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| Simpson: 'Let them eat catfood' |
Alan Simpson is at it again. The former senator from Wyoming who once colorfully described Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits” went after “greedy geezers” last month in a letter attacking the California Alliance for Retired Americans (CARA). Read the shocking screed here.
The April letter from Simpson – which was shared with the media today – responded to a flyer by the seniors group protesting his crusade against Social Security. His rebuttal is just what you'd expect from a let-them-eat-cake Republican who wants working families to suffer while the 1 percent get richer:
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. You must feel some sense of shame for shoveling this bullshit.Very classy.
Simpson has used the deficit – created in large part by the financial crisis – as a cover to attack the “excesses” of earned benefits like Social Security. He calls it a “Ponzi scheme.”
In the letter, the former senator continues to pretend he is looking out for future generations. As CARA points out on its website,
In the name of helping our grandchildren, the proposal cuts their benefits the most. The younger a person is the deeper the cuts because of the increase in the retirement age and the changes in the benefit formula.In response to Simpson’s charming letter, CARA President Nan Brasmer told POLITICO:
Sen. Simpson sounds an awful lot like Mitt Romney and others who will use the recent Social Security Trustees report as political cover for their radical changes. They would put seniors at risk while enriching Wall Street and the big health insurance companies. For instance, increasing the retirement age - one of their suggestions - would be extremely unfair to workers, particularly those in blue-collar and service sector jobs. And privatizing Social Security would let Wall Street firms profit while gambling workers’ Social Security savings on the roulette wheel of the stock market.Or as Sen. Bernie Sanders said,
When [Social Security] was developed, 50 percent of seniors lived in poverty. Today, poverty among seniors is too high, but that number is ten percent. Social Security has done exactly what it was designed to do!
