one of the tragedies is that we allowed Congress, signed off by Reagan, to smole and mirror us back in the 1980s to greatly increase taxes by using the excuse of SS running out of money, All this did was allow a wasteful congress to use this money to spend elsewhere, not to “save” for SS.
“one of the tragedies is that we allowed Congress, signed off by Reagan, to smole and mirror us back in the 1980s to greatly increase taxes by using the excuse of SS running out of money, All this did was allow a wasteful congress to use this money to spend elsewhere, not to “save” for SS.”
Yes, SS was running low on cashflow in the 80s, and the right response would have been to get rid of it then.
Nevertheless, that was politically impossible because SS and Medicare had political constituencies that were far too powerful. I would only add that the system was never designed to “save” money for anyone’s retirement. It has always been money-in/money-out.
Because the program wasn’t killed in the 80’s and taxes were raised, the 80’s seniors and their kept politicians created a whole new generation of victims (roughly speaking, us) who had to pay massively more in payroll withholding. The 80’s era retirees, BTW, were still among the big winners in the SS/Medicare ponzi scheme.
Now we have to ask whether we have more integrity than the geezers who shafted us in the 80s. Are we going to try to do the same thing (actually it will be worse because payroll taxes would have to go up a lot to maintain “benefits”) to our children and grandchildren?