Word: kerrey
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Modernization turned out to be a digital Tower of Babel. Treasury Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers, charged with looking after the IRS, says, "I think modernization has gone way off track. They tried to build the Taj Mahal." Senator Bob Kerrey, co-chairman of the restructuring commission, describes tax modernization as a failure. Says Kerrey: "While the world has moved into the wireless age with home banking, atms on every corner and stock investing over the Internet, IRS technology has remained stagnant...
Burned in their past attempts to reform Social Security, Republicans examined last week's advisory-council report with barbecue tongs and mitts. But Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat from Nebraska, immediately submitted legislation that would give workers more control over how their Social Security contributions are invested. Kerrey dismissed as "condescending" the notion that the average American can't be trusted to invest his own money. "Millions of middle-class Americans," he observed, "are investing successfully today," and their numbers are growing rapidly. Most of them are prudent enough to shift their savings gradually from the volatile stock market...
Social Security is scheduled to start spending more than it collects in about 2012, just as the huge baby-boom generation begins to retire. By 2029, even the so-called Social Security trust funds would be depleted. Thanks to men like Kerrey and investment banker Pete Peterson, president of the Concord Coalition, more and more Americans understand that the Social Security "trust fund" is a myth. Every week's collection of Social Security payroll taxes first goes to pay benefits to today's retirees; then the surplus (currently about $565 billion) is immediately used to finance other federal spending. What...
...believe we are spending too much on our parents, but we're spending too little on our kids," Kerrey said. "We are squandering millions of lives--the lives of our children, who are not getting the education they deserve...
Robert J. Blendon, Lee professor of health policy and management at the School of Public Health, responded to Kerrey's remarks, explaining his views of the long- term problems with Social Security and Medicare...