Hey, Atrios

From Eschaton:

I'll admit that, for the most part, during the great and glorious benevolent rule of the Kenyan Muslim Socialist, I've been a bit unsure just what I should be advocating for. 

I've found my groove. We need to increase Social Security Benefits. The Professional Left needs to sign on to this. All the oldsters need to vote for it. Congressional candidates need to get on board.

From How to Save America in Several Easy Steps, last November:

But what is we weren’t satisfied with saving Social Security. What if we … wanted to make it better.

Consider that CNN has recently reported that:

A quarter of middle-class Americans are now so pessimistic about their savings that they are planning to delay retirement until they are at least 80 years old -- two years longer than the average person is even expected to live.  

It sounds depressing, but for many it's a necessity. On average, Americans have only saved a mere 7% of the retirement nest egg they were hoping to build, according to Wells Fargo's latest retirement survey that polled 1,500 middle-class Americans. 

While respondents (whose ages ranged from 20 to 80) had median savings of only $25,000, their median retirement savings goal was $350,000. And 30% of people in their 60s -- right around the traditional retirement age of 65 -- that were surveyed had saved less than $25,000 for retirement.

For whole lot of folk, the economic stagnation, combined with the downturn in the housing market, means that retirement is looking harder and harder to achieve. Here’s the chart for the S&P 500 for the last twenty years.

Ah, the Clinton years; they were so good to us. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to get back to those heights – even though eleven years have passed. So if you had a retirement fund keyed solely to the S&P 500 (and which included neither dividends nor additional capital contribution), your performance would be as shown below.

Since January 1, 2000, you would have experienced a negative return of $179, or about -13% over almost eleven years. That is not how to build a retirement plan.

But, perhaps you’ve got money stuck in your house, and were hoping that would play a key part in your retirement.

According to the Case-Shiler Home Price Indices, your house is now worth what it was eight years ago, in 2003.

Now the loss of a decade’s worth of growth it not something which remedied easily, or even with a lot of work. But we can do something for those people who planning to work for years after they die.

The magic words are “unearned income.” The 1% have pulled off a brilliant con over last 30 years, where they’ve been able to convince the government that unearned income – the kind that comes from capital gains, dividends and interest – should not be subject to the kind of taxation that the rest of us face. In terms of income tax, long term capital gains are taxed at 15%, far below the current maximum marginal rate of 35%.

But it gets worse in terms of Social Security, because these things have ... never been taxed at all.

In 2009, the IRS reported that there was nearly $7.7 trillion in income, $5.7 of which was salaries and wages. Now, just because something isn't salaries and wages does not necessarily mean it would qualify as "unearned income," but it does give us a sense of scale. If only half of it was -- $1 trillion -- then applying the 2009 employee Social Security rate of 6.2% would yield an additional $60.2 billion in revenue.

And all of this increase would be on income -- literally -- that no one worked for.

Fixing Social Security is easy -- just get rid of one tax break for wealthy (and well-off). Making Social Security better will take more work, but it's the kind of thing a decent country -- one which doesn't make dead people work -- should consider. And one good place to start would be re-examining the special treatment we give to "unearned income," a.k.a. money no one worked for.