Because, damn it, we paid for it!
We forty somethings(and under) are going to have to pay for the boomers and those before who will have put in less than they took out.
As a boomer who has maxed out payments into SS for 30 plus years I won’t recover what I put in if you also figure the interest I would have earned on those dollars at just 5%. You also have to consider my employers has matched my contribution over the same period.
No I won’t be seeing everything I put in.
The generation before us did take more than they ever contributed.
The longtime Social Security Administration commissioner Robert M. Ball wrote on this page recently that “it’s the essence of responsibility, in my view, to insist on no benefit cuts...”
Hmmmmm.... That’s what we’ve been doing for 74 years. So far, it’s not worked, and in fact, that’s what got us into the mess to begin with.
The FDR way was to set the age of retirement a couple of years past the estimated life expectancy.
Raise the retirement afe to 80 and SS is fixed!
In other words, it will buy your food, but it won't pay your rent. Were that goal kept in mind, the fix would be easy.
Rent can be dealt with by your subprime mortgage bailout check, delivered under separate cover. ;)
“The Social Security program might have been able to afford this if American families had continued to produce three, four or five children. But they did not. Families shrank.”
So the New Dealers assumed in their calculations that we would have exponential population growth from then to infinity? Not the brightest bunch afterall.
“Americans have an exaggerated sense of respect for the New Dealers who created the original Social Security model. Questioning them or the Great Society heroes seems impolite.”
Only if you are a rabid liberal.
The very same congressional blowhards that held Enron up for ridicule and prosecution have misappropriated many thousands of times more. Commingling of funds is illegal, unless one is congressman. D@amn them all.
We had a built in population of approx 9 million that were 65 or older. by the time 1940 rolled around.
If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was approx 48 years.
If you were born in 1950, your life expectancy is approx 66 years.
Seems to me the dead was suppose to pay for those who continued to live.
Probably would have worked too, except they turned SS into a bazillion other things unrelated to pure retirement.
Now, with that said, my life expectancy, after having attained my current age, is,. approx 73 years...
so...all you youngsters...get back to work !!
Lord aren’t we sounding like a bunch of govt addicted liberals. “I paid in, I want whats mine!”. Believe me I do speak with the sanctimony of someone who was born on the cusp of the boomer generation and who knows that all the boomers who have sucked SS dry will have mostly died off and all the resentfull Xers and younger generations will hold a political block that will make sure that whatever changes that havent already happen will screw me to the wall when I reach retirement. That said, the first thing a con should be thinking is how we can break ourselves from the SS system entirely, NOT how we can get out what we paid in. Our best objective as cons is to aspire to leave a legasy of good government. Thats what cons do.
I’m more in favor of confiscating all money, property and goods of the crooked politicians and bureaucrats that stole the SS money and then bringing back slavery and making these crooks work for the victims until they dropped dead. And after they dropped dead I’d hang them.
But that’s just me.
I’m also in favor of digging up FDR and hanging him, too.
To read........
Fix it the Republican, conservative way. Cut Social Security taxes. Cutting taxes raises revenue, right? I don’t understand why no GOP Presidential candidate is proposing this. It’s the only way to fix Social Security.
Ms. Shlaes was referring to Thompson's proposal to peg S.S. increases to the CPI instead of to the wage index without naming him.
I fear that no one's paying attention to the issues.
Not a good omen for Mr. Thompson -- abortion and speculation on his belly-fire is so much more popular, I guess.
wanna fix it? Take all the immigrants that are on it and tell them NO, you haven’t paid anything into the program to deserve anything out. Many of these guys take their work record from their home country and come here getting FREE benes with no input, and out govt cries there is NO money.
You can’t “fix” Social Security. It’s a worthless ponzi scheme that was destined to failure from day one simply because it can’t work and politicians control it with their meddling.
Any talk of “fixing” or “changing” is ridiculous. It should be eliminated. Period.