Posted on 04/13/2023 7:59:48 AM PDT by SteveH
the federal social security system is a lie. you can find out about how it is bankrupt by 2030 any day of the week by just picking up a newspaper and reading the headlines.
paying a vendor who has lied about his or her or its product is called STEALING. It is prohibited by social convention (such as the 8th commandment, the koran, verse 5:38, and furtum in Roman common law) and so broadly understood to be morally wrong.
so why should people be required to stand by and allow their social security to be stolen from them in the forseeable future??
how about if everyone can get an estimate of the (stochastic, to borrow a term) value of their social security now, apply for it, and obtain it in a reasonably short amount of time (eg 4 weeks)??
if we know that a train will become a wreck in a time certain, then it is criminal and morally wrong to force us to stay on the train until it is wrecked and all hope of retrieving the value of the amounts held in trust is dissipated.
can the US government be held accountable in courts of law for this THEFT???
could this become the basis of a class action lawsuit???
> Thing is: we’re talking about old people - like yours truly. We croak. The system counts on that. That’s why it stops when breathing does, and can’t be passed on to heirs.
One wonders if the system also counted on retirees as having nothing left to lose
(when in the course of human events and all)
> The other 50% content themselves with pickleball.
I take that personaly lol
aha, ok, that’s a thoughtful response, thanks very much!
They will pay you every dime of your social security. They will just print what they need.
The lesson from Weimar is that the purchasing power of your pension cheque will be less than the stamp on the envelope it came in.
Time to get out of fiat.
bkmk
Not an accurate way to look at things.
At the level of the federal governments, dollar-denominated assets, liabilities, payments and receipts aren’t really what you think.
They are simply adjustments and projected adjustments to the money supply: taxes and other inflows are the destruction of dollars, and spending and other outflows are the creation of dollars. Reducing the money supply increases the buying power of the remaining dollars (i.e., constrains inflation and interest rates) and increasing the money supply does the opposite (i.e., unleashes inflation and interest rates).
The ONLY reason the federal government can’t have infinite “spending” is because of the hyperinflation and catastrophic high interest rates that would cause.
Taxes and tax policies (including progressive things like tax rates and regressive things like the FICA cap) are, along with the direct monetary policy the Fed controls, policy ways of distributing the pain of limiting the growth of money supply caused by spending.
So ... the federal government cannot go bankrupt, it can simply be in a position where it is causing unpopular levels of inflation.
You make a good point about the FICA cap.
I remember when my first job was doing the payroll for a small manufacturing company back in the sixties. That’s when I realized that the Social Security tax I was deducting from the paychecks was the worst kind of regressive tax. The more you made after the cap on gross pay kicked in the less was the TAX PERCENTAGE RATE on your income you were paying. I felt then and I feel now that the SS tax should apply equally on every dollar a person makes. Otherwise the poor sap at the bottom is paying a higher percentage of his pay than the big guys. I think that will ultimately be addressed.
Currently 15.3% of our paycheck is going towards Social Security/Medicaid through the FICA tax (remember that employees only pay half that amount as their employers pay the other half).
So bring that down for everybody to a more reasonable percentage.
Bear in mind, though, that there is also a cap on the benefit amount when drawing. If the high earners pay SS on every dollar earned, it would be logically fair that their earned benefit would increase accordingly.
So, we’d be insolvent then, too.
Students are allowed to “skate” on their loans because they will still be voters after the morally justified retirees are dead. (Of course, the dead retirees will then all vote Democrat, probably even more reliably than the students.)
Fair point on both counts. Certainly the tax rate should be lowered for all if you expand the base after to fully fund the program going forward. Of course we know that the politicians will try to get around that.
The point about a cap on benefits is exactly right. The high earners get scalped. No way around that if, as you say, we want to avoid insolvency.
As always it comes down to whose ox is being gored.
Laughing at anyone’s supposed misfortune is not gracious at all. Hope someday it hits you in your dumb ass.
I call the US dollar the equivalent of Bitcoin backed by government guns.
Btw after all the posts nobody seems to have mentioned “the trust fund”:
This is just a long con—in a con there is no such thing as “solvent” or “insolvent”.
“Laughing at anyone’s supposed misfortune is not gracious at all.”
Anyone’s? It’s everyone’s misfortune, myself included. And there is nothing I can do but laugh, so what do you expect me to do? Cry about it, or get angry? Neither of those would be “gracious” either.
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