Posted on 01/02/2011 10:24:47 AM PST by rabscuttle385
Seniors should be older before the receive Social Security and wealthy Americans should receive less benefits across the board, says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
He made the argument in an interview on Sunday's Meet the Press, but it's a position Graham has advocated for on the stump in South Carolina, including a 2009 stop at The Citadel with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"What I'm going to do is challenge this country to make some hard decisions," Graham said at the time, telling the crowd of cadets, Tea Partiers, and Graham supporters that they shouldn't give Congress a pass on the tough stuff.
(Excerpt) Read more at charlestoncitypaper.com ...
>Changing the name of a government entitlement to “Welfare” doesn’t change a thing except branding seniors as “being on the dole”.
Yes silly me, best that we live a lie instead and call it insurance rather that what it really is. You can accept that it is either welfare or you got snookered by a Ponzi scheme. There is no other option. Reality precludes other answers.
>I’ll be looking forward to reading similarly long screeds by you advocating stopping billions in foreign aid to Egypt and other muzzie countries, free medical care and education for illegals and their countless offspring, and millions in vacations and junkets for Obama and his hangers-on in just the past twenty -four months.
Foreign aid is minuscule chicken feed. Total foreign aid expenditures is less than 1% of the budget. You could gut it completely and it wouldn’t made an iota of difference.
You are deliberately ignoring reality. There is nothing more I can really say on this. The numbers simply don’t lie. We’re broke. Fool yourself all you like, but when the excrement hits the ventilator you will notice then.
>Would you advocate for Death Panels to reach your goal?
Would you advocate spending $5000000 per elderly individual to keep them alive for an additional ten years? (this is an arbitrary number picked to demonstrate how stupid the expenditures well could get)
Let me interject a bit of reality here. Medicare is going broke because people don’t get to make their own choices about if life is affordable past a certain point. They, instead, get to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers. Because of the socialization of the cost of that choice, eventually that choice itself will be socialized. That is inevitable. Anything else is economic nonsense.
Better that people pay for the health insurance they can afford. People will then get to make choices about their own destinies and these choices will be forced to reflect economic reality.
I have no idea what you are responding to.
>I consider myself to be in that middle class; I go to work every day, and I get paid reasonably well for that. I don’t subsist on govermnent handouts, but I also don’t own factories and stores. The middle class, by definition, pays for its own expenses (save, maybe, an occasional emergency.)
I’m not going to post the numbers again. However it has been posted by myself an others how Social Security and Medicare are going to break the bank. They will break the bank because they cover everyone, rich, poor, and in between.
You aren’t part of the problem. The system’s promises to your retirement are.
A premie can cost $220,000 in a year would you advocate snuffing it out. For the record we filed medical directives where needed long ago...
I was more worried about his energy independence talk=energy taxes
Thanks for letting me know.
>A premie can cost $220,000 in a year would you advocate snuffing it out. For the record we filed medical directives where needed long ago...
If society collapses because the economy goes down I can guarantee that not a whole lot of preemies are are going to make it. Would you advocate that outcome?
Get it through you head, we are looking at the edge of one hell of a deep abyss. Until people get that into their heads they will keep dithering on about nonsense.
May I ask you a question, since you’re on the topic of deaths for lack of money being spent. How many people die in the Third World because you don’t spend enough to save them? Are they somehow worth less as humans than those $220000 preemies? I can guarantee that close to zero preemies survive in those regions because they don’t have the means to do anything about it.
That's one of the trolls' most popular arguments. They like to whine "Those mean old people are squandering MY money!" Of course, when they say that, they're talking about other people's money being spent on necessary healthcare, but the trolls never let the truth get in their way.
Wagglebee isn't the only one who's noticed that verity pushes the liberal troll agenda on a wide variety of subjects. When I see troll comments, I usually look to see who said it. There are a handful of names that repeatedly pop up. Verity is one of them. Some trolls occasionally say something that sounds conservative, but I've never seen such a post from verity. Trolls like to blame the FReepers who recognize them as trolls, instead of accepting responsibility for their own behavior. If you don't want anyone to know where you stand on abortion, Rooty Tooty, the homosexual agenda, our military, redistribution of wealth, forced euthanasia, etc., then don't tell everybody where you stand on those issues. It's that simple. Don't post all about it, and then complain because FReepers have read your posts, and remember them. Of course we're going to remember posts that push for the tearing down of conservative values in our society. That kind of crap tends to stand out from the usual posts we see here.
Social Security is a government ponzi scheme, but those people that you think should be means tested have paid into the social security system, and the benefits are merely the return on the forcibly withheld "contributions" from the earnings of the "investors". The benefits - based on the amount of earning from which Social Security taxes are withheld - should not be reduced just because you either saved or made better investments prior to retirement than someone else. Such a policy that would further confiscate your benefits just because you have better prepared for retirement than others is the epitome of government welfare and income redistribution.
The government has not represented SS as a "retirement account" with a real principle...or characterized FICA as "investment" in decades. When it was resprsented that way it was by a politician and NOT on paper (written law). How else could they allow those who never contributed a dime collect benefits?
Why do you believe it is now a retirement account in which people have invested?
It is welfare for many, a kind of forced savings for others, and just plain tax for still others. It should have been fixed 25 years ago, and all they did was to kick the can down the road.
For people who aren't anywhere near retirement - let's say teenagers to twenty-somethings and thereabouts for the sake of argument - I'm actually fine with that. Life expectancies have gone up, and a SS retirement age that reflects that by going up 2 or 3 years for the Gen Y folks wouldn't be a bad thing, IMHO. Though I suspect Graham isn't looking at the youngins with that statement...
"and wealthy Americans should receive less benefits across the board, says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C."
Okay, now I gotta say FU! Those "wealthy Americans" already have paid more into Social Security than they will ever collect, and now they should get even LESS on their "investment"?!? FU!!!
I was going to say the exact same thing. Compare traditional Army boot camp training to Navy SEALs "Hell Week" training. That is the difference of pain we're talking, yet you know how politicians love to kick the can down the road!
I think it is wealthy congressmen!!!
If Ms. Lindsay is talking about phasing it in over time, then I agree.
However, if Ms. Lindsay is talking about making these “hard decisions” today, then I would tell her to SHUT UP.
Frankly, since we were in our 20s, we’ve lived as though SS and MC won’t exist when we retired, so we will be okay no matter what they do.
However, there are many hard working, frugal people whose finances have been decimated during the last couple of years, and don’t have enough in their retirement funds to cover what they need.
Needless to say, that doesn’t excuse those of us boomers who have spent every penny they received, and have lived the Life of Reilly while not thinking about their future.
There are many of those...and I don’t feel very sorry for them.
So the people that forcibly paid the most into the system should get nothing out of the system.
Hey Lindsay, be a man and just go to their houses and rob them at gun point. At least it would be an “honest” crime.
Eventually...probably in fifty years...after we’ve done the first twenty tricks to keep the program going...we will come to the idea of cutting social security for folks who already have a pension (military, government employee, railroad workers, etc). I can envision a 50 percent cut and having a bunch of senators come to agree on this within four to five decades.
The problem here is that the system simply wasn’t designed for the long haul. It doesn’t have the ability to shift or improve itself. Half the tinkering that congress has done over the past two decades has done little to nothing to fix the issues.
I’d even go as far to suggest destroying social security and creating social security version 2. It wasn’t built as a pension program, and we’ve come to envision it as such. I think that’s our first obstacle to overcome.
Here’s some more grist for the mill.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2650736/posts?page=17#17
Sen. Tom Coburn’s claim on percentage of SSDI, SSI recipients is on the mark.
tampabay.com ^ | December 18, 2010 | Louis Jacobson
Posted on Monday, January 03, 2011 1:36:02 AM by Angelus
The statement “One in 19 Americans today get SSDI or SSI. That’s one in 19 Americans (who) are disabled.” Sen. Tom Coburn, Dec. 1, 2010, in a meeting of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission.
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