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 ...
Tell ya what slick. Look up the system in Galveston county Texas and then come back and ask when I will get to the grief stage. It was evidently long before you were born that some of us realized what this government is.
FWIW I’ve been retired now for some time and am living rather comfortably. I travel in a 40’ coach and have zero debt. Next time you are tempted to over generalize think of the phrase that starts with “better to keep silent”.
If you were prepared for it then you should know better than to call SS anything but welfare.
bookmark
Sorry, no. I don’t really care whether somebody has “paid in” or not. Entire generations of people have now “paid in” without paying the least bit of attention to what was being done with the money, or trying to stop it. So screw ‘em. The SS system could have been fixed, maybe, a number of years ago. We’re well past that time.
Bookmark.
This will be a 500 plus thread.
For later...
Contracts are voided all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Heck, in one of my old jobs Coke and Pepsico were famous to ignoring any contract that went against their own interest at any time.
There is no money. None. The promises made were lies then, and lies now.
Do we work to change that or just collapse the system?
I cringe to say that, but it is the truth. You can't just stop working for thirty years and expect that someone else take care of you.
My grandfather died at 83, my father will probably not make that, and I will be lucky to make it as long as either of them. There is no money, and I will expect my kids, or grand kids, to pay for me. It is my job to save for them.
We got turned around as a society somewhere.
“Just a little more on military retirement:
1) Move where and when you are told.”
All of your points were good, however I’d like to add to this one. This results in not being able to purchase a home and build that equity, although recently this isn’t very detrimental! ;-)
It’s not the baby boomer generation that ruined the system. That generation by and large consisted of hard workers who paid into the system for a lifetime and didn’t use the system until retirement. It was and is the generations since who have learned to scam the system.
What you and others are demanding is that we,and our kids, pay up to three times more than you put in.
Simply put, demographics are going to crush SS. When the Boomers start retiring, there will not be enough people working to pay the taxes to keep them all on the level of benefits promised. They didn’t have enough kids, and are living much longer.
But I will compromise. I will pay for you, and will expect not to receive one red cent from SS. But it ends with my generation. Tax everyone over 35 (I will 36 soon), but leave my kids out of it.
All my life I had to shoulder the burden for those who could or would not. That is my lot in life. But I will not stand by and let others saddle the next generation with crushing debt because they were lied to. It has to stop.
“- - - lets refocus this discussion into solutions - - - - “
The solution was given to us by none other than the protegee of FDR, yep, the father of THE GREAT SOCIETY, LBJ himself !
LBJ told all of his cabinet members to put on his desk their plan to cut 15 % off their department’s expenditures. Somewhere in “Freedom of Information World” is LBJ’s Master cutting plan. ( Are you listening Freeper sleuths? )
Even though LBJ never used the plan to give us “Guns and Butter” as he put it, LBJ did “did turn down the lights in the White House.”
Wow! What symbolism! The Liberal Intelligentsia Elite ( L.I.E. ) Media were so pleased that the financial crisis of the day was over that Federal spending has never looked back on those dark days, so long ago.
My point is that the US Federal Government will never agree to where or how much to cut spending.
Hence, use LBJ’s Master Plan and cut every part of the Federal Government equally.
My humble, but always correct plan:
1. Cut baseline salaries for all Federal employees, contractors, advisors, and other’s others 5 % per year, starting on the third anniversary of the US Congress permanent cancellation of the US Budget. ( October 1, 2011 ).
2. Cut the baseline salary of all members of Congress 10 % per year retroactive to September 15, 2008, and continuing until the National Debt is paid in full. ( I know, but make it the end of the Month if you like).
3. Privatize all “Entitlement” Programs that will not be solvent by the time the current National Debt Ceiling is reached. ( Don’t use the Can’t Be Obama projections).
4. Have each elected Federal politician sign “THE MAGNA DEBTA” which states that the United States of America is NOT to big to fail.
5. Freeze all “Entitlement” plan enrollments, so the burden purchased by private companies will be minimized during the “entitlement” privatization bidding process.
6. Rigorously enforce the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law against all US Federal Trust Funds.
7. Pay off the Total USA National Debt.
Good post.
We really have gotten turned around. We have gone from parents and grandparents helping their kids start off in life with a down payment on a house or money for furniture to the point where the grandparents and parents take 7% to 10% of their kids’ and grandkids’ checks every week to support themselves.
And, in part, it is an unintended consequence of the destruction of the extended family. Families used to live together and all chip in for expenses. A son lived with his parents until he got married. He didn’t sit on his ass without a job like some of today’s kids do. He worked and paid some of the expenses while still being able to save for a down payment on a house when he got married. And then when the parents got old, they moved in with the kids.
At some point in the 60s that changed to the point where neither parents nor kids want to live together. And the result is that the parents need Social Security to live a decent life. The brutal truth is that America can’t afford it anymore. We are not the wealthy nation we were. We squandered the wealth over about 40 to 50 years. Parents and kids are going to have to live together again because we, as a society, can’t afford to subsidize them living separately. It won’t impact today’s seniors. There is still enough borrowing power to let them live as they are. But within the next 20 or 30 years, its going to be blindingly obvious that we are broke and the credit card has been maxed out.
Flemming v. Nestor 1960. Look it up. Here's the cache from the SS gov website itself (interestingly the page appears to have been erased recently!)
Mind you this is 51 years that this has been the case, so there's no excuse for any person not to be aware of the terms under which Social Security is collected (by force) and distributed (at the sole discretion of the government).
This whole time too, the Boomer generation knew it was unusually large and had every reason to know that attempting to retire and collect SS payments en masse would crash the system. For 51 years they voted and voted and voted and time and time again they declined to change the system. When the time came to step up to the plate, they made Social Security the "third rail of American politics" (I heard that phrase so often I get nausea even quoting it.) They have ZERO reason to complain at the mathematically inevitable consequences of their own actions.
I guess personal responsibility joins property rights in the garbage bin of principles discarded when there's real money on the line.
You are correct. I was just making a list off the top of my head. Didn’t take too much thinking either.
Thank you!
Oh yes there is.
Ya find it ironic the corrupt bloated government continues to subsidies millions of illegal aliens on the backs of the tax payers, but tells the tax payers their too broke to pay Americans for what they seized from their pay checks over the course of their work histories.
If the corrupt government is broke, how are they possibly able to support half of Mexico in the U.S.?
Are they using the income from Americans to pay for millions of illegal aliens? Yes they are.
Americans are not only being gang raped by this government, but their being robbed while getting raped.
There is a solution to this.
I already told my kids they better study hard, so that they can afford a nice, big house, because we're moving in.
And there is nothing wrong with it!! I told my mother she can come live with us. I have two extra rooms at this point. My friend turned her large basement into a “mother in law suite” that is really nice. It has a separate entrance so its not like the parents and kids are in each others’ hair. Its a great solution, especially if you have kids who need to be watched or taken places. As long as there is some ability to each have your own space. I hear seniors who say they won’t move in with their kids because they don’t want to be a “burden” and I just shake my head.
You were educated in the public school system weren’t you.
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