Extreme Makeover: Jesse Kelly morphing into Sharron Angle

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Giffords for Congress campaign points out in a message today:

For months, candidate Jesse Kelly has staked out extreme positions on the issues, and Social Security has been no exception.  Now that he has won his primary, Kelly has changed his position to try and fool Southern Arizonans.  Kelly's answers on Social Security read like a multiple choice exam: Privatize it, Phase it out, Eliminate it… and now… Protect it.

If Jesse Kelly went to Congress, which would it be?

In December 2009, when he was asked about Social Security, he told the Tucson Weekly, "I would love to eliminate the program."

In July 2010, asked by KUAT's Bill Buckmaster about privatizing Social Security he said, "You must! … Right now, you have to take steps to reform it, to privatize it, to phase it out."

Phase it out!  As in, get rid of it.

Now this weekend, his spokesman told Bloomberg News that Kelly is "mainstream" and that he wants to "protect" Social Security.

But Kelly's statements repeated month after month speak louder than his spokesman's attempt to give Kelly an extreme makeover.

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In fact, Jesse Kelly is morphing into Sharron Angle, the loony "Teapublican" running for the Senate in Nevada.

Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Sharron Angle says the nation's Social Security system needs to be privatized, and she says it was done before by military dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Sharron Angle Cites Chile's Dictatorship On Privatizing Social Security:

CBS affiliate 8 News Now reports on what the Tea Party-backed hopeful had to say on the matter in an interview on Thursday:

…Angle's new ads say she's out to save Social Security by protecting it from government raids.

But in the primary, she said that Medicare and Social Security needed to be phased out in favor of something privatized, saying, that it can't be fixed. 8 News NOW asked how is that not a flip flop.

Angle's response demonstrates either her ignorance of current account balance versus long-term trust account balance, or her willingness to mislead and be dishonest:

"It is when we have a $2.5 trillion raid and pillaging going on and an empty trust fund and now we are upside down. As of last Friday, they said, (there was a) $41 billion shortfall in Social Security. $41 billion less going in than coming out. It's broken," she said.

This year social security is paying out more than it is taking in as a result of the Bush Great Recession and the resulting unemployment. As I explained in The "mythology of fear" about social security:

What this means for the program is that the benefits Social Security is expected to pay out this year will slightly exceed the money coming in from payroll taxes. There are other sources of income for the program, however, including the interest income on the $2.5 trillion trust fund. Thus, the Trustees report the program should remain in surplus until 2024. That means the the trust fund can remain untouched until 2025, and–all things being equal to the situation in 2010 [an illogical assumption]–the fund would become exhausted in 2037. However:

[A]t a press conference Thursday, Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue, one of the government trustees releasing the report, begged reporters not to scare the public by exaggerating the significance of trust fund exhaustion.

"That does not mean that there will be no money left," Astrue said. At that point, even if Congress took no action, Social Security could still pay out 78 percent of expected benefits from annual revenues. "That would be a bad result, but it is a far cry from having no benefits at all," he said.

Social Security Trustees report that social security will be able to make full payments until 2037(pdf).

The trust fund has a $2.5 trillion surplus, it is not "empty" or "upside down," nor is it "broken" as Angle claims. The only raid and pillaging on social security is Rep. Paul Ryan's "GOP Roadmap to America's Future (Ruin)" to privatize social security and to allow the banksters of Wall Street to steal the last remaining dime from America's middle class for the "two percenters."

Angle then referred to 1980s Chile — then under a military dictatorship — to explain her previous statements that the United States should phase out its current system.

"When I said privatize, that's what I meant," explained the Senate contender. "That I thought we would just have to go to the private sector for a template on how this is supposed to be done. However, I've since been studying and Chile has done this."

However, the pension system established in 1981 by right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is no longer a fully private system. Chile's system was revamped in 2008 to expand public pensions for groups left out of its system, including low-income seniors.

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"Before her D.C. handlers put a muzzle on her, Sharron Angle spent her entire political career loudly and proudly denouncing Social Security and promising to dismantle the program entirely," said Reid spokesman Kelly Steele, the Las Vegas Sun reports. "At this point, she must believe that Nevada voters…are ignorant or they have amnesia."

Jesse Kelly's handlers also must believe that Arizona voters are ignorant or they have amnesia.