06-07-2018, 02:06 PM
(06-07-2018, 11:56 AM)David Horn Wrote: Medicare insolvency is mostly an issue of simple demographics: too many seniors being added to the rolls. Though Trump may decide that it's worth arguing for a means test to stay on the program, I can't see that happening. AARP and seniors in general, are too big a political force to tangle with. Assume that an adjustment to the funding formula will be offered, and sooner rather than later. 2026 is not that far away, but the amount of offset required is not that large, at least for now.
Social Security is an even easier fix, though not in the era of Trump. Removing the earnings cap will fix this without any additional taxation needed.
None of this is rocket science … or even something new. The easy fixes were stonewalled by the GOP while Obama was in office, so now they own both problems 100%. They will be fixed quietly, so the base doesn't get too aroused.
People reaching the age of Medicare eligibility in 2018 were born in 1953. During the middle-to-late 1990s and the Double-Zero Decade, the birth-dearth years of 1931 to 1944 were becoming eligible.
Removing the earnings cap for high-income people is something that you can never trust Donald Trump or any other right-wing pols to tamper with. The rich are to them the Salt of the Earth, the ones through whom all blessings flow -- and the rest of America had better believe that about their exploiters.
Republicans will be caught holding the bag for the fixes that they refused to make -- but Democrats will get the blame for making the fixes, at least from the noisy and well-funded Right.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.