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  • 2011-03-07 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Alan Simpson or Dick Durbin Call Americans 'The Greediest Generation'? (en)
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  • Alan Simpson spent half a century in government service, including three terms as a senator representing Wyoming in the U.S. Congress. In 2010, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles were appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, tasked with coming up with a plan to bring down the federal budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product by 2015, compared with nearly 10% today, and to propose ways to hold down the surging costs of government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The commission's proposal for eliminating the nation's $13.8 trillion debt, which included components such as increasing taxes and gradually raising the retirement age for Social Security to 69 years, prompted an unprecedented amount of flak from opponents, to which Simpson responded by referring to modern Americans as the greediest generation (although he tempered his remarks by saying he felt America had more patriots than selfish people): Simpson's remark became the basis for a caustic anonymous rebuke that was widely circulated on the internet: Since the letter reproduced above isn't credited to any particular person (other than an unknown fellow in Montana), and a number of different people have claimed authorship, there is no particular attribution for us to verify as correct or incorrect. Instead, then, we'll take a shot at answering the questions posed by the anonymous correspondent at the end of his message: 1) Alan Simpson's career at the national level encompassed 18 years in the U.S. Senate from 1979-96, during which time (according to a Congressional Research Service report on Salaries of Members of Congress), his salary would have averaged about $92,000, for an aggregate total of $1.66 million. 2) Alan Simpson left Congress at the age of 65. It's not possible to precisely calculate his annual retirement benefits without knowing which retirement plan he selected (among other factors), but if we assume he was covered under the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), we could estimate that his annual annuity would be about $43,000. 3) How much Alan Simpson might pay for government provided health insurance is not possible to calculate. Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program is not a single program, but rather a collection of many different programs from which participants select their preference. 4) The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's proposal included no provisions for excluding the retirement and health care benefits of politicians from deficit reduction efforts. An interview with Alan Simpson on the subject of Social Security can be found here. In 2018 this item began circulating again, this time substituting Senator Dick Durbin's (D-IL) name for Simpson's. (en)
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