Useful primer
by digby
If you are confused about the outlines of the debt ceiling deal, and I imagine quite a few people are, this one page fact sheet by the social security works people is quite good. It’s designed to talk about how SS is affected but it ends up being a useful simple primer on the deal itself.
It’s the sort of thing you might send to Uncle Bubba if he’s ranting and raving about how the Republicans sold out the Tea Party.
I hadn’t heard about this:
The Budget Control Act of 2011 includes a program integrity initiative for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and three other agencies to reduce overpayment of federal benefits. Additional appropriations to SSA would be permitted so it could continue Disability Insurance (DI) and SSI reviews. CBO estimates these reviews could reduce benefits outlays for DI, SSI, Medicare and Medicaid by nearly $12 billion over 10 years
Looks like they’re going to be siccing the feds on people who are collecting benefits to ensure they really, truly deserve them. This might be a good idea if it meant that the money they saved would be used to allay the kind of cuts I wrote about in my previous post. But it won’t. It will be used to pay down the debt caused by Wall Street gambling, useless wars and tax cuts for rich people.
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