As both programs are currently configured participation is mandatory - you must participate.
So lets look at a high level performers Kevin Williamson mentions in his article. Since the taxes are now progressive - the high end performers pay more dollars than the low end performers. After working and paying taxes into both programs for 50 years, or more, they are told - at or near retirement - that they made too much and/or saved too much and/or worked too hard. Now they have to surrender part, perhaps a significant part, of their involuntary decades long contribution to social security and medicare.
What's the difference between this government decision and a robber sticking a gun into your back?
As for any agreed threshold you must remember two things - no Congress is held to any agreement made by a previous Congress. Finally, the 16th Amendment started with tax rates between 1% and 7 %. Prior to the Kennedy tax cuts the top marginal rate was 95%.
Where am I going? Means testing is a method to stealing more money from the producers and doing so when they have no way to recover. Take your monthly income and means test it then live on what is left. If that happens the resulting storm would remove every politician and political thinker from their positions of power. Do it at the end of a person's work history and the politicians and political thinkers might survive, at your expense, because you would be dead long before the case law was decided by the Supreme Court. Oh, excuse me, we can no longer expect to use the Supreme Court to correct mistakes made by the electorate - thank you loads of ** Chief Justice Roberts.
BLUF - Means testing for social security and medicare - it is nothing more than government approved robbery.
1) Social Security and Medicare are “welfare” - inter-generational wealth transfers. They are promises made by politicians which cannot be kept. The left insists on compulsory universal Social Security “Insurance” and Medicare so that it will not be considered as “welfare”.
2) If you don’t believe me, ask the SSA to give you a summary of your SS contributions and estimated SS benefits when you retire. If you know how to work a spreadsheet, prepare one which lists your yearly “contributions” to SS, then double it to include employer “contribution” each year, and predict your contributions until your retirement date. Add interest at whatever rate you think the feds should pay (e.g., 3% per year). This yields the “value” of your contributions at retirement. Now subtract the projected “benefit” payments for the next 20 years of “retirement”. How many years of withdrawals does it take to deplete the value of your contributions?
Check this independently by consulting an insurance agent, and ask him what premiums you would have to pay each year for an annuity which would match the expected SS payments, and compare that to your expected “contributions” — the difference is welfare.
Conclusion: SS is a Ponzi scheme which requires an ever increasing pool of workers to make “contributions” to make the projected payouts. SS payments to middle class workers are subsidized by the working poor. SS is welfare, an inter-generational redistribution of earnings.
Medicare is even worse. Take the same spreadsheet, add up the Medicare “contributions”, and compare them to the cost of a single hospital stay for a moderately critical medical event. Why should a 20 year old with a wife and baby, without the proverbial pot to pee in, pay medicare taxes to subsidize the health care of someone retired with the property and wealth acquired during their working years?
Means testing SS and medicare benefits does not “rob” anyone. Means testing simply limits the amount of welfare provided to the middle class retirees.
If you work through all of these figures and still believe you would be “robbed”, then it could be you are suffering from Ponzi psychology (i.e., shoot the messenger who tells you that you have fallen for a ponzi scheme). See
Social Security, Ponzi Schemes, and Leprechaun Economics
GaryNorth.com ^ | Gary North
Posted on Monday, January 07, 2013 11:04:02 AM by DeaconBenjamin