"He used $1 billion of his Wall Street Fortune to create the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, whose sole purpose is to educate Americans about the dangers of the debt."He's a former advisor to Nixon; ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers; co-founder of the Blackstone private equity group; ex-president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Described as having "an odd, even aloof, ignorance" of the Tea Party, their objectives seem to mesh pretty well.
His first book was published in 1982 -- Social Security: The Coming Crash. He wants to gradually increase the retirement age, institute a means test, and raise the cap on the payroll tax. (I haven't researched this, but as far as I understand, everyone pays a tax on their first $106,000 of income which funds Social Security. I also understand that having built up enormous surpluses over the years -- which are now diminishing as the ratio of retirees to working, contributing people increases -- SS is approaching a point where it will soon start to operate at a deficit: More will be paid out each year than comes in. Finally, I understand that the SS surplus can fully fund retirees for the next 30 years, and that if the $106,000 cap were raised to $180,000, SS would be self-sustaining as far into the future as the eye can see.)
“He’s not focused on the debt so much as on cutting Social Security and Medicare,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Even in the late ’90s, when we had a surplus, he was saying the same thing and the debt wasn’t in any obvious way a problem then.”
Digby, at Hullabaloo, says Peterson "once called Social Security a 'taxpayer funded vacation.'"
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