Tax cuts or social security, you decide

Commenting on the fallout from Alan Greenspan's announcement of the need for cutbacks in Social Security in order to stem a future fiscal crisis in the United States, Patrick Martin of the WSWS writes,

The discussion of the US fiscal crisis, as it is framed by the media and political establishment, is based on distortions of a fundamental kind. The alleged bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare is not the inevitable result of impersonal demographic forces. It is the product of policy decisions that favor one class of Americans—the top one or two percent who control the bulk of the wealth—at the expense of everyone else.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal study group, pointed out nearly a year ago, any deficit in Social Security as a result of increasing life expectancy is dwarfed by the long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts, which essentially phase out all taxation on the wealthy. Simply repealing the Bush tax cuts—in other words, taxing the rich by no more than they were taxed in 2001—would generate three times as much revenue over a 75-year period as the projected Social Security shortfall. It would generate enough revenue to cover the combined deficits of Social Security and Medicare, with several trillion dollars to spare.

Always nice seeing socialists approvingly citing liberal think tanks...