Posted on 12/20/2007 10:49:56 AM PST by shortstop
Damn Social Security and the thieves who thought it up.
That's my attitude.
As I make a list of reasons why I hate the government, Social Security has to be near the top. It is, for me, the most recognizable and intrusive tyranny in my life.
And that's saying a lot.
We sadly live in a day when the strangling grip of government chokes the life and liberty out of working Americans all across this country. We are little more than sharecroppers and slaves in a system of taxation and regulation which dictates everything in our lives – from what we can build on our property to how much water there is in our toilet. The lion's share of our labor and wealth is confiscated for bloated bureaucracies and covetous welfare parasites. We are burdened by a government that has long since stopped being what the Founders envisioned.
So when you're making a list of reasons to hate the government, you better have lots of time and lots of paper.
But today we're going to talk about Social Security.
And how Social Security has deprived me of my life's dream.
First, the dream. One evening, when I was 19, in a trailer in the Arizona desert near Winslow, I decided I wanted land. Country land. As I stood there talking with my host, he told me about the five acres upon which his trailer sat, and his plans for it.
And it fired my imagination. I thought of all the things you could do with a few acres. And for years I've thought about it. I've read and planned and daydreamed.
I want some country land. Where it rains and the trees grow and you can pasture cows and plant crops and stock your pond with fish. I want chickens and sheep and a woodlot.
I want it for the peace of it, for the hard calloused-hands work of it, for the fruitfulness of it and for the self-reliance of it. It's my heritage, and I'd like it to be my future.
But I am not a man of means. I'm a wage earner. I'm a middle-income guy with a lot of kids and all the money I make goes to supporting my family.
And the government. My family budget has always been pressed toward insolvency by the voracious, thieving hand of government. Year after year I have cut corners and shorted my children while money I've earned has been siphoned away by a government that takes it before I see it. I have less and less and the government takes more and more. All of society is entitled to my paycheck – except me.
And so at 48 I am no nearer my country land than I was at 19.
Which gets me back to Social Security.
I was going through some papers the other day and found that little mailing the Social Security Administration sends out periodically, the one that shows how much of your money they've taken from you, year by year. I looked at the numbers and added them up and the total struck me odd. It occurred to me, looking at the numbers, that I had essentially paid a mortgage over the near 35 years of my working life. A mortgage that, applied to land, would have long since given me my dream.
And my freedom. And a great deal more security and prosperity than Social Security will ever provide.
See, the idea of land is not just some country idyll. It's also a practical objective, a means to an independent end. While the government wants me to be dependent in my old age on a miserly monthly check, I would rather provide myself with the means of self-support.
With just a few acres of land, tillable and forested, I would with simple labor be able to provide myself with food and heat. I could raise and grow what I ate and cut and chop what I burned. I could become at least in part self-sufficient.
And that is a far-preferable retirement plan to a Social Security check. In the name of providing for my old age, the government has taken away my ability to provide for myself in my old age. Instead of investing my income as I see fit – in land or in anything else – it is stolen by the government and put into a Ponzi scheme that has no realistic likelihood of being solvent when it comes my turn to retire. To promise me security, the government must deprive me of liberty.
I have lost the ability to use my own money as I see fit. I have lost the ability to provide for my own retirement. I have lost the simplest right of a free man – the right to live by the sweat of my own brow, and not have it stolen away by a covetous and avaricious government in whose eyes I am little more than a beast of burden.
Country land would provide many of my needs until I grew too enfeebled to work it. Then I could sell it to get myself the care I need. In time I would die, but I would go to my grave having paid my own way and having lived as I chose.
But those are things the government now deprives me of.
I have clung to a dream, and one simple tax has destroyed it. My dream is going into some drunk's SSI check, or into the rat hole of the welfare/bureaucracy complex, the vast industry that lives off the life's blood of Americans who work.
I love my country. I would die for the Constitution. But I hate my government. I hate what generations of snakes in elective office have done to the greatest nation and the freest people ever to grace the earth.
We should be free to plan for our old age they way we want. To invest our money in land or a business or in stocks and bonds. We should be free from ridiculous taxes that don't deliver what they promise. We should be free from the socialist dreams of long-dead New Dealers.
But we are not free – we are Americans.
And damn the men who have made us this way.
According to your logic, they are paying me 6.2% more than they have to now. Everything they pay me now (government mandate or not) is because they have to pay me that much to keep me from finding another job. If the government mandated that they put 50% of my pay into SS instead of 6.2%, I promise it would not be extra money, it would come out of my current pay. The 6.2% they pay now is NOT extra free money, it comes out of my total compensation.
Following your logic, if they drop corporate income tax, all the prices would drop 25%, right? In your dreams. The companies would put it right back into their bottom line.
Following your logic, corporate taxes cost the public nothing any only reduce the bottom line. Of course this is not true. Corporate taxes are a cost of doing business and are passed on to the consumer. Corporations (and individuals) set prices for goods and services based on the maximum they can get without running off their customers. Raising taxes for all business goes straight to the prices for their goods and services. Cutting taxes on all corporations MUST for the exact same reason be passed on to customers as lower prices.
I never said that a 401K could fund this benefit, what I was trying to say is that citizens should be demanding the right to invest their (stolen) Social Security “contributions” in a diversified, insured, fiscally sound pension plan.
The fact is, this will never happen, because almost everybody uses divisive terms like “extremely generous” and “no risk” when discussing public employee pensions.
Your study reveals the obvious, but because it is geared toward limiting growth of local and state government spending (an admirable pursuit, no doubt), it emphasizes that public pension recipients have superior retirement benefits. It does not contribute any emphasis on the need to end the Social Security drag on private sector standard of living.
Social Security has been sold as a form of deferred compensation to the American public. I am hoping that discussions like this one will prompt the public to demand that the system evolve into something better than exorbitant, regressive tax burden during working years, followed by a pittance of a welfare benefit for senior citizens.
Finally, I apologize if I missed it, but where in your study or response will I find the evidence against my assertion that public pension funds are by and large sustainable?
Even if one subscribes to the “risky stock market” lie, simply investing into a basket of CDs, real estate in high growth areas experiencing net long term in migration, etc, you’d do better than Social Security.
My study involves the compensation side of public employee pensions. The funding side has been carefully studied. Defined benefit plans that are similar in design to the PERA plan in Colorado are underfunded. The funding level is a moving target because the pensions provide high guaranteed benefits (the target guaranteed rate of return is 8.5%) but the funding mechanism is a risky asset portfolio.
My study is unique in its emphasis on deferred compensation. The reason that these defined benefit plans have become so generous is due to ignorance about the amount of deferred compensation inherent in the design of the plans. Employees are provided an investment that does not exist in the private sector (high return with no risk). Much of the retirement income stream is deferred compensation, not income derived from investment earnings. If legislators and the public understand that pensions like PERA in Colorado are providing on the average $500,000 of deferred compensation, they may vote to reduce benefit levels.
Ignorance about compensation allows public employees to claim pool man about current compensation. The legislature increases current compensation and ignores the vast poor of deferred compensation. This situation allows career public employees to receive increases (sometimes large) in current compensation that magnifies their deferred compensation even more. The taxpayer is hit on all sides: increases in current compensation, large increases in deferred compensation, early retirement by a substantial part of the work force, and lifer employees who do not perform well but hang on for the retirement benefits.
Social security is the opposite of retirement plans like PERA. Social security is entirely unfunded. Social security will provide negative returns to many boomer retirees. Social security is a generational Ponzi scheme. Social security is sucking money from the private investment market and robbing many boomers of their ability to save for retirement. If the employer’s share of FICA tax (6.2%) were invested in a personal retirement account, the vast majority of boomer retirees would have a much more secure and better retirement.
bttt
Step one-— you have to double the percent because the “matching funds” from your employer is paid by you.
Step two-— the $6,000 from year one at 7% would be worth $69,037 , the $6,000 from year two would be worth $64,383 and so on for 35 years.
That’s why it’s called PRESENT VALUE.
Value from the first two years alone would be worth over $133,000...
bttt
the greatest generation who forced this generational Ponzi scheme on us
I don't know what the numbers are today, but at one time you got back all you had paid in about five years. It is a good Ponzi scheme but the payout is killing it.
We’ve been in boiling water so long our asses are cooked and no one has the strength to hop out.
And they collect far more (probably somewhere in the range of $100B to $200B) than they spend.
You wouldn’t contribute to their support yourself if there was no “Social Security” program?
Your parents can’t help support their parents and grandmother?
They can’t save for their own retirements?
Bingo
They won't pay 82% of their earnings - they'll just pay 15% of their $2.3 million lower-middle-class paychecks in order to provide the retirees with the agreed-upon $20,000 a year.
It's gone forever, so get over it. Just as surely as your income taxes - all cranked out onto enormous pallets of $100 bills and shipped overseas.
A clean death would be nice, but that's not how it works.
Social Security is a pyramid scheme, and would have been illegal if any one else were running it!
Sometimes I envy those who died in combat. They did not have to see the Constitution they defended rot under tons of political sh!t.
And who owns the bottom line? Shareholders - namely you, me, grandma and grandpa, and Auntie Fran down the street.
I’ll sue and win.
It would have been true for you, perhaps.
But the vast majority of Americans have next to no savings.
Do we let them starve in the streets?
(It was their reckless spending that earned the rest of us a lifetime of money to save.)
But that said, I still agree with you.
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