News | Council of Seniors

President’s Budget To Call For Medicare, Medicaid Cuts

Feb 11, 2012

News organizations got a preview of the multi-trillion-dollar federal budget President Barack Obama is expected to propose on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal: Budget to Call for Taxes on Wealthy The budget’s broad themes, according to a draft outline viewed by The Wall Street Journal, contrast sharply with Republican proposals for smaller government and lower tax revenue. Mr. Obama repeats many of his previous budget prescriptions, resists sweeping cuts to government programs, preserves the structure of Medicare and Medicaid, and calls for close to $1.5 trillion in tax increases on higher-income Americans over 10 years (Favole and Paletta, 2/10).

Reuters: Obama Budget Declares Election-Year Tax Battle Federal government spending has already been capped for 2013 in a deal Obama and Republicans reached last summer to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. … The budget must still spell out where the ax falls on domestic spending. But it identifies $360 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid, federal healthcare programs for elderly and poor Americans, over 10 years (Bull and Cowan, 2/11).

Bloomberg: Obama Budget Plans $901 Billion Deficit Next Year With Tax Rise Much of the president’s budget plan repeats proposals that have already been rejected by Republicans, including a 10-year, $3 trillion deficit reduction package offered to Congress in September. … The plan, for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, would wring $360 billion in savings out of Medicare and Medicare over the next decade (Runningen and Faler, 2/11).

The Associated Press: Obama Budget Predicts 1.3T Deficit For 2012 The White House says that Monday’s budget will contain many items from a September submission to a failed congressional deficit “supercommittee,” which deadlocked over tax increases and how much to cut popular benefit programs like Medicare. … it’s commonly assumed that presidential politics will prevent Democrats and Republicans from renewing efforts for a broader budget agreement, though negotiations on Capitol Hill are under way in efforts to renew jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and a 2 percentage point cut in payroll taxes and prevent a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors that’s the product of an outdated funding formula (Taylor, 2/10).

Los Angeles Times: Obama’s Budget Plan Draws Upon His Previous Proposals [The August debt ceiling] agreement mandates steep and unpopular cuts in defense and domestic spending, a result of the super committee’s failure to forge a broader deficit reduction plan. The president’s budget seeks to head off those cuts by offering up a new version of the deficit reduction package he introduced in September. The plan claims more than $4 trillion in deficit reduction (Hennessey and Parsons, 2/10).

The New York Times: Obama Budget Bets Other Concerns Will Trump the Deficit House Republican leaders have already promised to follow the president’s plan with a budget document of their own that is largely based on last year’s blueprint drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and the chairman of the House Budget Committee. The new Ryan plan may temper his proposal to replace guaranteed, government-paid Medicare with vouchers that would be used to purchase private health insurance plans. Instead, Mr. Ryan is likely to propose a new version that offers traditional Medicare as an alternative to vouchers (Weisman, 2/10).
Politico: Obama Budget Goes Big On Highway Spending Biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health is frozen at $30.7 billion; much the same is true of the Food and Drug Administration’s discretionary appropriations. And the end result is that agencies like the FDA are more and more dependent on user fees raised by some of the same industries they oversee. … The full array of budget documents still won’t be formally released until Monday morning, but senior administration officials discussed the outlines in a phone call with reporters Friday evening (Rogers, 2/11).

The Hill: Obama’s Budget: 10 Takeaways What does Obama do on entitlements? The September recommendations included a number of smaller Medicare reforms including higher premiums for wealthy users and changing drug reimbursement policies. He has so far not outlined a plan that would deal with Medicare’s long-term demographic challenge. Experts do not expect him to do so, giving the GOP a chance to once again draw a contrast. It will also be important to look at how much savings Obama expected to get from the Independent Payment Advisory Board for Medicare (Wasson, 2/11).

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2012/February/11/budget-president-obama-medicare.aspx

Obama budget cuts health spending by $360 billion

By Julian Pecquet – 02/10/12 06:09 PM ET / The Hill

President Obama’s budget proposal will cut federal healthcare spending by $360 billion – including $300 billion from Medicare – over the next 10 years, according to a summary of the spending blueprint that will be fully unveiled Monday.

The savings target for Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health programs is nearly identical to the $320 billion in healthcare savings included in the president’s $3 trillion deficit-reduction plan last September. Senior administration officials confirmed in a media call that the proposals would be not identical but very similar, with most of the savings coming from provider cuts and changes to drug reimbursements. September’s deficit-cutting proposal would have required wealthy seniors to pay more for their Medicare benefits, cut payments to doctors and hospitals and shifted Medicaid costs to the states.

The new budget keeps funding for biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health level at $30.7 billion for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. The budget will propose “new grant management policies to increase the number of new research grants by 7 percent,” according to the budget summary.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/medicare/210071-obama-budget-cuts-health-spending-by-360-billion-

Should the Rich Lose Their Social Security Benefits?

By Dan Caplinger

Posted 1:10PM 01/05/12

Millions of Social Security recipients get minimum-wage benefits that are barely enough to make ends meet. At the other end of the spectrum, though, many retirees who could get by just fine without any Social Security payments at all receive much larger monthly benefits from the government.

With Social Security in crisis, does it make sense to give those big payouts to the people who paid the most in taxes along the way — or should they be forced to sacrifice those benefits for those who are less fortunate?

Before you decide whether the government should cut off rich retirees from part or all of their Social Security benefits, let’s first look at exactly how high-income earners get treated under Social Security currently.

What the Wealthy Get from Social Security Under current law, Social Security benefits get calculated based on your average income throughout your career. The more you make, the higher your benefits are, up to the yearly maximum on which the government collects Social Security taxes — $110,100 for 2012. But what many don’t realize is that in figuring your monthly check, not all earnings are created equal.

The first $700 to $800 in average monthly earnings counts the most, turning into $0.90 of benefits per $1 of income.
Above that level, the increases in benefits get a lot slower — $0.32 per $1 up to about $4,600 in 2012, and $0.15 per $1 above that.

So even though top wage-earners get more benefits, they don’t get as much more in benefits as their higher earnings would suggest. Furthermore, many high-income retirees pay taxes on as much as 85% of their Social Security benefits. For top-bracket retirees, that has the same impact as slashing almost 30% off their monthly checks.

Two Ways to Look at the Issue
Obviously, arguments for and against giving Social Security to the rich create strong emotions. On one hand, high-income earners pay a lot of money in Social Security taxes, and with the tapered benefit structure, many feel that they already don’t get their fair share of what they put into the Social Security system. If Social Security calculated benefits without the earnings breakpoints described above, then high-income earners would get much more in their monthly retirement checks.

On the other side of the argument, many believe that the purpose of Social Security isn’t to give people payback for the payroll taxes they’ve had withheld from their paychecks throughout their lifetimes, but rather to provide an economic safety net for all workers. With insurance for disabilities and other hardships as well as retirement benefits, Social Security acts as a supplement for those who need it. Proponents of measures like means-testing argue that if you don’t actually need the money, you shouldn’t get benefits.

Does Rolling Back Benefits for the Rich Really Help?

The bigger question, though, is whether cutting benefits for the rich would actually do any good.

A 2011 study from the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research concluded that phasing out benefits as income levels rose would have little or no effect on Social Security’s viability going forward, especially when you consider the ways that the rich would respond to the move.

Right now, 90% of benefits go to individuals with less than $50,000 in annual income (not including what they get in Social Security). In order to have a marked impact on Social Security’s financial health, a means test would have to hit far more than just the very rich. More importantly, the added costs of administering a means test would offset any savings.

Still, the practical impact of means-testing doesn’t change the way many people feel about the fairness of the program. As long as Social Security remains in financial trouble, reformers will look at cutting back on benefits for the rich as a possible solution to a much bigger problem.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/05/should-the-rich-lose-their-social-security-benefits/
Motley Fool contributor Dan Caplinger doesn’t count on Social Security for anything.

For three decades, conservatives’ proposals for dramatic changes to the programs have reflected a divide-and-conquer strategy inspired by the Leninist movement.

January 13, 2012|Michael Hiltzik

About the last thing you’d ever expect is for conservatives to draw procedural lessons from the founder of the Soviet state. So it’s fascinating to ponder the persistence of an attack on Social Security that was explicitly billed as a “Leninist” strategy three decades ago by analysts at the Heritage Foundation and is still in use today.This is the notion, which is part of pretty much every proposal today to “fix” Social Security and Medicare, that benefits for the retired and near-retired should be guaranteed, while those for everyone else must be cut.The usual rationale given for distinguishing among generations is that it’s unfair to renege on a promise people have counted on for their entire working lives. But the real rationale is political. If you understand that, you might see almost all current proposals aimed at reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare — whether they involve cutting benefits for most people across the board, raising eligibility ages, or means-testing the programs to cut or deny benefits to wealthier retirees — in a new light.

Let’s go back to the original strategy brief by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. Their piece, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy,” appeared in the Cato Institute’s Cato Journal for fall 1983. Anguished over President Reagan’s failure to exploit Social Security’s 1982 fiscal crisis to privatize the program, they concluded that the reason was the program’s strong support among the powerful voting bloc of seniors.

The answer, they concluded, was to “neutralize” elderly voters while continuing to undermine confidence in Social Security among the young. Their model was the Leninist movement’s “success in isolating and weakening its opponents.”

Any plan to change Social Security, they wrote, “must therefore be neutral or (better still) clearly advantageous to senior citizens … the most powerful element of the coalition that opposes structural reform.”

The young, by contrast, were not organized to support privatization, and uninformed about its virtues. The task of filling the knowledge gap, they argued, could best be performed by “the business community and financial institutions in particular … both through their commercial advertising and through public relations.”

Ever since then, proposals for dramatic changes in Social Security and Medicare have reflected this divide-and-conquer strategy. Some have scarcely any other practical rationale. Consider, for example, the argument for means-testing Social Security. This often appears as the question of why the system should be burdened by paying a monthly benefit to Warren Buffett or Bill Gates (insert name of your favorite billionaire here).

Yet to reduce Social Security’s costs significantly, any means test would have to reach far beyond billionaires. One reason is that there simply aren’t enough taxpayers in the Buffett/Gates class to make a difference, especially when the maximum initial annual Social Security benefit, whatever your wealth, will be $30,156 this year. Only about 8,200 of the 140 million personal income tax returns filed with the IRS in 2009 reported adjusted gross income of $10 million or more.

Moreover, Social Security benefits are already sharply skewed toward the working class and middle class: 76% of all benefits paid in 2009 went to recipients with less than $20,000 in non-Social Security income, according to calculations by Dean Baker and Hye Jin Rho of the nonprofit Center for Economic and Policy Research. Those reporting $180,000 or more got 1% of the total. In other words, means testing makes no sense in terms of Social Security’s fiscal condition; its only result would be to make the program less relevant to the lives of middle-class Americans — and that’s a political strategy.

The same goes for increasing the full retirement age for Social Security (currently 67 for those born in 1960 or later) and the eligibility age for Medicare (65). An analysis of this commonly discussed nostrum for both programs was just released by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO found that gradually raising the full retirement age to 70 for those born in 1973 and later would indeed cut Social Security outlays — by 2060 they would be 13% lower than if the law remained unchanged. But the burden would fall especially heavily on low-income seniors, who typically have few alternative income sources, and those for whom staying in the workforce isn’t an option. The CBO says the change would “lower average income and increase poverty rates” among the elderly; does everyone understand the trade-off of a policy change so casually bruited about?

As for raising the Medicare age, that looks like a classic case of being penny wise and just plain foolish. Raising the age to 67 would reduce government expenditures on Medicare by 5%, the CBO says. But the agency acknowledges that it would do nothing to stem overall healthcare costs; indeed, its own analysis and those of other experts suggest those costs would rise overall. Those who lose Medicare access (those ages 65 and 66) “would pay higher premiums for health insurance, pay more out of pocket, or both.” And some would have no insurance.

As the CBO observes, those effects would be moderated by the 2010 healthcare reform act, which many of those advocating cutbacks in Medicare also say they want to repeal. The Kaiser Family Foundation has concluded that pushing disenfranchised Medicare enrollees into private insurance, either through the reform act’s insurance exchanges or by forcing them to stay on their employers’ plans as workers or retirees, would push up the costs of those plans by increasing the numbers of elderly and less-healthy members in the private market. Medicare premiums would also rise, because deferring the enrollment of relatively younger beneficiaries makes the Medicare pool older and sicker on average.

If the change were implemented all at once in 2014, the Kaiser study found, the government would enjoy a net savings of $5.7 billion that year — but at a total cost of $11.4 billion divided among 65- and 66-year-olds ($3.7 billion), employers ($4.5 billion), other Medicare and private insurance members ($2.5 billion) and states paying their Medicaid share ($700 million).

In other words, here as in so many other categories the savings from making a dramatic change in an established program are illusory. Some bargain. Lenin would be pleased. http://articles.latimes.com/print/2012/jan/13/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120113

Social Security Under Attack

By Trudy Lieberman

December 20, 2010 12:34 PM

When the president signed the tax bill Friday, a year’s worth of efforts aimed at modifying Social Security came to an end—at least for now. Obama’s signature was an early Christmas present to those who propose fixing the system in ways many Social Security experts say could hurt recipients in the future. The Obama-Republican compromise grants a payroll tax holiday that reduces the contributions paid by workers by two percentage points for 2011 and, ironically, aggravates a shortfall that budget hawks on the president’s now-defunct deficit commission have screamed about all year.

When the commission disbanded on December 3, eleven of its eighteen members had voted to cut Social Security benefits and make technical changes in the benefit formula that would reduce the amount of money workers would eventually receive, including cost-of-living increases for all beneficiaries beginning in 2012. “The public needs to recognize that there is a serious effort underfoot to dismantle Social Security,” says Eric Kingson, co-chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of 250 organizations—including labor unions, civil rights groups, and women’s groups—that takes a different view of what needs to be done to Social Security.

Kingson’s coalition has struggled all year to inject that view into the MSM. When they were quoted, journalists often described them as “defenders” of the country’s most successful social program, implying that, as defenders, they are seeking to hold onto something that’s outdated and unworkable. In the last couple of weeks, the press has finally noticed what they have to say. Kingson’s co-chair Nancy Altman appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered, arguing that once a tax cut is in place, it’s hard to repeal it. “All of a sudden Social Security’s shortfall, which is very manageable at this point, would actually double,” she said. It’s hard to say whether the press was finally paying attention to concerns and seeing what veteran Washington journalist Tom Bethell has called “an opening wedge in a new effort to change the face of Social Security,” or whether it was atoning for a year’s worth of lopsided reporting.

It’s reasonable for people to debate the merits of ways to slice the deficit or to fix Social Security’s shortfall, but it is not reasonable for the press to serve up one-sided, shallow reporting, which has been the norm from too many news outlets. As Social Security expert Alicia Munnell told Campaign Desk in late October: “We haven’t really had a debate.” And yet, a few weeks later, a headline in The Washington Post announced “Consensus is forming on what steps to take in cutting the deficit.” A consensus of elites, maybe, but not necessarily of the general public, who indicated in poll after poll they do not want to cut Social Security to reduce the deficit or achieve the long-term fiscal balance in the Social Security trust funds.

But stories asking what the public thinks or probing how ordinary citizens will be helped or hurt by proposed changes have been absent this year. CNN aired segments about why people take early retirement benefits, but stories like that were rare. That omission prompted me to travel to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and report in our series, “Social Security in the Heartland,” how people would fare in a different kind of system. In my admittedly unscientific sample, no one was in favor of the changes advocated by political elites and the press. One businessman who called himself a conservative and favors privatization did not like raising the retirement age because he said it would hurt some people financially. “It’s a violation of the original contract. I should get what the system was set up to give me,” he explained.

From the beginning of the deficit commission’s work early last year, the press passed along comments, even offensive ones, from co-chair Alan Simpson, famous for saying “this country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements, Social Security and Medicare,” and “we’re trying to take care of the lesser people in society,” and likening Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” The president did not fire Simpson, and so his comments set the premise for the public discourse that followed.

Simpson and other advocates for reform talked a lot about the need to save Social Security for their grandchildren. “Erskine [Erskine Bowles, the commission’s co-chair] and I are in this one for our grandchildren,” Simpson said. “Somebody said they’re stalking-horses for taxes. I’m not a stalking horse for taxes. I’m a stalking horse for my grandchildren.” If the retirement income of future generations were the issue, we should have gotten critical analysis from the media about the looming crisis in retirement income. How do skimpy personal savings and the decline of good employer-sponsored pension plans mesh with cuts to Social Security? Never mind the grandchildren. About half of American households are at risk for being unable to maintain their pre-retirement income. News outlets, however, were more interested in the deficit crisis as defined by a narrow group of economic experts.

It wasn’t until much later—closer to the mid-term election, when candidates revealed their positions on Social Security—did stories began showing up on local news broadcasts. It’s fair to ask if the electorate understood enough about what was at stake to evaluate what the pols were saying on TV. Stories also appeared in local newspapers like The Bristol Press in Connecticut and The News-Gazette, which serves central Illinois. Those stories reported on grassroots pushback to the deficit commission proposals from a group called the Alliance for Retired Americans, and were notable because they offered new voices to the discussion.

As they did with health care, the media played follow the leader, waiting for newsmakers to make news. Alan Simpson and his deficit commission were making the news that was informing elite opinion. Other proposals came late—perhaps too late for the media. In late November, shortly before the deficit commission’s report was due, a group called the Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future—composed of well-known experts and civic leaders—released its own set of proposals challenging those of the deficit commission. The group’s press release called the commission’s proposals “fundamentally misguided.” The group got some coverage, but conventional wisdom about changes for Social Security had already emerged.

This is not the first time the press has flubbed in covering Social Security. In the mid-1990s, the National Academy of Social Insurance commissioned a study by two well-known academics who examined coverage by major media outlets between 1977 and 1994. Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Robert Y. Shapiro of Columbia concluded that the media have delivered “a consistent message” to the public: “Social Security is very difficult to sustain without constant doctoring.” That is not a correct assessment of the program’s status, they said. Their study also found that the media turn to sources who might be expected to be critical of Social Security rather than people who support the program, who themselves could provide balance.

Sound familiar? Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor once told me: “Social insurance programs in the U.S. are widely popular in a superficial way. You have popularity without understanding.” The media bear much responsibility for this.

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/social_security_under_attack.php?page=all

Congressional Meetings Scheduled for January 2012

Council of Seniors Executive Director, Loius Ambrose will visit Capitol Hill on January 26, 2012 to deliver over 100,000 petitions calling for Congressional action to protect the Social Security benefits of America’s senior citizens. Mr. Ambrose is a looking forward to discussing this issue with Congressmen from both sides of the isle and is confident that Congress will take decisive action.

An Executive Report detailing the results of Mr. Ambrose’s Capitol Hill visit will be issued in early February.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Executive Director’s Report: November 1, 2011

On October 28, 2011, Council of Seniors’ Executive Director Louis Ambrose was on Capitol Hill to deliver petitions to Congressman Ron Paul of Texas.

Upon arriving at Congressman Paul’s office in room 203 of the Cannon House Office Building, Mr. Ambrose was warmly received and a brief meeting was held during which 78,882 petitions in support of protecting Social Security and ending the totalization agreement with Mexico were presented.

Congressman Paul’s staff expressed their appreciation for the vital policy support generated by Council of Seniors members and showed genuine concern about the serious threats to social security and Medicare benefits facing America’s senior citizens.

As Executive Director of the Council of Seniors, Mr. Ambrose wishes to thank each and every member for their petitions and for the financial support they have provided over the last 6 months. Furthermore, he stated that without the dedication and generosity of Civic Council supporters,our highly successful 2011 Congressional Legislative Initiative to Protect Social Security would not have been possible.

Social Security Disaster

Walter E. Williams

10/24/11

Politicians who are principled enough to point out the fraud of Social Security, referring to it as a lie and Ponzi scheme, are under siege. Acknowledgment of Social Security’s problems is not the same as calling for the abandonment of its recipients. Instead, it’s a call to take actions now, while there’s time to avert a disaster. Let’s look at it.

The term was derived from the scheme created during the 1920s by Charles Ponzi, a poor but enterprising Italian immigrant. Here’s how it works. You persuade some people to give you their money to invest. After a while, you pay them a nice return, but the return doesn’t come from investments. What you pay them with comes from the money of other people whom you’ve persuaded to “invest” in your scheme. The scheme works so long as you can persuade greater and greater numbers of people to “invest” so that you can pay off earlier “investors.” After a while, Ponzi couldn’t find enough new investors, and his scheme collapsed. He was convicted of fraud and sent to prison.

The very first Social Security check went to Ida May Fuller in 1940. She paid just $24.75 in Social Security taxes but collected a total of $22,888.92 in benefits, getting back all she put into Social Security in a month. According to a Congressional Research Service report titled “Social Security Reform” (October 2002), by Geoffrey Kollmann and Dawn Nuschler, workers who retired in 1980 at age 65 got back all they put into Social Security, plus interest, in 2.8 years. Workers who retired at age 65 in 2002 will have to wait a total of 16.9 years to break even. For those retiring in 2020, it will take 20.9 years. Workers entering the labor force today won’t live long enough to get back even half of what they will put into Social Security. Social Security faces Ponzi’s problem, not enough new “investors.” In 1940, there were 160 workers paying into Social Security per retiree; today there are only 2.9 and falling.

Some politicians claim that Social Security has a huge trust fund and is in good health. An uninformed public and a derelict news media don’t challenge that lie. Back in August, politicians were in a tizzy over raising the federal debt limit. In an effort to frighten seniors, President Barack Obama said in a CBS interview, “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on Aug. 3 if we haven’t resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.” Here’s how we reveal the trust fund lie: According to the Social Security Administration, it has a trust fund with $2.6 trillion in it. If those were real assets, then the Social Security Administration could have mailed checks out regardless of what Congress did about the debt limit. The reality is that the Social Security trust fund consists of government IOUs that have no real value at all and probably are not even worth the paper upon which they are printed.

I believe that a person who is 65 years old and has been forced into Social Security is owed something. But the question is, Who owes it to him? Congress has spent every penny of his Social Security “contribution.” Young workers have no obligation to be fleeced in order to make up for the dishonesty and dereliction of Congress. The tragedy is that most seniors just want their money and couldn’t care less about whom Congress takes it from.

Here’s what might be a temporary fix: The federal government owns huge quantities of wasting assets — assets that are not producing anything — 650 million acres of land, almost 30 percent of the land area of the United States. In exchange for those who choose to opt out of Social Security and forsake any future claim, why not pay them off with 40 or so acres of land? Doing so would give us breathing room to develop a free choice method to finance retirement.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2011/social-security-disaster

Council of Seniors Executive Director Louis Ambrose Attends CATO Institute Symposium

On September 16, 2011, Council of Seniors Executive Director Louis Ambrose attended the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies Symposium in Washington D.C.

Held at the Undercroft Auditorium in Mount Vernon Place, the symposium explored the 2010 to 2011 Supreme Court term. The event celebrated Constitution Day and the recent publication of the the 10th Annual CATO Supreme Court Review.

Pat Coniff, U.S.F.F. Executive Director was also in attendance along with members of the Department of Justice, several prominant Washington, DC think-tanks along with a strong showing from local clergy. A luncheon and reception were also attended.

World Bank Warns Danger Zone for Social Security

August 14,2011

Global stock markets are entering a “new danger zone”, says Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank. Coming this fall to a country near you – Bank Bailout II “What’s happened in the past couple of weeks is there is a convergence of some events in Europe and the United States that has led many market participants to lose confidence in economic leadership of some of the key countries,” the World Bank President told an Asia Society gathering in Sydney Australia. In other words, Zoellick believes, stock market investors have lost confidence in the economic leadership of Obama, Merkel, and Sarkozy, and a global stock market collapse could happen at anytime. Why have stock and bond market investors lost confidence in Obama? According to the World Bank President, the recent debt ceiling deal, did not result in big enough cuts to Social Security and Medicare, “Until they make an effort on those programs, there is going to be continued skepticism about dealing with long-term spending.” In other words, until Obama throws the American Middle Class under the bus, robs them of their Social Security, Medicare, their retirements, investors will not have confidence in the long term growth prospects of the United States and Europe. And investors could pull their money out of the markets at anytime. Danger! Danger! Danger! What is going on here, is a threat to the leaders of the United States and Europe from the World Bank president, that unless they inflict deep austerity upon their peoples and rob them of their retirements, their stock markets are in danger of crashing. He is trying to talk the U.S. stock market into crashing. The bankers need our money and they need it now! Banks have recently begun laying off employees in record numbers, a sure sign that they are taking large losses, and that they have entered “their” new danger zone. Social Security and Medicare, our retirement assets held by our government, must be sacrificed in order to save the banks. The World Bank President is correct, we are in a new danger zone, in danger of being robbed by world bankers once again. The Author of the article is a former banker at one of the world’s largest banks.