Social Security and Medicare are defined contribution programs - not entitlement programs.
Entitlement programs are paid for out of general tax revenues and are means-tested.
Social Security/Medicare on the hand are paid into by their beneficiaries. They get back what they paid into them during their working lives when they retire.
The people on them are not moochers and don’t deserve to have their benefits cut or their eligibility age for them increased. Society made a pact with them to put their money aside for their later years.
To say its generational theft isn’t accurate and misses the point. A decent society takes care of its aged and sick and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Its who we are as a country.
That is false.
FDR made a pact to transfer wealth. He may have had good intentions - and that's a separate argument. Nevertheless, the "pact" that would have and could still work would be a "pact" to keep saving your OWN money until retirement. Not saving for someone else.
freakin' duh
just sayin'
A decent government does not take money out of Soc Security lock box and spend it on other entitlements and wars when it is needed to head off demographic changes and logevity and then cover up the crime by having their allies in the media lecture taxpayers that they must make up the difference or they are not taking care of the old and aged. IMHO those politicians should be found guilty of fraud and financial sabotage of the US economy, lined up against the wall and shot. Any reporter or US citizen that abeit in the cover up should be shipped off to Alaska to build roads to nowhere till they are dead.
“Social Security and Medicare are defined contribution programs - not entitlement programs.”
Then we should have no problem making participation voluntary.
“A decent society takes care of its aged and sick”
The same society that has aborted 1/3rd of my generation?
Social Security is not an insurance program at all. It is simply a payroll tax on one side and a welfare program on the other. Your Social Security benefits are always subject to the whim of 535 politicians in Washington. Congress has cut Social Security benefits in the past and is likely to do so in the future.
Most people get more out of Medicare than they put in. Costs have risen more than anticipated, and the benefit is distributed evenly to so many people, regardless of how much a person has paid into it over their lifetime (it doesn’t belong to the individual). There isn’t enough money so it is paid for in part by current workers.
A decent (Great?) society does take care of it’s old and sick. The government is a failure in that capacity for the same reason it fails in so many areas. There is a nearly infinite amount of need, and finite resources to meet those needs. I guess decency and bankruptcy are one in the same. The expenditures will grow until the whole thing comes crashing down. Then we can all congratulate ourselves on how decent it all was.