We don’t LIKE SS and medicare -— WE JUST WANT THE MONEY WE PAID INTO IT ALL OF OUR WORKING LIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you.
A lot of junkies don’t like their dealers!
Those aren’t entitlements...I’ve paid into them since 1965...It’s MY money...
SS and Medicare aren’t entitlements they are a contract that was forced on us if we wanted employment, however we are so far into it that it would be impossible to shut it off now.
Bottom line: People are idiots.
Because I've paid tens and tens (and tens) of thousands of dollars to fund them.
I think they mean people who have had monies forcibly taken for decades expect to get something back out of it. If you look at who doesn’t like SS and medicare it is the under 40 professional who knows he will never see a dime of it back.
Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.
If you want to understand where we are, think about the fact that every single Republican running for president supports the centerpiece programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
Which were never constitutional in the first place.
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
— James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution
To all of those on the thread who are screaming that they paid in and they deserve to get theirs:
You were lied to. Your money was stolen and spent. It’s gone. Face it.
Now, in order to “get yours,” this generation has to be lied to and stolen from.
And by debt-based spending to help support it as well, your posterity is also being stripped of its God-given, unalienable right to government by consent.
Social Security is not an entitlement for God’s sake. We pay into it and deserve at least the money we put into it. So sick of that crap.
That’s always the problem. Nobody likes big government, but everybody has a couple of programs they like, and all programs are liked by somebody. Which is why government never shrinks.
I’m more interested in reducing the size of the bureaucracy such as IRS, EPA, TSA,DHS,BLM,BATFE, HUD,Education, Energy, HHS (Obamacare). Then talk to me about reforming SS and Medicare.
The way to stop both SS and Medicare is to poison their roots.
That is, the scam is to essentially double the income tax, while immediately spending the money on other things. They figure that as long as they pay the month to month obligations incurred, by the small number of people drawing benefits, the programs are solvent, despite wracking up gigantic deficits.
So, the way to end it is to assure those receiving benefits that they will continue to get their month to month payments, but to stop enrolling new people into the system.
It might even be accelerated by offering those who have only been in the system for a short time a way out, while recovering the FICA taxes they have paid, to go into an IRA and an Individual Health Account.
The biggest immediate benefit is to slash federal tax revenues by about a third, starving the beast. So it needs to be accompanied with a massive reduction in the size and power of the federal government.
No, we don’t like SS and Medicare, and if we were given the chance we would opt to be reimbursed everything we’ve paid into the programs, and be done with it.
SS and medicare are NOT government programs, they are social contracts between americans and their government. Americans want these contracts to be honored!
Three Golden Rules straight from my Parents.
1. Life isn’t fair.
2. Nobody owes you a Living.
3. You help People who CAN’T help themselves, not People who WON’T help themselves. They weren’t referring to the Government, they were referring to Charity.
As long as the Ruling Class forces People to pay in to the System, they are obligated to meet the Program’s promises.
Until those Funds are set aside rather than being mixed in the General Fund, it will never get any Better.
The only (temporary) solution is gradually raising the Full Retirement Age to 70 for both SS and Medicare over a specified period of time.
The simple fact is that Life Expectancy “at the time” was used to estimate the Program’s costs, not that Ponzi Schemes have viable Financial Models in the first place.
I think I read here on FR that the Politicos of the time said Medicare would NEVER cost more than $30,000,000,000 a Year adjusted for Inflation. Well, that worked like a charm.
Yep, there are plenty of hypocrite “conservatives” who whine about the size of government and deficits, right up until someone takes aim at their goodies, then their fangs come out. See it all the time even around here.