Posted on 03/20/2025 6:39:51 AM PDT by Red Badger
Don’t know much about him other than he paints his fingernails and wears a mask while working outside. He’s about 50 years younger than me. I called him Mike once...he snapped back, “My name is Michael”. I cannot reason or converse with this individual.
SS should go back to being a retirement mechanism and nothing else.
That shows he’s mentally ill right there.
My name is the same and I would never ever snap at anyone for that. In fact I use it myself to refer to myself..............
People worry it will lead to deeper cuts.
Chuck Schumer is roundly hated by everyone. The idiots at the Hill are throwing out a lead life preserver to hopefully keep Schumer afloat. Clowns are everywhere.
You’ve been here all these years as a contributing FReeper and you think Trump is going to “cut social security?”
No I don’t. Try brushing up on your reading comprehension skills.
Social Security payments are in two categories:
- old age (retirement) approx. 86% of total payments
- not old age (welfare, injuries, disabilities, unemployables) approx. 14% of total payments
Old Age (retirement) payments are calculated by the gov’t and due, respecting basic info: age, retirement status, what you put into the system (social security taxes).
Not-OA payments are calculated by the gov’t based upon a variety of info that can be a complex mess accumulated from a variety of inputs.
The latter, Not-OA situation, is where there usually exists room for errors.
Okay I read your post again. You agree with RINO Murkowski so you’re just stupid I guess.
Okay, genius.
Senate Republicans want Elon Musk to stop talking about Social Security.
Musk found their gold mine
Like all Ponzi schemes it has an end.
I’m sure it will but perhaps not before the 2026 midterms.
Their real Gold Mine is Welfare (EBT, SNAP, WIC, ETC) Fraud.................
If you have had the misfortune to visit a Social Security Office you will have experienced the inefficiency that is the hallmark of the agency. Many of the staff are obvious DEI hires, the computer systems are archaic and the whole atmosphere of the place reeks with almost despair. Time for a change.
Check dots connected everything is on the table is for the taking.
PS Could you please stop screaming your screen name at all of us?
The Senate is a snake pit.
It is the stronghold of the uniparty although the judicial branch is giving it a run for its money.
Murkowski and Collins take TOO much heat.
Do NOT be fooled, they speak out because they have “safe” seats.
They are speaking for a MAJORITY of the Republican wing of the uniparty senate caucus.
Again, the Senate is a snake pit.
NEVER forget Schumer and Goober Grahamnesty met with Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch at the Palm Restaurant to convince Rush Limbaugh to stop using the term amnesty to describe the so-called “comprehensive” bill on illegal immigration reform.
Limbaugh of course declined to meet their “demands” and I assume that his relationship with Ailes who invited him to this ambush was never the same.
“ Like all Ponzi schemes it has an end.
I’m sure it will but perhaps not before the 2026 midterms.”
If anyone knows how to ease us off of a Pnzi scheme, if that’s what exactly to call this, it is the ultimate money manager himself, Trump
Pay no attention to Musk on this.
Social Security was always a Ponzi scheme, and it is actuarially bankrupt. As it stands now, Social Security is rapidly exhausting its fictional “trust fund,” which was never anything more than a special category of off-budget debt to sidestep OMB and CBO accounting rules. Debt is free when you “owe it to yourself,” when you can attribute non-existent interest “to yourself” in a fictitious shadow account, and it never actually has to be paid out. But when the tipping point is reached and the SSA starts to draw on it, there is nothing there. All that happens is that off-budget debt gets rolled into on-budget debt.
Anyhow, under current law, Social Security will be capable of paying only about 70 percent of promised benefits when the fictitious trust fund reaches zero. Anywhere but the fedgov, this would be called “bankruptcy.” Since Social Security operates in the land of disinformation, it is not bankrupt; it is a “sacred intergenerational compact,” which means our children and grandchildren will be stuck with the bill.
Our children and grandchildren should just say no. Cut benefits across the board by 30 percent. This has been locked into the math for generations. There is no extenuation for people who have willingly closed their eyes and listened to the liars. I am sympathetic to those who have been raising Cain about this for many years, but there is no way to sift the wheat from the chaff. Cut benefits by 30 percent and be done with it. But this is assuming that we have enough children and grandchildren for them to be politically relevant. The democrat plan is to replace our descendants with successor populations from all over the world, and why anyone should expect armies of brown, black, and asian newcomers to tax themselves up to the eyeballs to support our retirements is beyond me.
Of course, there have always been offramps. There still are, but they get more difficult with each passing year. And the costs go up, the costs being the political necessity of amortizing the unfunded liabilities of the Ponzi scheme.
Democrats will want to protect benefits by raising taxes. But Social Security has always been a dead loss for many people, and a major loss for huge numbers of people who die before recovering even as much as they paid into the system. Since SS has no real underlying assets, it creates no inheritable wealth. Sucks to be you, chump. Raising taxes simply increases the planned loss in a system that is already the money-losing portion of people’s retirement strategies is stupid. Given the choice, no one brighter than a cabbage and under the age of 50 would stay in Social Security. Of course, there are a lot of people who aren’t as bright as a cabbage, who get their news from MSNBC and TikTok, and who continue to vote for the party of Chuck Schumer. They deserve what they are voting for, but in a compulsory system, they can take the rest of us down with them.
Republicans have taken runs at this issue from time to time but have never gotten enough traction to get serious reforms through Congress. In recent decades, Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America pubbies were pushing the idea and had apparently opened some talks with BillyJeff. But then Clinton turned hard left because he needed democrat cover for his accumulating scandals, and any serious SS reform was scuttled. George W. Bush grabbed the third rail on SS and the Medicare/Medicaid mess, but he ran into a democrat stone wall on the Hill. GWB at least demonstrated that it was not suicidal to approach the issue; he ran with privatization of SS and market oriented reform of health insurance in his platform, and he won.
Trump was leading a populist crusade and has walked away from any semblance of fiscal sanity on entitlement reform. If Musk can lead Trump to do a reality check, that would be a great thing, but I don’t see any indication that this is likely. With regard to current spending, Trump reminds me of Ross Perot, who was going to get the experts together and check under the hood. How’s that for a plan? Trump’s extra special MAGA Sauce is that he promises to grow the beautiful economy so stupendously, amazingly fast that deficits and unfunded liabilities won’t matter. That may appeal to people who are drunk on hopium, but it is nonsense.
DOGE? Well, there are a lot of useful cuts that can be made, and projected over the ten year costing horizon, DOGE may generate projected savings of hundreds of billions, perhaps a trillion or two, over the 10 year OMB planning horizon. That sounds impressive to the hopium addicts and it can be used to make smoke, but the reality is that we have been borrowing two trillion a year, every year, and nothing that DOGE is proposing will do more than marginally reduce the speed at which the debt is compounding.
DOGE is targeting discretionary domestic spending. Fine. The fedgov is overlayered and has many programs that can and should be terminated. It also has things we want to save, like air traffic controllers, federal meat inspectors in the packing plants, the U.S. Park Service, etc., so we have to sort that out. But domestic discretionary spending is now about 20 percent of the federal budget, and it is the part of the federal government which is not growing, at least in real terms. It has actually been shrinking in budget share for decades. We could zero it out entirely and still not solve the problem.
The rest of the budget? Glad you asked. The rest of the federal budget is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, defense, and debt service, and defense has been shrinking sharply in budget share since the height of the Cold War. Prior to LBJ and the Great Society, defense was half of federal spending. Today? Hahahahahaha. If you want to balance the federal budget, entitlements are where we have to look.
You can get drunk on hopium, or you can look at the numbers.
Amen
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