Goose the Economy: Expand Social Security

Social Security payments - like food stamps and unemployment compensation and non-corporate welfare and EITC and every other government program that provides money to the working class - makes the economy grow.

That's because when the working class gets money, they spend it. That helps businesses, who then expand and hire more people, who spend the money they earn and ad infinitum in an endless virtuous loop of prosperity.

The economy is not growing the way it should because we are giving money to corporations and billionaires, who are not spending it the way the rest of us do.  They are stashing it away in overseas bank accounts while ten million Americans remain unemployed and underemployed.

What's the solution? Increase payments to the working class.  Start by expanding Social Security.

Digby:

Social Security works is out with this:

Happy Birthday, Social Security – Now Let’s Finally Give You A Raise

This Wednesday, August 14th, Social Security will celebrate 78 years of never missing a single payment and helping millions of Americans live with dignity and honor. This birthday, we have a unique opportunity to give Social Security a real raise for it’s birthday, expanding benefits and paying for it by ensuring billionaires pay the same rate as the rest of us.

That’s why we’re working with Social Security Works to help you tell your Member of Congress that you stand for expanding Social Security benefits at a time of great need, and scrapping the cap on Social Security funding.

In other words, sign our birthday card alongside thousands of others:

I can't tell you how happy I am that institutional and grassroots progressives have finally come around to the idea that we need to raise benefits on Social Security. It's going to take a while to get the usual suspects to stop thinking of this as taboo because "entitlements" are the boogeyman that's going to kill us in our beds. But it can be done if everyone sticks to the message and they don't run off to chase the next shiny object the first chance they get.

This is a really good and necessary idea and we need to just keep hammering it until it happens.