Free Republic

snip Economist Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, says she offered assurances at union board meetings and congressional hearings that employees would have enough to retire if they set aside just 3% of their paychecks in a 401(k). That assumed investments would rise by 7% a year. snip Ms. Ghilarducci wants to ditch the 401(k) altogether. She and Blackstone Group President Tony James are recommending a mandated, government-run savings system that would be administered by the Social Security Administration and managed by investment professionals. While both are Democrats, they believe their solution has bipartisan appeal....

Social Security benefits will be cut at the start of 2017 for everyone who has yet to turn 62. Those cuts will grow in each year to 2022, reaching 7% for everyone now 56 and under, as the official retirement age rises two months per year to 67. Those benefit cuts are part of the daunting math for Social Security and the federal budget that could cause speed bumps for, or perhaps even curb, President-elect Donald Trump's big fiscal plans. 1) Once the retirement age rises to 67, Social Security's early retirement penalty will cut annual benefits by 30%... 2)...

It has been well reported that the Social Security Administration (“SSA”) had been passing along information of individuals that it deemed unable to handle their financial affairs to NICS for the purposes of preventing them from purchasing a firearm due to being “adjudicated as a mental defective.” In May of this year, the SSA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. It received over 91,000 comments relating to the proposed rule. Of those, 86,860 were identical letters submitted by various individuals of a single advocacy group, opposing the proposed rule. On December 19, 2016, the SSA published a Final Rule on...

In what the NRA is calling "Obama's attempt to implement the largest gun grab in American history," senior citizen veterans on Social Security very well may have their Constitutional right to own guns stripped from them. Approximately 177,000 military veterans have been snared by this gun grab already as the VA has implemented a program which prohibits vets owning a firearm if they collect Social Security and have a "representative payee assigned to their accounts to help them manage their payments and receipts." By this method, the Obama federal bureaucracy will effectively implement just what the US Supreme Court decision...

On Monday the Obama administration finalized a Social Security gun ban that could prevent “tens of thousands” of law-abiding elderly citizens from purchasing guns for self-defense. Breitbart News reported this ban on July 18, 2015, when it was learned that the Obama administration was creating a ban on gun purchases that would apply to Social Security recipients who needed help managing their finances. The Los Angeles Times reported that the ban would be sweeping; that it would cover those who are unable to manage their own affairs for a multitude of reasons–from “subnormal intelligence or mental illness” to “incompetency,” an...

am Johnson, a Republican from Texas and chair of the Ways and Means Committee, introduced legislation to significantly cut Social Security. The bill introduced by Johnson, who is also the chair of the Social Security subcommittee, slashes benefits, adds means testing, and would raise the retirement age from 67 to 69. ...Michael Linden, associate director...at Center for American Progress, pointed out on Twitter, a letter from Social Security’s Office of the Actuary calculated workers making around $50,000 would see checks shrink by between 11% and 35%.

The following is an email from Mark Nugent of Sacramento california who at the age of 16 was forced into the mental health system against his will, branded mentally ill, stripped of his trust fund by his liberal parents and forced on SSI. The SSI program was originally intended for those liberals branded too old or too stupid to work. It pays very little, about $695 a month and to receive it one must not hold assets or property worth more than $2000.  People with disabilities who receive SSI [Supplemental Security Income] payments continue to be the nation’s poorest citizens....

One Kansas City Royals fan feels like she is being punished for the good deed of others. Joyce Jeter has a debilitating medical condition, causing her to rely on Social Security as her only source of income. Royals fans rallied around her to raise money to send her to a game at Kauffman Stadium, but now that gift is leaving her financial future in jeopardy. Joyce told Fox4KC she feels like she's being robbed all because she accepted a gift.

During the presidential campaign, Republican Donald Trump said he would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, but no matter. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the next Senate minority leader, on Tuesday warned that Republicans are “plotting a war on seniors.” The New York Democrat said he was “so disappointed” that Trump has nominated Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) to be his Health and Human Services secretary. “When it comes to issues like Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, Congressman Price and the average American couldn’t be further apart,” Schumer told a news conference on Capitol Hill. …

“We’re not going to hurt the people who have been paying into Social Security their whole life,” Trump declared, calling the payment of promised benefits “honoring a deal.” But the man heading the Trump transition team’s Social Security effort? Michael Korbey, a former lobbyist who has spent much of his career advocating for cutting and privatizing the program, according to Yahoo News. “It’s a failed system, broken and bankrupt,” Korbey said as a lobbyist in the mid 1990s. Korbey acknowledged that some of the reforms his group backed would hurt retirees, but “our constituents aren’t just senior citizens,” he told...

Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a "nasty woman" during the last presidential debate. The two presidential candidates were discussing their plans for when programs like social security and Medicare run out, with Clinton emphasizing, "We need to put more more money into the social security trust fund." "That's part of my commitment to raise taxes on the wealthy," Clinton said. "My social security payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald's, assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it." "Such a nasty woman," Trump uttered, interrupting Clinton as she repeated that it's necessary to "replenish the social...

The typical retiree's monthly Social Security check will get only $3.92 bigger next year. That amounts to an increase of just 0.3% -- the smallest ever put in place to help cover higher prices. That's still an improvement from this year, when the lack of inflation kept benefits from increasing at all. The average retiree's monthly benefit is currently $1,305.30. "Over the last five years, Social Security COLA's have remained small or nonexistent," said AARP. "Every cent can matter to beneficiaries and their families. After last year's zero COLA, this year's announcement doesn't offer much help to the millions of...

The number of illegals seeking asylum to gain easy access to the United States has jumped 900 percent in less than 10 years, greatly expanding the Immigration population receiving Social Security, school loans, green cards, welfare and other taxpayer funded services, according to figures from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. While about 8,000 mostly Latin Americans in 2009 sought asylum, the number is expected to reach 80,000 or more this year, according to a projection from the Center for Immigration Studies.

Few if any candidates for federal office will tell you that as a consequence of current federal law, young Americans are being screwed in two life-changing ways. First, under current law, every Social Security beneficiary under the age of 48 will have their promised benefits cut by a third. And second, every young person who works is contributing between $10,000 and $20,000 to the health care and retirement of those lucky Americans who are already drawing benefits under federal law. In some ways the second screwing is worse than the first. Young workers do not have the defined benefit retirement...

Although we are still a month away from an official announcement about the size of the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits in 2017, the latest Social Security Trustees report projects a 0.2% increase in benefits next year. That would boost the average Social Security retirement benefit of $1,341 per month by about $2.70 and increase the maximum benefit of $2,663 per month in 2016 by about $5.30 next year. While that would be an improvement over this year when there was no inflation adjustment over 2015 benefit levels, a small COLA will do little to shield seniors'...

The IRS has discovered more than 1 million Americans whose Social Security numbers were stolen by illegal immigrants, but officials never bothered to tell the taxpayers themselves, the agency’s inspector general said in a withering new report released Tuesday. Investigators first alerted the IRS to the problem five years ago, but it’s still not fixed, the inspector general said, and a pilot program meant to test a solution was canceled — and fell woefully short anyway. As a result, most taxpayers don’t learn that their identities have been stolen and their Social Security files may be screwed up. “Taxpayers identified...

If you’ve spent any time in downtown D.C., you’ve likely seen 80-year-old Wanda Witter. Shock white hair, a determined, unsmiling set to her mouth, jeans. She may have asked you for some change and probably didn’t smile if you gave her some. This month you may have also been taken aback by the black eye and stitches across her face. For years, Witter bedded down for the night at 13th and G streets in Northwest Washington, on the cement in her blue sleeping bag, pulled up tight to keep the rats and cockroaches out. Her tower of three suitcases was...

The Social Security Administration is relaxing a recent security directive requiring beneficiaries to use two-factor authentication to log into personal accounts after complaints that the new restrictions hindered user access. ...SSA has not come up with a new two-factor verification method. The agency is strongly recommending that users take advantage of the text-message security option, but beneficiaries are able once again to use a simple username and password to access their accounts....

The U.S. Social Security Administration announced last week that it will now require a cell phone number from all Americans who wish to manage their retirement benefits at ssa.gov. Unfortunately, the new security measure does little to prevent identity thieves from fraudulently creating online accounts to siphon benefits from Americans who haven’t yet created accounts for themselves. ... “People will not be able to access their personal my Social Security account if they do not have a cell phone or do not wish to provide the cell phone number,” the agency said. ... Also, as one reader already pointed out...

The American debt problem was almost entirely ignored at the Republican National Convention last week, and we can expect nothing more when the Democrats gather this week. Both parties support the entitlement spending system and the decrepit tax system that fails to support it. They compete on the fiscal side of politics with impossible promises to spend more and tax less. Imagine the U.S. Treasury as an airplane beginning to roll down the runway to take off. For a mile or so, the plane gains no altitude, then the wings start to generate lift. The wheels leave the ground and...