Hear it from two economists: Social Security is fiscally sound for at least 20 years, bought and paid for by the regressive Payroll Tax. The present fiscal crisis is solely due to taxpayer bailouts of the big banks, not to national debt. And as any intellectually honest economist would tell you, austerity would (or will) greatly deepen the current recession.

---

 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Obama Fully Embraces Austerity with Cuts to Social Security and Medicare

Bob Pollin: Costs of Social Security and Medicare have nothing to do with rise in fiscal deficit - April 10, 13

Bio 

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the founding co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the US and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the US. His latest book is Back to Full Employment. Other books include: A Measure of Fairness: the Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States, and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

The Grand Betrayal has Arrived

Bill Black: President Obama's bargain with Republicans opens the door to Wall St.'s dream - the privatization of Social Security - April 10, 13

Original Here
Bio 

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.