tax increases on the wealthy have caused a slow steady growth in the economy.

www.cedarcomm.com...

This missive is clearly biased against deficit spending. Getting past the hysteria, bias and rhetoric, certain facts about the United States national debt stand out:

1. Since the Neo-Conservative movement has become the dominant force in the Republican Party the national debt has grown and continues to grow at an unsustainable rate, by any measure you care to use.

2. Experience has shown that “trickle down tax cuts” only work to concentrate the nation’s wealth into fewer hands and never help to rebound the economy.

3. Mr. Bush has no viable plan to deal with the debt he has already created, and we cannot count on him to contain government spending in the future.

4. The only time we have seen national debt reduction in the past 60 years was when Democrats were totally in charge of our government or when one party was in the White House and another ran Congress.

5. In the past 60 years when Republicans were in control of the presidency and both Houses of Congress, neither debt, nor government spending was ever reduced. The last time a Republican Congress reduced the national debt was in 1947, under Truman’s leadership.

6. The last time the debt was reduced was in 1961 during President Kennedy’s first year in office. It has been almost a half century, 46 years, since this nation has paid down any of its exponentially increasing debt. (Had President Bill Clinton been in office one more year we would probably have seen a debt decrease in 2001.)

7. The failure of the financial and insurance markets can be directly related to the tax and regulation policies of the Neo-Cons.

Relatively recent history tells us that there is a simple solution to the growing debt problem: Congress must adhere to a ‘pay as you go’ rule regardless of the party in control. Unfortunately it requires a President like Bill Clinton, who was truly committed to balancing the budget, to lead the Congress, regardless of the party in charge, to do the right thing for the future of the nation.


Fortunately our nation is fundamentally strong and it has always had the strength to overcome bad presidents and their failed economic and foreign policies. Our economy can and will endure the downward vortex of this misguided Neo-Conservative trend as well. However, for the sake of our nation, our jobs, ours and our children’s future let us all hope that we see an end to the dominance of the short sighted, Middle Class-killing, Neo-Conservative economic polices soon.

Acknowledgements:



Sources and Related Websites:



The GDP to debt data can be found at the US Government web site: www.whitehouse.gov...



Link to IRS data (the IRS is a bit slow in updating their data, the newest data found on this website is from 2004):

www.irs.gov...=130546,00.html

An Excel spreadsheet with the debt data and the chart above can be found at the following URL;

www.cedarcomm.com...

Here is a link to see what the current debt is:

brillig.com...

Start researching how the state of our economy came to be instead of spouting party prejudice politics.