Social Security, Welfare Queens, Deficits and Walmart

Though most Americans depend on Social Security payments for their very livelihood, most of those recipients know very little about the actual working of the program; and are, therefore, highly subject to the disinformation campaigns waged by politicians like Congressman Paul Ryan. The fact is Social Security, contrary to the Ryan Republican PR campaign, is not the engine driving the budget crisis, and benefit cuts should not be used to erase our national debt.

Let's  be realistic about our national budget deficit and what's causing it's growth. For starters, Social Security is self funded and does not add one penny to the debt. Indeed, our Social Security trust fund monies have been dumped into general revenue funds and have helped pay the Nations bills every year since at least 1973. Those funds were invested in US Treasury notes and carry with them the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Coincidentally, those are the same notes regularly purchased by the foreign governments whose monies have helped to keep our government afloat. Just today (4/o1/2013) the Treasury reported that the Chinese continue to buy US Treasury notes at  a rapid rate.

A new report out today indicates that the real "Welfare Queen," to use a fictional label created by Ronald Reagan, is not the mother with three or four kids collecting food stamps and driving a Corvet; it's not the retirees collecting their hard earned Social Security checks, NO! IT'S WALL MART!!!!!! Yes, Walmart!

Walmart, our nations largest private sector employer, pays their "sales associates" on average just over 15,000 dollars per year--for a family of four that's pretty close to $6,000.00 to 8,000.00 a year below the Federal Poverty Level. The Walmart poor apply for and receive Federally funded food stamps just to get by. In 2011, Wallmart workers received $2.66 billion in food stamps and Medicaid. Those numbers have gone up in each year since. While the working poor at Walmart were forced on to public welfare, Walmart in 2011, declared profits of $15.4 billion dollars.

Obviously Walmart has the means to take better care of the people upon whose backs they make their money. Indeed, “The combined worth of the 6 Walmart heirs and heiresses is greater than that of the bottom 41% of American families (48.8 million households)".

To be sure corporate welfare is alive and well.  Walmart is not alone in collecting Federal largess. The last time I checked, GE, another of our nations largest corporations, didn't pay any federal taxes last year but rather were the recipients of federal moneys though one legal scam or another. American corporations are fond of stating that US corporate tax rates are the highest in the world, and that may be true. But, the facts give the lie to the actual rates being paid by these corporate giants. Many large US corporations keep their wealth off shore and don't pay any taxes.

In sum, it's important to keep in mind that though our nations deficits have become the constant preoccupation of the extremists that have become the Republican Party, none of their deficit reduction programs even remotely touch the problems that created those deficits. During the Romney/Ryan Presidential campaign, Congressman Ryan repeatedly talked about closing tax loop holes etc. but in fact neither he nor Gov. Romney would ever even  mention a specific loop hole they would willingly close; and that remains the posture of those Republicans in Congress to this very day. Yet, they do continue to talk incessantly about cutting “entitlement programs” into which they dump programs like Social Security.

Let's not forget that the Republican deficit hawks voted for the unfunded Bush wars. . .didn't offer any criticism of Bush Administration budgets that did not include one penny for war funding. This is the same group that pushed though a huge prescription drug bill that lined the pockets of big pharma but did not include one penny to fund the program.   And let us not overlook the biggest contributor to our Nation's deficit. . .the one and a half trillion dollar Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.   To be sure, the Bush budget deficits didn't emerge from a vacuum; they came from the voodoo economic behavior that ribbed eight years of Bush economic profligacy.   As Vice President stated during the vice presidential debates, "“They talk about this Great Recession as if it fell out of the sky, like, 'Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?' It came from this man (pointing at Congressman Ryan) voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted against them.”

Have we forgotten that during the last months of the Bush Administration that the economy was in desperate straights; that Obama and McCain were called back to Washington to participate in emergency talks to keep the ship of state from going over the economic cliff.

How a few short years of Right-Wing economic nonsense changed the equation Bush inherited from the outgoing Clinton administration. Back then the dominate talk in economic circles had to do with what we were going to do as a nation with all the budget surpluses the Clinton Administration had accumulated. Those were the days.