Friday, October 18, 2013

Hammered: The con artists attacking your Social Security and Medicare

The greedy con artists trying to lower your Social Security and Medicare so they can lower their own taxes are having a rough time of it lately. People are catching on to their grift.

For example, the Fix the Debt swindlers tried to hold a Twitter live chat yesterday. Fix the Debt is the billionaire-funded group that likes to lecture the rest of us on how to make do with less. While they, you know, make do with more.

The Fix the Debt Twitter live chat didn't go so well, according to Business Insider. "'Fix the Debt' just felt Twitter's sweet, trollish wrath," reported BI's Steven Perlberg. Here are some choice tweets:

David Dayen:
@ddayen Do you believe increased tax receipts from faster economic growth would reduce the deficit? Or do you not have a calculator? #fixthedebtqa
Kyle McGuiness
@Emcee_Gee Which is preferable: Arduous entitlement reform, or just beating up grandparents and stealing their SS checks every month? #fixthedebtqa
Brett Banditelli
@banditelli Will you be willing to cut Ed Rendell's consulting benefits as much as #ChainedCPI cuts seniors benefits? #fixthedebtqa cc: @fixthedebt
Sam Seder
@SamSeder Favorite Cat Food for a quick nosh? #fixthedebtqa
Then the conversation turned to the utter failure of the twitter chat:

Kurt Lynch
@KurtLynch12 Is your PR guy regretting the making of this hashtag yet? #fixthedebtqa
If that was bad, the naked capitalism blog did a priceless takedown of another hustler who wants to throw granny under the bus: billionaire hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller.

Druckenmiller, the naked capitalist explains, is a financial speculator who bears a lot of the guilt for the 2008 collapse that is making life so miserable for young people these days (i.e., disastrously high unemployment). Now he's fomenting generational warfare with much the same message the Fix the Debt hustlers are promoting:
He’s going to college campuses and telling students that things suck (which they know full well) and they need to go after Boomers who are gonna get too much in entitlements if things don’t change.... 
...Druckemniller has not only been one of two or three biggest Republican donors for the better part of two decades, he’s been firmly aligned with the aggressive “shrink government/cut taxes” effort, back to being a strong ally of Newt Gingrich. For Druckemmiller to point at Boomers and act as if he’s part of the solution, as opposed to one of the long-standing proponents of tax cuts, which among other things were one of the big causes in the rise in government debt levels under George Bush, is remarkably disingenuous.
And she concludes:
...he was a major sponsor of the very policies that have helped impoverish American youth. Perhaps Druckenmiller is making such an aggressive and public disinformation tour because he knows that if young people were to turn on the old, he’d be one of the most deserving targets for their vengeance. 
If only they'd just crawl back to their mansions...