Posted on 08/29/2011 7:22:55 AM PDT by Poundstone
I earned these 'entitlements'
I believe that most citizens do not understand what a federal entitlement program is. There are earned entitlements versus a special government entitlement that is given to an individual who needs assistance that is mandated by law.
What is a government entitlement? Note below that some are free and some are not! Why the government is lumping these programs together is beyond me: Only Congress would think this was a proper thing to do. How can a program like military retirement be linked with food stamps? The programs I am associated with should never be diminished by the federal government because they are either paid for by me and my wife or I have earned them. Most citizens believe all the federal entitlements are giveaway social programs and that is not true.
(Excerpt) Read more at redding.com ...
Name ONE “ entitlement “ that is not a mandatory tax!
The test is, “if you don’t pay your “entitlement” tax then you go to jail. “
She paid in to the system. She was entitled to every penny.
A government union negotiates a fully legal pension plan for its employees. The pension plan is so generous that it will totally bankrupt the whole state. Who cares??? They paid in. They're entitled!
At some point, people have to look at the math. These things do not work in the real world. In terms of rhetoric, sure, you can "justify" them. But the math will win the argument in the end. Ponzi schemes inevitably fail. People pay in a small amount, and expect to receive a large amount. Life doesn't work that way.
agreed.... I am sick and tired of people calling me greedy for wanting nothing more than what I paid into socialist security...to date I have paid over 350,000.00 DOLLARS into the system...that is not rubles, or pesos...that is 350K of U.S. dollars....if some greedy ass, get reelected at all costs politican spent it, that is not my problem...I am not greedy, it’s the damn politicans that are...lets put the blame where it belongs...
my problem is with pensions for people that have not put themselves at risk for the country or community
89% of public employees get lifetime pensions... many that far exceed any social security payout
teachers? why the hell does a teacher get a pension? why??
did they get paid far below average salary? no. was their life at risk? no. then what??
city, state and federal employees, excluding firefighters, cops and military... administrators and bureaucrats. why do these people have pensions? they did a job. the job had high stability. compensated... many richly. why should these people get a lifetime payment plan?
congress people... why do they get lifetime pensions? for what??
and no one is talking about cutting such waste
One comment on this article:
Dumbplumber writes:
“Yes Mr. Cleckner, you paid for yours. However, Social Security (under SSI), Medicare and Medicaid (MediCal in California) have been so ‘prostituted’ and ‘bastardized’ from their intent that they no longer resemble their original purpose.
Moreover, when Liberals are threatened with cuts, they drag our soldiers, firemen and policemen and widows as the targets. Sorry, but you are just a pawn in a very ugly game.”
End ALL federal pensions for ALL civilian federal employees. ALL! The military should keep theirs but that system needs to be overhauled as well.
The author, and you, make a very good point.
Pensions and social security truly are “entitlements” in the original sense of the word. Beneficiaries are entitled to those payments because they worked for them.
Welfare, etc. should not be called an entitlement. Not only is it a misuse of the word, it sends the wrong message to everyone involved.
Welfare is more like a charity than an entitlement. We need a description along those lines.
I don't know whether there is a contractual obligation to pay for military or civil service retirements. I wouldn't be surprised to see that there is no such contract with military retirees, or that it is pretty loose with a lot of "or such benefits as determined by Congress" exceptions in it.
This, in a nutshell, is why we are completely, totally screwed as a country. The majority of people approaching retirement age--including a lot of conservatives--think they've earned Social Security. Someone owes it to them since they paid in all their lives. To them its not a transfer payment program. And in one sense they are right. But when you ask who owes it to them, the answer is "the government," as if the government is some person with a big bank account who can dole this money out without taking it from someone else. They don't want to face the fact that the people who owe it to them are dead. Their parents and grandparents got a windfall and by demanding their full Social Security and Medicare payments, they are completely screwing their kids and grandkids. Their kids and grandkids do not owe them Social Security. They did not set up this Ponzi scheme. And yet somehow today's seniors think its OK saddling their grandkids with a mountain of debt to pay for unsustainable entitlements. And if you even mention this to some of them, they go ballistic and are ready to fight. Once again, its why we aren't going to be able to solve our debt problem.
Have Seniors Really Paid for Their Medicare Benefits? Cont.
By Andrew Biggs
August 19, 2009, 3:25 pm
Patrick Appel at the Daily Dish picks up on yesterday’s post showing that most seniors will receive significantly more in Medicare benefits than they ever paid in Medicare taxes, undercutting the claim—coming from Republicans, believe it or not—that President Obama’s proposed Medicare cuts are unfair to seniors, who have “paid for their benefits.” (E.D. Kain also weighs in.)
Appel raises the good point that the figures I presented yesterday are only for someone who actually survives to retirement age. “Senior citizens can get slightly more out of Medicare than they put in while not bankrupting the country because many workers will not live long enough to collect payments.” That’s true. But how big an effect does it have?
To check, I effectively repeated my prior calculations, but on a mortality-adjusted basis. That is, I start with a person who is 21 years old. I then construct a stream of taxes through age 64 and Medicare benefits from age 65 through 100. Each dollar figure is then multiplied by the probability of being alive at that age. Taxes at age 22, for instance, are multiplied by 0.999, since there’s a near certainty that a 21-year-old will live to age 22, but benefits at age 95 are multiplied by only 0.08, since there’s only around an 8 percent chance that a 21-year-old will survive to age 95. These mortality-adjusted taxes and benefits are then converted to present values to account for interest.
What’s the result? The typical 21-year-old as of 1965 would have paid around $62,290 in Medicare taxes (versus $64,470 on a non-mortality adjusted basis) while receiving around $140,346 in benefits (versus $173,886 on a non-mortality adjusted basis). So Appel’s point clearly has merit.
That said, the broader point still stands: in my original calculations, a new retiree in 2009 would have paid Medicare taxes equal to around 37 percent of his expected benefits. Adjusted for the chance of dying before retirement, that share rises to only 44 percent. So even with reasonable adjustments for mortality, the typical retiree today has paid for less than half the Medicare benefits he can expect to receive over his lifetime. Importantly, rising life expectancies will tend to increase benefits more than taxes, making today’s deal better over time.
http://blog.american.com/2009/08/have-seniors-really-paid-for-their-medicare-benefits-cont/
Idiot. They get pensions because there is a contract that agrees to pay pensions. It’s astounding to me that anyone here is ready to ignore contracts. That goes against not only honor and law, but a lot of conservative principles that helped make this country great. Once we can ignore contracts, order ceases to exist.
Ah, yet another “conservative” who wants to ignore contracts. Free Republic is becoming increasingly un-conservative.
Let’s put the politicians where they belong ... at the looped end of a rope maybe? What did they do with thieves in the Old West? And that’s what said politicians have shown themselves to be!
I agree with most of your statement. The only problem I have is with the politicians. The American people put them in office but did not control them. We are at fault to some degree. Now it’s time to fix it. Don’t let them collect full pensions for just serving one term. Don’t let them put all the taxes we pay into a general fund so we can’t track the money. We need to re-do how the politicians operate. They work for us and need to be controlled.
“Ponzi schemes inevitably fail.”
To date, SS has largely been self-financing: that is, the “average” person is paid roughly the same amount they paid into the system. One can quibble about whether they might have done even better (given that retirement savings ought to be earning some sort of rate of return) http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/07/29/youve-been-robbed-the-real-scandal-behind-the-pew-centers-wealth-gap/, but at least there’s ROUGHLY some correspondence.
Medicare is completely different. The “average” person gets about $3 in benefits for every $1 they pay into the system. Thus, anyone who thinks they are “entitled” to Medicare benefits doesn’t understand the extent to which in actuality they are being subsidized by others (read: younger workers who generally are in a worse financial position than the elderly they are subsidizing!).
We could entirely solve the SS problem and still go bankrupt due to Medicare and Medicaid entitlements.
The first Social Security recipient paid in about $24 (total) and received about $24,000 in total payouts.
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I’ll aways remember the guy in his 70s from the Mariel Boatlift Carter let in from Cuba...
Castro opened the prisons and mental asylums and allowed thousands of them to come on boats..
This one guy boasted to the TV camera that he hadnt worked one day in his life in the US but he was already signed up to get SS
But the "federal government" produces nothing, and therefore has no money of its' own.
The money you are claiming is a fraction of the earnings of your fellow citizens. How much of it they fork over in a given tax period is contingent on many things, including how many claimants there are.
The "federal government" has more claims than it has payors - therefore, whatever you think you are "entitled" to, chances are you are not going to get 100c on the dollar.
There is no such thing as an “earned” entitlement - the Supreme Court has spoken definitively on the matter that SS is just another tax and entitles the payer to nothing at all.
I paid a life time of work for my entitlements Soc Sec and Medicare through mandatory payments.
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