Posted on 12/20/2007 10:49:56 AM PST by shortstop
ROFL!
Such a lawsuit has already been filed 48 years ago now, and the US Supreme Court ruled that Social Security is a tax, not an annuity, pension, or savings account, and the terms of payments can be changed at will by Congress, and you have no contractual or other right to benefits. See Fleming v. Nestor, 363 US 603 [1960].
Americans don't even let Indonesians starve in the streets, what makes you think we'd let Americans starve in the streets if not for the Velvet Fist of the Almighty State?
I suppose if politicians are truly committed to helping the working poor, eliminate Socialist Security. That will never happen though...
DU would concur heartily.
You can’t look at Social Security as a retirement investment. Your money went to pay someone else’s social security check. Any extra went into the governments general revenue and was spent. There is nothing to compound/grow.
Phase it out. Start now.
Social security as a privately funded personal investment fund would be fine and a good idea. What it is now is trash and a ponzi scheme that is dumping a mount of debt on my generation (I’m 26) that can probably never be repaid. Thanks a lot.
I, too, hate Social “Security”! But this world is not my home. I’m justa passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door
....and I can’t feel at home in this world any more! (sounds like an old spiritual?) I feel sad for those who will only have earth....and Social Insecurity...for a home.
WTF are you talking about. If he started off making 50k a year, putting in 6% (with employee matching) and getting just a 6% rate of return, after 35 years he’d have $712,000, not $105,000. Even just his portion (excluding company match) would be $356k. At a rate of 10%, he’d have nearly 1.9 million (or 950k on his own).
LOL are you serious? I get about a 12% average rate of return on 401k in the last 5 years vs 2.5% for SS and if I die early it’s passed on to whomever I want instead of lost to the government. How is that “not much better than ss”?
And who owns the Government? Voters - namely you, me, etc. And we send the same people we complain about back to D.C. time and time and time again. We get what we deserve.
Another benefit to investment is that your savings are put into the world's most efficient creator of wealth--the free market. Social security payments are put into the world's most efficient creator of something else, the US Government.
Upthread, it was said that the government takes in $100-200 billion more in Social Security receipts than it spends on Social Security entitlements. Imagine a system of federally-managed private retirement accounts (like the TSP system for federal employees) set up for younger workers so they could recoup the SS taxes that aren't paying entitlements today. That money would be go right back into the stock market. We'd have a lot more investment in American companies today, and universal retirement savings for tomorrow.
Do you and your wife have a lot of kids? Just curious!
I never voted for any socialists and I didn’t ride in on a horse, thanks.
Without enough financial smarts to really discuss this, I did want to say that I have been retired several years and get a $752.00 SS check each month. It’s nearly all I have, after working 35 years - a lot of them years when women didn’t make as much money as men did - and I feel like it is owed to me because I paid it in, as I think most would have to agree. Like many women raising their kids alone while working full time (four legal kids born while married, in the long-ago days when it was still popular/acceptable to have kids!), I really didn’t have anything extra for investing or saving. I made sure I would own my final home with a mortgage so small I could handle it on SS - so I did that right. I didn’t bite on the drug coverage scam; can’t afford it and don’t want it. I have told all my kids - the oldest is 50 - not to count on SS being there for them, to make what arrangements they can NOW. So don’t talk about pulling the rug out from under me because YOU are mad. And yes, this is why the broke system isn’t going to be fixed quickly, easily, or very well. But when my generation dies off, have at it.
Millions of Americans have had this tax taken from their earnings. Many also have saved whatever they could on their own. Had they been allowed the right to privately invest what the SS tax took from them for 20, 30, 40 or so years, some could have been financially independent of the gov't program.
The only way to end Social Security is to phase it out over several decades. Yet we will still be left the problem of older folks, etc., who don't have enough money to survive.
With these the federal government has conferred upon itself the mechanisms to intrude into all of your affairs, and claim all wealth you generate.
My grandparents’ generation, born at the very end of the 19th Century, was the last generation that lived as free Americans. They were actual citizens. And they lived part of their lives without these monstrous, unconstitutional, abominations of legislation.
My parents generation, the WWII generation, was the last generation who thought they were free. They voluntarily turned in their citizenship to become subjects. All of their shackles were forged and locked around them in open sight. And they cheered.
My generation, the Baby Boomers, was too busy throwing a temper tantrum to stop this slavery while there was still a chance. And now the boomers are beginning to notice the shackles they are wearing. But too many still whine about bogus “causes” (such as Global Warming) instead of solving real problems.
And the generations following the boomers? Well, welcome to the plantation fellow slave. Hope you can spell "crash and burn"!
We raised 5 kids,,all grown, and working now.
You are absolutely right. It would be a huge boon for the economy.
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