The Grandma’s going to have to eat dog food act

     Obama released his so called “American Job’s Act” to little fan fair last week.  The proposed act promises $447 billion in tax cuts and government spending in an effort to jump start the ailing US economy.  The act looks to extend the temporary tax holiday, rolled out in 2009, that reduced payroll tax deductions on employee paychecks.  This new act purposes to lower taxes by $1,500 annually for the average family and provide incentive for businesses to hire additional people. 

      The lower taxes are via lowering the social security tax that employees must pay via payroll deduction.  An employee used to be taxed 6.2% of their salary (up to a maximum salary of $106,800) and an employer was also taxed 6.2% of the employee’s salary, all supposedly going towards social security.  With the change in 2010 that percentage dropped to a 4.2% tax for employees but remained at 6.2% tax for the employer.  The new change that Obama is proposing has both the employee and employer’s contributions decreasing to 3.2%, thus by Washington math freeing up to $1,500 for employees and employers.  

      But where is that money going to come from?  The last I checked the US government has a $1.3 trillion budget deficit forecasted for 2011 (per the CBO).  The social security “trust fund” for the first time in 2010 spent more money in benefits and payments then it received in taxes.   This was not supposed to happen until 2016.  This premature deficit was caused by only reducing the original amount the employees were taxed by 2%.   Now this new act is tripling the original reduction (2% goes to 4%- 1% additional for employees and 3% for employers) we are almost assure of seeing larger deficits. Hmmm, how is this going to work? I will tell you how. 

     The only way to fix social security in the future is to either increase the amount we tax our citizens and businesses, raise the retirement age, change the amount that retirees receive, or a combination of all three.  No other way will work.  Time and demographics are against us.   We are borrowing from the future just to make the present seem better.   So in other words, Obama wants Grandma to be forced to eat dog food in the future or grandpa to work into his 80’s just to support his sorry ass in order to be elected again!    Grandma was once on the Atkins diet, in the future she will be on the Alpo diet.    Grandpa used to shop at Walmart now he will be greeting people at Walmart.  All this just so we can reelect arguably the worst president this republic has ever had in power. 

     I know one job cut where we can save trillions…..fire the president and while you’re at it, have those 535 worthless souls start preparing their resumes as well.  Now that is an American Job Act I could get behind.  

Full disclosure

I am an independent voter that thinks both political parties need to stop playing government like little kids and do their damn job and reduce the government deficit to $0.  But alas it seems this is just a pipe dream because every time someone goes to Washington they learn “new math” that never seems to add up right.  It must be something they learn from those wonderful public schools in the district.