If you want to know how moribund the Democratic Party is, how completely owned by Wall Street the president is, and how sick our national politics have become, just consider Social Security.

The president, earlier in his term, convened a “blue ribbon” panel, supposedly composed of a “broad spectrum” of opinions from liberal to conservative,” to come up with a plan to “reform” the system.

At issue: It is known that because of the huge number of Baby Boomers -- people born between 1946 and 1964 -- just starting to hit retirement age, and the general aging of the population, the Trust Fund composed of revenues paid into the system by working people will be depleted by about 2033. That would leave current worker taxes covering just 78% of the benefits promised to be paid out the same year, unless something is done sooner to increase revenues or decrease the rate of payouts of those benefits.

The commission, which proved to be a bust, was headed by co-chairs named by the president. For the Republicans, who since its inception have wanted to destroy this last vestige of the New Deal, it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, a cadaverous wretch of a man who promptly called the program a “milk cow with 300 million tits.” ‘Nuff said there. Nice pick Barack.

As for his Democratic co-chair, the president named Erskine Bowles. If you wanted to know the views of this former congressman and Clinton advisor on Social Security, you need only learn that in 2011 at a public event, he praised Rep. Paul Ryan, now Mitt Romney's choice for VP, who has said he wants to privatize Social Security, and condemned the president’s last budget proposal as a joke. Barack sure knows how to pick ‘em. Bowles ...

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s newly picked running mate, Paul Ryan, is on the forefront of efforts to dismantle Social Security by putting seniors’ savings into risky Wall Street investments. Over the years, Ryan has not only pushed for privatizing Social Security, but also dismantling Medicare and slashing funding for Medicaid. In the Republican response to President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address, Ryan defended cutbacks on social spending. "We’re in a moment where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century," Ryan said. "This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency." For more, we speak with two experts on Social Security: independent journalist Eric Laursen, author of the book "The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan," and Heather McGhee, vice president of policy and outreach at the progressive policy group Demos and co-author of a chapter on retirement insecurity in the book "Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and its Poisonous Consequences."

Transcript:

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Social Security, which celebrated its 77th anniversary on Tuesday. President ...

Today, August 14, is Social Security's 77th birthday. That presents us with a difficult challenge: What do you give a government program that has everything ... except a secure future of its own?

Let's take a look at the options for this year's celebration.

The Gift Pile

Talk about an embarrassment of riches! Look what Social Security can already list among its gifts. It's got:

Hundreds of millions of people who love it. Polls consistently show that Social Security, along with Medicare, is one of our most popular government programs.

The best balance sheet in the entire government. Despite all the scare talk (which we'll get to shortly), no program in U.S. history is on a firmer financial footing than Social Security. It's a stand-alone program which isn't allowed to contribute to the overall government deficit, and is absolutely solvent until the mid-2030s.

No other program can say that.

A great profile. There's no way to say this delicately, so we'll come right out with it: Social Security has the slimmest, sleekest look in Washington. We don't like to encourage our society's fixation on thinness as the ideal of beauty, but let's face it -- Social Security is so cost-effective in delivering its benefits that it's got the most streamlined chassis around.

The Social Security Administration beats every private benefits program in the country when it comes to low overhead and efficient administrative design. One of the main reasons for that is the fact that everybody who pays into the system receives its benefits at qualification time.

There's no "means testing," no gamesmanship, no trick—just trim, no-overhead service delivery.

Great polls. Time and time again, overwhelming majorities of Americans have made it clear that they don't want this program to be cut. That means a lot: Of all the gifts in the world, the best ...

The Education Department proposed new rules on Tuesday to revamp its troubled program for forgiving the federal student loans of borrowers who become disabled.

The new regulations came after an investigation last year by ProPublica found that the department's dysfunctional system for evaluating disability was keeping many genuinely disabled borrowers buried in student debt. Under federal law, borrowers who develop severe and lasting disabilities are entitled to get their loans forgiven.

The department's proposed reforms would streamline the application process and improve its communication with borrowers, eliminating many of the bureaucratic hurdles that frustrated applicants in the past.

But the department rejected a key reform that would have allowed many disabled borrowers to bypass its review altogether — tying the Education Department's standard for disability to that of the Social Security Administration, so that Social Security disability findings could be used to discharge loans.

"The most important reform is changing the definition [of disability], and without that it's impossible to have full reform," said Deanne Loonin, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center and the director of its Student Loan Borrower Assistance program. "Given that they chose not to address that, I think they made some other substantial improvements."

Perhaps the most significant change is that all borrowers will now submit a single discharge application to the Education Department. Previously, many applicants had to undergo initial reviews by loan holders and guarantors, ...

"Hmm," writes a blogger. "Liberals need to get off their fainting couches." It's in an argument for cutting Social Security benefits - and it comes from a liberal.

Benefit cuts would hurt millions of disabled and elderly people, harm our economy, and wound our social character.

Cear-eyed historians of the future wouldn't just point their fingers at radical right-wingers. They'd also cite collaborators in the Democratic Party and other members of what is still called (with no apparent sense of irony) "the Left."

Today's case study is called "Lieberman vs. Drum."

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In the coming days and weeks we'll be hearing a lot of misinformation about the Trustees Report from the Social Security Administration. It's time to separate the myths from the realities:

Myth: "Social Security and Medicare have a cost problem."

Fact: Medicare has a financial problem. As this chart shows, the cost of providing Social Security benefits is not out of control or skyrocketing.

Social Security is on an even keel for the foreseeable future. Twenty years from now it's projected to be in a position to pay only 75 percent of benefits - but that's easily fixed by lifting the payroll tax cap.

Fact: That's a headline we saw repeated across the country in anticipation of the Trustees Report, but it's wrong. What's "straining" Social Security and Medicare today is the unequal distribution of income and a broken regulatory system for Wall Street that has put the entire economy under stress.

Social Security was actuarially stable after it was overhauled by the Greenspan Commission in the 1980s. The Baby Boomers were all alive and (mostly) working by then. So what really happened?

First, a radical upward shift in income toward the "1 percent" - and the "0.0001 percent" - meant that more and more of the nation's income was ...

Major news outlets like the Washington Post and National Public Radio constantly bombard us with news pieces on the budget deficit. Invariably these stories focus on the cost of “entitlements,” which most of us know as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The story pounded home in these pieces – often explicitly – is that these programs, that primarily benefit the elderly, are creating the basis for a generational war between the young and the old.

The media focus both contributes to and follows the Washington policy debate. At the moment, we have the congressional “supercommittee” scheming to produce a deficit-reduction plan that will almost certainly involve large cuts to all three programs. There is a commonly repeated view in Washington policy circles, based on no evidence whatsoever, that there will be a disaster if the supercommittee comes up empty handed. This means that members of the committee are feeling great pressure from the 1 percent to produce a package with big cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

It is truly impressive how the Washington elite have managed to make these modest protections for the country’s working population (the 99 percent) into the greatest problem facing the country. The obsession with cutting these programs is occurring at a time when we have more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether. One might think that Congress would convene a supercommittee to get people back to work rather than figuring out a way to undermine programs that people need, but it’s the 1 percent that pay for elections, not the 25 million workers suffering from their greed and incompetence.

Since almost no one can be immune to the hysteria that the media have created around the cost of these programs, it is worth putting it in some context. Starting with Social Security, the