Thompson's plan to gut Social Security
Not surprisingly, Republican Fred Thompson wants to do away with Social Security and replace it with a privatized system which would benefit those in the upper income brackets and penalize the poor and middle class:
Thompson's plan draws on ideas favored by conservatives: a reduction in benefits, rather than an increase in payroll taxes; and a shift toward private accounts, rather than government-provided payments.
[...]
To pay for the savings accounts and to help keep Social Security solvent, Thompson would change the way benefits are calculated. Over the next 50 years, benefits would grow much more slowly under Thompson's proposal than in the current system.
Here's the crux of Thompson's cockamamie scheme:
Jason Furman, an economist at the Brookings Institution, called Thompson's proposal a departure from the promises that were made to workers when the Social Security system was created. He said the change in calculating benefits, by indexing the system based on prices rather than wages, would dramatically reduce the payments that elderly citizens would be guaranteed.
"Price indexing would represent a historic shift in Social Security, transforming it from a retirement program to an increasingly paltry safety-net program," Furman said. "Price indexing would break the historic pact with senior citizens."
As Randy Neal pointed out, the only fix needed for Social Security is to remove the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Currently, only the first $97,500 is subject to the payroll tax, which is another way in which the wealthy are allowed to shirk their responsibility toward the society which made them rich in the first place.
Like most of the GOP, Thompson seems to have no problem impoverishing the very people who spent their entire working lives enriching corporations, through their labor and their consumer spending. To the Republicans, no social contracts exist except those which protect their own narrow, seflish ends.