The tax package passed the Senate this morning, and is moving to the House. This Tax Deal will cost nearly $900 billion, but it has practically nothing in it for retirees or government workers.Get the SS payroll tax holiday off the table!

Find your Congressperson's office numbers, bookmark them, and FAX, email and call them repeatedly over the next few days.

http://www.house.gov/ Attached to this Alert is a generic letter you can fill in and/or change and fax.

Here is an FDR quote that you might enjoy:

"We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren't a matter of economics, they're straight politics," FDR told a Treasury official in 1941.

(see HuffPost: Ryan Grim http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/obamarepublican-deal-coul_n_795187.html)

The “Grand Compromise” that has been reached in Washington this week contains a provision that is a big reduction to the Social Security Trust Fund.  It proposes that employees pay almost one third less in Social Security contributions next year.  This cut for one year in Social Security contributions will cost the Trust Fund at least as much as it would cost to repeal the WEP AND the GPO for TEN FULL YEARS* We paid our full requirement into the system.  It's our money.  If they are willing to cut the Trust Fund, they should be paying US back first as a stimulus!

The payroll tax reduction helps working people who have earnings up to $106,800 annually, and those who earn much more, BUT there are no equivalent benefits proposed for the RETIRED or the 4% of American workers who do not pay into Social Security in their current public service job! (The $250 proposed emergency benefit for seniors was blocked in Congress on Wednesday, by the way)

As work is done to improve long-range Social Security solvency this Spring, we will be looking for opportunities to repeal the WEP and GPO.  Any depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund now will make our job harder!

Call, email or FAX your Congresspersons and the President (see attached letter format) this weekend.

http://www.house.gov/ ;  

http://www.senate.gov/ ;   

Tell them:

• Social Security did not cause the deficit or the recession, don’t hurt this program to try to fix the fiscal situation!
• Any changes to Social Security must include the repeal of the WEP and the GPO.  We paid our money, you still owe us a fair return!

This is urgent—email it to your friends and family now!

Make copies of the attached letter, and ask people at gatherings you go to in the next weeks to write their comments, sign it with personal information (so it will be counted), and Fax it to the President.

* Social Security income from payroll taxes in 2009 was $570.4 billion;  $285.2 was from employee contributions.  The bill before the House proposes a cut from 6.2 percent down to 4.2 percent of wages for the employee.  The two percentage points cut results in a 32.3% reduction in the employee share of the payroll tax.  32.3% of $285.2 billion is $92.1 billion dollars. That was ’09. Projections for ’11 are for a $120 B loss. Estimates for repeal are $80-100 B  over 10 years.(See: ”Financial Condition of Social Security” link on the “Further Reading” page of SSFairness.com and the Congressional Research Service reports also on that page.)