In response to Pat Toomey’s waffling on Social Security, dozens of seniors, labor leaders, and community residents brought together by Penn ACTION, Democracy for American and UFCW Local 1776 gathered at the Municipal Services Building across from City Hall to tell Toomey to come clean about his position on Social Security.
“When Pat Toomey attacks Social Security he is attacking all of us, every participant, which is every American that participates in that system,” said Arshad Hasan of Democracy for America. “Worse than that he’s attacking me and my generation – people who are working, and he’s saying, ‘you work for it, you pay into it, but you don’t get it. I don’t want to leave a system for you.’ And I think that is fundamentally unfair.”
Seniors held up bars of soap and shouted, “Come clean Toomey!” Toomey came under criticism last month when he responded to a question at a news conference saying, “I’ve never said I favored privatizing Social Security,” and then said his reforms would include the creation of “personal accounts,” which critics say is the same as privatization. Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman consequently called Toomey’s explanation Orwellian doublespeak.
“Toomey has a far-right extremist position on Social Security,” said Marc Stier, Executive Director of Penn ACTION, the group that organized the event. “He wants to implement Bush’s old plan to gamble Social Security away on Wall Street. He is not being transparent about this goal to fundamentally restructure a program which currently benefits millions in Pennsylvania.”
Nearly one in five Pennsylvania residents receives Social Security benefits, lifting 950,000 people out of poverty in the state. Two-thirds of all beneficiaries, about 13% of PA’s population, are retired workers, according to the report, Social Security Works for Pennsylvania, compiled by Social Security Works and Strengthen Social Security.
Social Security helps people of all ages. “When my father died in 1976 I was twelve years old. My brother, sister, and mother benefited from the survivor’s benefits that Social Security pays…” said Richard Pasquier, a lawyer for a Fortune 500 corporation. “When I was twelve I had benefits that took me all the way through college. One of the amazing things about this program is its great universality.”
“Social Security did not contribute a dime to the deficit. It currently has a huge surplus,” said John Meyerson, political director of the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1776 who also spoke at the rally. “Social Security is a promise that the government has made to working Americans and it must be kept. We can’t let Pat Toomey break that promise.”