Posted on 12/03/2012 1:20:24 PM PST by ExxonPatrolUs
In the current downturn, the vast majority of the elderly are suffering along with the young. The right cure would help both generations...
Since the early 1980s, financier Peter G. Peterson has been predicting that Social Security’s excessive generosity would crash the retirement system and the economy. The late British journalist Henry Fairlie, in 1988, famously wrote a piece in The New Republic with the cover line “Greedy Geezers,” faulting the elderly for living too well at the expense of the young...
The government’s general budget went into the black in 1999, and economists were projecting that the national debt would soon be paid off...
However, the Bush tax cuts, the costs of two wars, an inefficient privatized Medicare drug plan, and the financial collapse of 2008 drove the budget back into deep deficit and gave new life to the Social Security Cassandras. Unemployment soared, payroll taxes plummeted, and a deep economic slump followed...
Apart from the cause and cure of Social Security’s projected deficit, there was always one fallacy at the core of the greedy-geezers fable: The vast majority of the elderly are far from wealthy. The median income of elderly Americans in 2010 was just $25,704 for males and $15,072 for females. Almost two-thirds of the elderly depend on Social Security for at least 70 percent of their entire income. The income of the very wealthy elderly is outsize, but that’s hardly a reason for cutting Social Security for everyone else. Peterson contends that “a substantial part of these [Social Security] retirement payments go to people like me”—affluent folks who can do without the money...
Gov’t encourage people to spend and rely of the gov’t for a generous retirement. Now its broken beyond repair.
“The New Republic with the cover line “Greedy Geezers,” faulting the elderly for living too well at the expense of the young... “
Why is there never one headline that reads, “Worthless Welfare Cancers that refuse to work are costing more money than Social Security, or Medicare, or Defense, and almost as much as any two of them combined.”
Funny, this doesn’t seem to get reported anywhere. Can’t understand why?
Welfare spending has hit a stunning, all-time high. A new Congressional Research Service report confirms what research here at The Heritage Foundation has shown: The government’s means-tested welfare programs now cost taxpayers roughly $1 trillion a year. (This figure does not include either Social Security or Medicare.)
Unlike general government programs, mean-tested welfare programs provide assistance exclusively to poor and low-income individuals. The federal government runs over 80 means-tested programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care and social services to around 100 million Americans. That’s a third of the U.S. population. Combined federal and state expenditures on these programs come to roughly $9,000 per recipient per year.
The size and cost of these programs largely are hidden from public view because government decision makers and the mainstream media invariably discuss welfare one program at a time. By analyzing each of the 80-plus programs in isolation, they conceal the overall size of the welfare state. The Congressional Research Service report is a rare departure from this piecemeal approach.
Discussing the welfare state one program at a time is misleading because most recipients will receive aid from several programs at once. Converted into cash, total welfare spending would equal five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.
Although liberals constantly lament the level of defense spending, annual means-tested welfare spending has exceeded defense spending for nearly two decades. In the next decade, the U.S. will spend well over $2 on welfare for every $1 it spends on national defense.
Yet somehow $1 trillion a year in means-tested welfare spending isn’t enough for President Obama, on whose watch this spending already has increased by more than a third. This isn’t a temporary increase because of the recession. According to Obama’s budget plans it would continue to grow in the next decade, reaching $1.56 trillion by 2022.
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2012/10/welfare-is-at-an-all-time-high
“predicting that Social Security’s excessive generosity”
Thats a good one. If any other pension manager took 15% of your pay for 40-46 years, and could just barely manage to give you an annuity of 1000 bucks a year or less, and he kept it all if you died before you started to collect or shortly thereafter, he would be prosecuted for embezzelment.
The true scandal of “generosity” of SS is the staggering number of people who draw it who never paid in, or who paid 2 or 3 years. Disablity is a scam beyond belief. 4 or 5 decades ago, SS disability was fairly unusual.
Today if you start listening and asking around, to relatives, business owners, doctors, etc, you will be amazed at the total explosion of people on disability.
Time was you were blinded at work, or lost both legs in a railyard accident, etc to get disability.
Today half the morbidly obese 28 year old women you see are on SS disability for “back pain”.
That's true, and I believe they are already trying that at every opportunity.
i.e: a recent Thread on how Cuomo and Bloomburg gave the STAND DOWN order to NOT Evacuate the nursing homes in the Hurricane path....wonder what the motive would be? Or the results if they were all drowned like those in Katrina.
Did you see that thread? These two threads need to be linked together.
and disenfranchise their voters...../s
And after they euthanize you and your dead, they’ll make sure you vote democrat for another 40 years.
that’s “and you’re dead”. :)
Then I’m not dying.
Damn, I had $250,000 in my 401k and borrowed it all. I used the money to buy things that made me feel good about myself - my wife made me do it, it wasn’t my idea.
Now the account is empty. I told my young co-workers sitting next to me that they need to pay it all back for me, since I’m about to retire. They looked at me as if I’m some kind of a nutcase. I told them it’s MY RETIREMENT MONEY in that account and I demand it back, now that I’m retired. They still look at me like I’m crazy. I told them my statements still say that I have $250k in that account (although my other statements say that I’ve borrowed all of it...I just ignore those). They said that I spent it all, and I told them NO - it was spent by others, representing me.
Now I don’t want to engage in generational warfare against those younger workers, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand why they think they don’t owe ME MY MONEY BACK.
(that is Social Security in a nutshell...although I didn’t bother folding in the national debt, which makes it twice as bad as above)
bump
Thanks to Bernanke the elderly who did save are being decimated. At the beginning of the Bush II regime, a saver could build a ladder of federally insured CD’s paying 6%. On $500,000 in lifetime savings through 401K’s, IRA’s, and non tax deferred savings the retiree would earn about $30,000 per year. Add $20,000 in Social Security and possibly a small pension, and the retiree has a decent middle class income.
Thanks to the Benanke, Bush, Obama policies of driving down interest rates artificially in order to reduce government interest payments on the debt and prop up the housing market, the safe CD ladder today pays out 1% or less. This equates to $5000 annual interest which added to $20,000 in Social Security income does not deliver a middle class retirement. To earn $30,000 per year in interest income the retiree would need $3,000,000 in accumulated savings which is beyond the ability of most middle class workers to accumulate.
Continue to suppress returns on savings a few more years and you will never generate support for privatizing social security. At interest rates of 1% it just isn’t possible to accumulate a nest egg large enough. Plus most citizens do not have the knowledge to invest in a stock market casino manipulated by big Wall Street banks churning billions of transactions per second trough computerized trading in order to skim fees from the savings of average Amaericans invested in mutual funds.
While privatizing retirement savings is a good theoretical free market concept, it doesn’t work for most people in the rigged financial markets of today’s US economy. Without a reasonable ability to accumulate some wealth, people will demand Social Security and higher benefits.
A young person today, lucky enough to have a $30,000 per year job, and disciplined enough to save 10% a year of pre tax income would be insane to take the risk of putting the money in today’s rigged and manipulated stock market. Someone at that income level cannot afford to have 50% of her savings wiped out every 6 or 7 years in market crashes. At 1% on a CD that saver will earn only $30 per year on the safe fixed income savings savings.
Tell me how the average young person will ever accumulate savings for retirement while raising and educating children and paying ever increasing taxes. The private sector today does not provide that opportunity at a reasonable risk because the financial markets are rigged by government and Wall Street. No wonder the working young people are voted Democratic. The conservative option of self reliance just doesn’t show a reasonable chance of success when you look through the eyes of the average 25 year old. I look at my mid 20’s child, working two jobs, and just don’t see her being able to accumulate enough savings for a decent retirement even though she is saving over 10% of gross income.
Very well put. I look forward to a breakthrough in fusion technology from the NIF Laser project at Berkeley. I am also hopeful that the American corporation’s global power can keep us on top on bring cash back home. The US sectors of education and healthcare are likely to profit on foreign consumers in the years to come. And lastly, who else but America can police the world with boots on the ground. The world owes us big time, and if they want us to continue to help, they’d better continue investing in US and paying back what they owe us. Amen.
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