enough braying
"I ain't got a dime, but what I've got is mine ... I ain't rich -- but Lord, I'm free." --- George Strait, "Amarillo By Morning"
bray: It is patently obvious you DO NOT understand the workings of Social Security. It is NOT a hand out like AFDC or FI or Medicaid. Rather, it is a repayment of taxes that were involuntarily taken from us our entire working lives.
I agree it needs to be reformed. Personally, I would like to see it privatized using a government-defined list of investments that could be made.
I have marketable skills as I do software development in JAVA, C++ and C; for 30 years. To the layman it sounds like an easy job sitting at a computer, doesn't it? Well it's not easy and I can't see me doing this until I am 70. For me it's too stressful. I've had manual labor jobs and those are less stressful believe it or not. I'd like to hear from some in there 60's doing hardcore development, and what its like. Maybe it isn't so bad....
Believe it or not some people have hard stressful jobs unlike journalists, pols and those in management. Not everyone can work until they are 70. I love it when a journalist tell me to just keep working.....
SS is nothing more than another tax. You no more have a claim to it than you have a claim to repayment of your federal income tax liabilities you’ve paid over the years. If it wasn’t just a tax, it wouldn’t be constitutional.
When someone willingly buys into a private Ponzi Scheme and it collapses, I have no sympathy for them. When someone has their earnings confiscated against their will, forcing them into the federal government’s Ponzi Scheme, I believe it is fully acceptable for them to try to get some of it back.
Non-defense spending must be cut.
Cutting outflows from SS and MC will only allow politicians to CONTINUE to spend on non-defense spending, since they will have to kick in less to fund the deficits starting in the OASDI trust funds.
The OASDI trust funds were supposed to be separate; separate contributions (check your paystub) and separate payments from Federal spending
SS and MC are benefits plans, not government spending.
Congress has always been in a mode of automatically diverting SS and MC surpluses to Federal spending from the inception of the programs.
How ? By requiring that surplus cash be “invested” in Treasury bonds. They then spent the cash the Treasury received for the bonds.
We’re getting to the point where there are no more annual surpluses, but OASDI fund deficits.
That is why Congress is trying to “combine” everything and get rid of the idea that they are a separate benefits plan - to avoid having to REDEEM Treasury bonds held by the fund and not simultaneously sell OASDI more bonds (rolling over the debt). Redeeming without rollover is the start of actually using the $2.5 trillion in Treasury bonds the OASDI trust fund “invested” in to actually pay out benefits. Congress HATES the idea of having to pay out the $2.5 trillion it borrowed from AMERICAN SENIOR CITIZENS over the course of their working lives.
My answer is always the same - decrease government spending.
Welfare-type programs for working age, able-bodied people are running in the hundreds of billions. They need to be eliminated or Congress will continue to increase them. And they are devestating on the economy for purposes of squeezing consumers who generate their own income in the private sector with higher prices (inflation). Think about it - all that money must come from taxpayers to pay welfare. But the money is taxed - the taxpayer is not “buying” anything for themselves. You don’t get houses, clothes or cars in exchange for taxes paid if you are a working taxpayer. But the inflation key is on the output side: people who are not working do not produce any goods or services. If they did, there would be a much greater supply of them, but they didn’t, so consumer dollars wind up bidding up the prices on goods and services that are more scarce because less is produced. This is why command economies (communism, socialism, statism, etc.) result in scarcity and therefore poor and hungry citizens, since those economies do not generate robust production of goods and services.
File under things your economics professor never told you.
Great posts and thread. Thanks for the information, kabar.
The greatest fraud ever FORCED on “free” people. It is built on the backs of DEAD Americans. Scheming socialists. Plunder and death...socialism 2.0.
“Socialism Is Legal Plunder” - Bastiat 1801-1850
DEFUND their collectives.
DISMANTLE their schemes.
DEPOPULATE them from the body politic.
“Progressive” plunderers and tyrannical totalitarians have placed many mandates on our existence, our time of life, our labor. We, our children and grandchildren, have become debt slaves to those organizations of sophisticated socialists.
live - “free” - republic
“—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
DEFUND, DISMANTLE, DEPOPULATE.
Managing that with SS also withdrawn from your paycheck all those years is a bit of an accomplishment, actually. I've managed it, although it wasn't always easy. Now two years away from retirement.
What I hear here is that I should be "selfless" and heroic and call that bad debt bad for the benefit of my successors, so they won't be screwed the same way. OK, fine. I'll be able to afford to do that...
IF my successors will keep their greasy fingers away from the money I have managed to save, in terms of taxation, increasing demands for school levies, benefits for THEIR children, and a general attitude on the part of the government that they elected that my 401K is convertible to government bonds for - wait for it - for the sake of my successors. I'm not starving in the prospect that later generations will think me a swell guy, because they won't.
That isn't speculation, it's a fact. You read repeatedly on the mind-numbingly regular boomer-bashing threads that *I* voted for this Ponzi scheme. And you know, I've never missed an election in forty-odd years but I don't recall ever making any such vote. That isn't how it worked.
So I'll offer a deal with my boomer-bashing FR compatriots - I'll forgo any demands on money I really did contribute if you'll keep *your* Democratic administration's hands off the savings I've managed to accumulate. And if you don't like me tagging you with responsibility for electing this travesty of a confiscatory administration, don't accuse me of voting for the SS scam. Deal?