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Buncha Rich Fuckin' Sociopaths Sittin' Around Talkin' - Howard Lutnick on the All In podcast |
"What I've learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called 'Fed-speak'. You soon learn to mumble with great incoherence." -- Alan Greenspan
As a rule, Democrats suck.* No question about it. Once the party of Franklin Roosevelt, whose bold leadership out of the Great Depression 100 years ago set the stage for an era of reforming presidents of both parties and America's greatest period of prosperity and expanding equality, it is now the party of Third Way donor-fellating technocrats whose wannabe Republicanism-Lite™ in a dark, seemingly unending era of raging inequality and misery is popular only amongst themselves, Never Trumper Republicans and certain 24 hour news channels. Their heads-up-their-asses approach to politics bears great responsibility for where we have found ourselves in 2025. Happy? Now can we talk?
I was watching a segment on Status Coup the other day in which it was promised that Jordan (Chariton) , the founder and main presenter of the Left of Progressive news outlet "GOES NUCLEAR on SLEAZEBALL Trumper Hinting at Sabotaging Social Security". The occasion for it was remarks that Trump's Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick made on the Venture Capitalism podcast All-In concerning his lack of concern about the controlled chaos inflicted on the Social Security Administration by Elon Musk's DOGE coup:
Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law — who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain. She'd just think something I messed up and she’d get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.
Never mind that the Trump administration is busily removing the channels for said complaining by cutting out the SSA's customer service phone number entirely as they prepare to make AI bots the only public face of the Agency. Do we really have to say that by definition those who need Social Security the most-- for whom the program was conceived as a way of keeping the elderly and unable to work off the streets and able to keep food in the larders as the name implies-- are those who can least afford to miss a single payment? Chariton did not disappoint, removing his trademark nerd glasses to accurately proclaim Lutnick a "rich fucking sociopath." Chariton's assessment of the plan that Lutnick was purposely under-representing for his former Wall Street cronies sounds about right: "Pretty clear cut: let's just fuck up this program as much as we can, get the masses so disgruntled, so desperate, and then, hey! Maybe J.P. Morgan can help us with Social Security. Maybe McKinsey... the vulture capitalist consultants that Pete Buttigieg [worked for], maybe the private sector can do this better than us since we've fucking taken a chainsaw to it. And that's before they start cutting the benefits-- and I assure you that's coming too-- under waste, fraud and abuse." All of this in spite of Trump's repeated promise on the campaign trail (to a MAGA constituency that is assuredly heavily dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as Chariton reminded us) that his administration was not going to touch the entitlements.
Of course no Status Coup rant would be complete without a reminder that the Democrats are hardly better. Chariton reminded us of the tinkering and the threats to tinker with Social Security of the most recent crop of Democratic presidents. But there was no mention of the inconvenient fact that the most recent, Joe Biden, who as a Senator pioneered third wave Democratic advocacy for ruthless "serious" trimming of entitlements in the name of deficit reduction, seemingly found Jesus as president on Social Security by boosting payments to the Social Security Trust Fund out of which come monies that cover annual shortfalls between the amount paid into Social Security by those still in the labor force and those paid out to retirees and those on disability, which in 2023 was $41.4 Billion. The total amount in the Trust Fund is around $2.8 trillion dollars, enough to cover shortfalls of similar magnitude until 2035. To complete the picture, the money that goes into Social Security via employer's FICA payments on behalf of their employees is a progressive tax on worker's wages which is capped at incomes of $168,600. Above this, the tax is the same regardless of the income of the contributor: currently $20.9K per year. Should the Trust Fund deplete, based on annual contributions, Social Security will still pay 85% of benefits; however, as Bernie Sanders has been touring the country pointing out, the shortfall could more easily be filled by removing the cap on incomes for social security contributions. "Tax the rich"
The Sociopath Lutnick, a former Democratic donor-type skeeve pre-Obama who oozed his skeeviness rightward over supposed unhappiness with Democratic identity politics during the previous Trump admnistration and provided resources for Trump's latest win, epitomizes the counterpart trajectory to Status Coup's guest in the segment, Steve Grumbine, a former Reagan Republican whose exposure to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) supposedly turned him into a progressive; a "Real Progressive" as the non-profit that he founded of that name avers.
Grumbine comes in hot following Chariton's rant to talk about how Bernie saying all we have to do to cover the Social Security shortfall is tax the wealthy is basically feeding into the same message as Lutnick et al—i.e., that there’s a shortfall that needs to be filled-- when according to Modern Monetary Theory the government can just print money whenever it wants to, so Social Security is never in true jeopardy, shortfall or not. In support of Grumbine's assertion, Chariton plays a clip of Alan Greenspan, the libertarian, partisan, Randian, antiregulatory free-market fundamentalist and former Head of the Federal Reserve from the Reagan to Bush Younger administrations (and as administrator of monetary policy arguably the engineer of the 2008 Financial Crash due to policies that made unregulated exotic speculation consequenceless for the financial masters of the universe). Responding to questions from Paul Ryan in a congressional hearing about the shortfall, Greenspan, hardly a proponent of MMT, nevertheless magically parrots Grumbine's assertion that it’s not a question of will the money be there because the government can print money whenever it needs to, but rather “the question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase? So it’s not a question of security, it’s a question of the structure of a financial system which assures that the real resources are created for retirement as distinct from the cash. The cash itself is nice to have but it’s got to be in the context of the real resources being created at the time those benefits are paid “ (video cuts off here.) All of which Chariton interprets as there is no insolvency issue, we have enough money to pay out social security "into infinity and beyond." And Grumbine goes further to explain the gobbledygook from Greenspan about what the real question is as consistent with MMT's advocacy of deficit spending; and avers that the Social Security system as conceived and currently operating is a concession to capitalists in that above a certain income you pay the same as everyone else so it hurts less to pay the more you make over that cap , whereas at the bottom of the scale it’s taking a bite out of your ability to live day to day. So while Greenspan is matter of factly saying that the real problem of retirement is not coming up with the cash to pay Social Security, it’s coming up with the things that that cash buys—in other words a problem for business—Grumbine is saying the government could not tax anybody for Social Security—and it could still then turn around and pay everyone say $5000 a month regardless of how much you made over the course of your career and then the problem would be ensuring that there were enough resources for folks to spend that money on.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Trump administration is not about to fix Social Security with Modern Monetary Theory, and furthermore that in the only alternate universe that was possible in the November branch of alternate universes, a Kamala Harris administration would not be dismantling social benefits, laying off Federal employees, wrecking government to give cover to nefarious plans to privatize to Elon Musk every service the government provides with our taxes. If the Social Security Trust Fund is essentially a spreadsheet as Grumbine says, is it not unreasonable to expect that anyone trying to preserve Social Security and prevent the massive social misery we appear to be headed for in this country might as well wring digits to "save" it from the hoarded wealth of billionaires? Would anyone other than the less than 2000 billionaires in this country complain? It is far too late to carp on this, but the reflexive "Them Too-ing" of Democrats on the part of the "enlightened left" absolutely contributed to the havoc we are now experiencing, which will only get worse. We can certainly expect the abstainers of the left, the Third Party purity voters to continue moaning as a way of excusing themselves for shirking from the prevention of Trump's victory. It certainly will not fix things if any proportion of them suddenly saw the light. But I wouldn't mind.
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* Though there are exceptions. And, to my main argument, far more exceptions to the rule in the Democratic caucus than in the GOP.