There are other ways of handling this and Santorum’s prissy, spiteful blaming of Granny is not going to fly. People have paid into this, and saying it’s now going to default and it’s really Granny’s fault anyway for doing what she was told (and forced) to do by the government for all her working life is sure not going to be a big seller with a major voting bloc.
Plus, it’s just plain wrong. There’s no point in arguing about whether SS should or shouldn’t have been founded in the first place, but it does exist, many people were told they could rely on it, and you can’t just dump them and walk away. Gingrich actually has ideas for reworking SS and permitting a gradual transition to other systems for younger people. Santorum sounds like he’s in the Granny-is-a-useless-eater brigade.
Well, here’s the problem.
It’s wrong to force people to pay into a ponzi scheme then, it’s wrong to continue to force people to pay into a ponzi scheme now.
The money that granny put into the fund, has been spent already. The money that granny is currently spending comes from you and I who are forced to pay to keep the ponzi scheme going.
The problem is that there aren’t enough of us - young folks - to keep the system going, unless you tax us over 100 percent of our income, which isn’t going to happen.
Since the program is massively in the red, the government has to borrow (as it has), to keep things going. This borrowing has to be eventually paid back - not by granny, but by her children and grandchildren.
That train can only go on so long. Only once has the US been in this kind of shape, and that was the year after the second world war. The immediate budget was a 40 percent cut in government spending.
I can show you Truman’s 46 budget - you’ll be shocked. 40 percent cuts across the board, to get the US into fiscal sanity. That worked, the deep cuts sparked a short and sharp recession, followed by the massive growth of the 50’s and early 60s.
It has to be done, and the longer we wait, the worse trouble we end in later. The ponzi scheme has to stop.