Good for them. Everyone should be talking about entitlement reform. It has to be done. Spending has to be cut too. It the GOP is serious about remaining a viable national party, it has to take these issues on.
**Good for them. Everyone should be talking about entitlement reform. It has to be done. Spending has to be cut too. It the GOP is serious about remaining a viable national party, it has to take these issues on.**
If I paid into a program with the promise of getting money back, hos is it an entitlement?
Why not reform welfare and cut spending elsewhere?
Yeah, anything except replacing entitlements with jobs, I guess? If deregulation and tax reform to allow businesses to create more jobs does not come with whatever “reforms” they think to institute, we’ll stay stuck at 30 percent unemployment—and have a bigger bureaucracy to suck up more cash while it conducts the means testing.
I completely agree. I'm among those planning to at least semi-retire in the next 15-20 years, but we can't continue to kick the can down the road. A gradual fix might be much more tolerable than a sudden one.
As this topic could likely be political suicide, any discussion has to be prefaced by a disclaimer that no currently-retired people will be affected. Democrats and the MSM would love for any Republican hopefuls to come out and say they agree in principal to entitlement reform. They want to paint the GOP as the party "stealing" Social Security from the elderly.
I’m not a wealthy person, no where near it. But you know what? It’s just wrong not to pay people their Social Security INSURANCE after years of being forced to pay premiums.
Indeed, but in true RINO fashion they have come up with one of the worst ideas for entitlement reform conceivable -- means-testing Social Security. These are men without honor. Even though the notion that money was being put away for retirees was never true, there was an implicit understanding that if one paid one's taxes to support the program, one would get a specified pension at normal retirement age. Means-testing is a breach of faith. The way to fix Social Security (and Medicaid) is to push the normal retirement age for both programs up to just past normal life-expectancy at birth. (When 65 was chosen as "normal retirement age", life-expectancy at birth was 64 years.) Again, to keep faith with those who have been paying the taxes to support both programs this needs to be done gradually.
I would propose for current 18 year-olds, the age to qualify by benefits under both programs be 79 (about a quarter year older than the current life-expectancy at birth), for current 62 year-olds (or older) they be left where they are, and for everyone in between, interpolate linearly and round-off to the nearest month. For new crops of folks entering the job market, the age to qualify should adjust upward as life-expectancy increases.