So, it seems that Jeb Bush doesn’t know how many years the lower 99 have to work before getting their share of crumbs from the table, though he knows he wants to increase the number of years and decrease the number of crumbs:
If you missed Face the Nation on Sunday, you missed Jeb Bush proving yet again he’s not ready for prime time. In this case, following up on his idea that Social Security has to be cut in order to save it.
“But we need to look over the horizon and begin to phase in over an extended period of time going from 65 to 68 or 70. And that by itself will help sustain the retirement system for anybody under the age of 40.”
Jeb Bush, who would be president of the United States, doesn’t know that the retirement age already has been raised and that it isn’t 65 for anyone retiring anymore. Right now the age is 66. For people born in 1959 and later, it’s 67. What RJ Eskow says: “The retirement age is a fundamental part of American working life. If you’re running for president and don’t know what it is, you’re privileged and out of touch.”
via Daily Kos
Well, unless I am gravely mistaken, we don’t need to worry about Jeb in the White House, no matter how much money his PAC salts away. If he goes out with a bang rather than a whimper that’s all to the good, but either way will do.
But Jeb’s promise to impoverish retirees raises a broader question than his incompetence. Standard political theory would predict that in a party system, the parties would compete, and one way they would compete is by promising voters things that they want. Yet, such promises are oddly missing. True, the Republican Party promises its slack jawed voters that it will keep “them” in their place, but beyond that it offers nothing that anyone but billionaires actually want. The Democrats offer Republican light. Unlike Republicans they’re not totally against raising the minimum wage, but they’re certainly not interested in even promising to raise it to an acceptable level. Neither party raises anything but isolated voices against the TPP, although almost everyone in the country is against it. If there’s a small but devoted group of people (Jeb’s friends and supporters) who want to cut social security, their numbers, if not their cash, are more than offset by the vast numbers of people who would like to see benefits increased, retirement ages decreased, all paid for out of the swollen incomes of the 1%, thank you very much. One would think that one could harvest enough votes by promising that, as well as free higher education, etc. to at least partially offset the kleptocrat’s money advantage. The fact is that we haven’t had a politician running a national campaign promising to give the mass of people anything, except around the margins, since LBJ, or maybe the much maligned George McGovern. The major difference between the two parties is this: one can tolerate chipping away at government benefits slowly but ineluctably; the other would prefer to proceed full speed ahead, while blaming the other party when the electoral shit hits the fan. Given Democratic timidity, the Republicans are gradually delivering everything the plutocrats could want, while they are successfully changing the rules to make sure that only the slack jawed and the rich get to vote.
This has been going on so long that our national punditocracy doesn’t know what to make of it when a politician goes off the reservation. They are desperately hoping that Bernie Sanders will precede Jeb Bush into oblivion, but don’t bet on it. He doesn’t have much money, so he won’t have the world’s biggest megaphone, but he’s the only one selling what the people want. We may be in for some surprises.
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