Alan Simpson Is Right: Government Is a Giant Milk Cow

August 25, 2010 RSS Feed Print
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Alan Simpson is right. America has become a "milk cow" with 310 million teats. We all feed off the government--from big commercial cotton and sugar farmers to Wall Street financiers to General Motors to the fabulously, obscenely rich folks for whom John Boehner, the Republican House leader, wants to give a big, permanent tax cut.

[See who donated the most to Boehner's campaign.]

Nobody has the moral high ground on this one. Not the Chamber of Commerce, which pushes immigration to import cheap labor, knowing that the government will pay for the social costs. Not the daffy matron who warned government to keep out of Medicare. Not military consulting firms, profiting from the war on terror. Not the whiny Social Security recipients who gripe about government spending on one hand, as they circulate the latest Web blast condemning Congress for denying them an unwarranted cost of living raise.

There is a move afoot to get rid of Simpson, the Republican cochair of a federal Commission that is tasked with reducing our dependency, and finding our way out of the fiscal fix we are in because of our self-indulgent spending, tax, energy, and economic policies. Ignore the leftish scaremongers who say Simpson was likening Social Security to a "milk cow." It is clear from his E-mail he was talking about Americans at large, not Social Security recipients. But even if he was blunt enough to compare retirees to nursing calves, it's all the more reason to keep the man. If we ever needed a straight-talking cowboy type like Simpson, it is now.

Tags:
recession,
Congress,
social security,
government,
economy,
John Boehner,
Medicare

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Simpson is wrong, again.

Simpson does not have the character that anyone could rely on for a reasonable solution. He has already made up his mind for more obstructionism and misinformation.

Sack the bum! He's part of the problem, having authorized borrowing like crazy while in Republican Congresses.

Sally of VA 6:24PM August 27, 2010

My wife and I have paid into social security our entire working lives. Over 40 years and we've paid in over $250,000 to social security much of it when a dollar was a real dollar. Now people are calling this a cows tit and that people should be ashamed of asking for it. Fine, give me back what I paid into it at

just 3% interest and you can take your social security and shove it.

Or how about this. Jimmy Carter put on the social security rolls millions of people who never, I mean NEVER paid a dime into it. Pass a law, if you paid into it, you get paid out of it. If you never paid in, you never get paid out.

Finally vote every single member of Congress and the Senate OUT. Replace all of them and put in term limits, one term 4 years and you're out AND without a pension for life, in fact none at all. Secondly pass a law that every single law passed by Congress, the Senate or signed behind closed doors and after a session closes, that all members of every part of the Federal government will have to live by the same rules. For a pension they get social security, period.

No special healthcare, no special pension, no special retirement benefits, and match all government pay to that comparible to the private sector.

Bring our jobs back from overseas. Make it profitable (tax wise) for companies to employ Americans here on on soil. Punish those companies that move to Ireland and other countries by putting a special import tax on their goods which will be as least as much as it would have been (cost wise) to build it in America.

Its time to take back this Country from the special interest groups in Washington. I believe come this Nov., the nation will be shocked to their very core about just how hostile the people are over how this Country has been sold down the river.

Last do away with the Federal Reserve system. Let Congress make the money as the constitution and our founding fathers designed the system.

Doug Thompson of VA 5:52PM August 27, 2010

Like it or not, Alan Simpson's right regarding our dependence on government. specifically Social Security. We're hooked ion "entitlements." Simpson has his moments, but he's not afraid to bash sacred cows.

Judy Frandsen of OR 5:29PM August 26, 2010

John A. Farrell

John A. Farrell

John Aloysius Farrell is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. An award-winning Washington reporter, he has written for The Boston Globe and The Denver Post and is the author of Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century and an upcoming biography of the great American defense attorney, Clarence Darrow.

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