http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/17/1403151/-McConnell-proposes-long-term-highway-bill-at-the-expense-of-retirees-and-the-nbsp-disabled?detail=facebook?detail=email
Democrats on both sides of Capitol Hill have been demanding a long-term funding bill for the highway trust fund and an end to the last-minute, short-term funding mechanisms that have been the norm for years now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's opening bid to give Democrats just that is typically diabolical: you can have your bill, but at the expense of retirees and the disabled.
The total package of spending cuts and program changes would raise about $80 billion, enough to pay for between three to four years of federal funding for road, bridge and transit projects while fulfilling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise to introduce a long-term highway bill this month. The retirement proposal would raise more than $30 billion of that total by cutting the rate of return on a popular retirement investment for federal employees.
The list of financing options is extremely tentative and negotiators are expected to continue working through the weekend to reach a deal.
"That menu… it has the support of neither the Democratic or Republican caucuses at this point," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters.
In addition, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare warns about two other proposals that are being floated as sacrificial lambs, both coming out of the Social Security trust fund. One would cut off payments to any senior with an outstanding arrest warrant
"Almost none of the seniors who would be affected by this provision are actual fugitives from justice and most of the warrants in question are many years old and involve minor infractions," the committee's president, Max Richtman writes in a letter to senators. Besides that, the Social Security Administration has already tried to enforce that ban, "with catastrophic effect for many vulnerable elderly seniors, employing procedures that did not withstand judicial scrutiny."
The other proposal is to end concurrent payments of Social Security Disability Insurance and unemployment benefits. "Given the importance that all policy makers ascribe to encouraging disabled Americans to return to the workforce, I am perplexed by the desire on the part of some in the Congress to strip working SSDI beneficiaries of their eligibility to receive unemployment compensation when, through no fault of their own, they lose a job," Richtman writes.
Senators as varied as James Inhofe (R-OK) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) say that the cut in federal pensions is a non-starter. Social Security should be just as off-limits. Cutting Social Security benefits—and siphoning off money from the trust fund—to pay for completely unrelated programs should never be an option.
here we are again republicans proposing bills to give we the people more jobs as prescribed in Pres.'s American Jobs Act infrastructure but look how the propose to do it in the same old way they do funding for their preferred projects on the backs of elderly, poor and what they have left behind that resembles the middle class in their wake of depression.
no way to govern, no way for reasonable people to even consider electing them as leaders so that said and millions still voting for them and their destructive, obstructive, non reproductive agenda who is the greater threat those who would, those who oppose or the republican base voter that through all this all they want is to take "THEIR" country back. wake up everybody!!!!!
McConnell stays off camera for a few months and comes back with this further raping of American citizens, those who look forward to that be careful what you wish for because a smiling face sometimes they don't tell the truth.
