Former Sen. Alan Simpson is not happy with the California Alliance for Retired Americans.
In an April letter full of bad language, the pugnacious Wyoming Republican criticized the seniors group for a flyer that protested a deficit reduction plan from the task force he co-chaired with Clinton administration honcho Erskine Bowles.
“Your little flyer entitled ‘Bowles! Simpson! Stop using the deficit as a phony excuse to gut our Social Security!’ is one of the phoniest excuses for a ‘flyer’ I have ever seen,” Simpson wrote on his official Senate stationery.
“What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very young people that we are trying to save, while the ‘greedy geezers’ like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap,” Simpson continued. “You must feel some sense of shame for shoveling this bullshit.”
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, created by President Barack Obama in 2010 to craft a plan to tackle the nation’s structural budget deficits, recommended trimming Social Security costs, by raising the retirement age and creating a new formula for calculating benefits, in order to save money. The Simpson-Bowles plan, as it is known, would also slightly increase Social Security payroll taxes.
The California Alliance for Retired Americans is not a fan of the plan.
This old geezer needs to pull in his horns. Why should the California Seniors roll over and play dead? Alan Simpson has some bucks. Most seniors no longer have the option of earning those big bucks with honorarium and other odd jobs the former senator can get. The seniors job is to preserve what they have been promised over their working lifetimes. Most seniors have paid in to the system their entire working lives.
Alan Simpson needs to be censured and he needs a good ass-whupping before he is forced to apologize to these California Seniors. Then he can take off his partisan hat and encourage his former buds in the Senate to raise the limit on FICA. The $106,000 or so ceiling is absurd. Then he can get off the committee. He isn’t fit to serve.
Senator Simpson can be blunt, but he’s spot on correct that these moronic flyers circulated by interest groups are completely toxic nonsense. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly (he didn’t when he was in office, either). I don’t really approve of that kind of discourse, but it may be that someone as prominent and as respected as he is needs to vent occasionally to embarrass the people who put out that garbage.
I looked for the flyer but only saw their news letters.
Even if they called him every name in the book, he needs to rise above it.
Why is he still using senate stationary?
Plus who is he to be calling anyone an old geezer. Geez.
Sigh, I am obviously on the size of the old geezers in California. Social Security is sacred. I am probably more of a geezer myself than Scout is. That explains it.
A good number of seniors worked in low wage jobs that didn’t provide pensions, so Social Security is all they have. As we continue to migrate to defined contribtion from defined benefit pensions, the dependence on Social Security is likely to increase, not decrease. After all, 401K type investments can also lose money as we found during the recent downturn.
So it’s ok for everyone else in the budget to have paid lobbyists to plead their case before members of the legislature, except for the poor, elderly and disabled — they should suck it up.
Excellent point, Bubberella. Where have you been lately?
Most people in sales never have pensions, regardless of how high the pay. Pensions just aren;t part of sales and I don’t think they ever have been. They are darn lucky to have a 401k.
I think some of these politicians are going to learn first hand about taking on the gray panthers. (and cougars, tigers, and lions) These ranks will swell with the boomers jumping on the social security band wagon. The alpha boomers hope the train this year, if they waited until the right age.
I’ve been reading, Moon. I find that I have less and less compulsion to post.
That is probably far more productive. Fiction or non-fiction?
Did they call Simpson names? Isn’t expected that people who have come to depend on benefits have a right to fear how they will live after retirement?
If all the flyer accuses Simposn of doing is misusing the deficit, that does not deserve the tirad that he subsequently spewed toward them.
I recede from my previous remarks. I withdraw the pass I issued. Civility is a matter of great value. But I still have some considerable sympathy for the Senator in this. He and Erskine Bowles did the Nation a great service by taking a serious approach to fiscal irresponsibility. Nothing approaching “using the deficit as a phony excuse to gut Social Security” was part of the work of that commission. His anger should have been vented at the dunderheads who wrote the copy (probably some guys living large on the south side of 30), rather than the group whose name was hijacked to sponsor the mailing.