Posted on 08/15/2018 9:20:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
Social Security is running out of money.
You may not believe that, but it's a fact.
That FICA money taken from your paycheck was not saved for you in a "trust fund." Politicians misled us. They spent every penny the moment it came in.
This started as soon as they created Social Security. They assumed that FICA payments from young workers would cover the cost of sending checks to older people. After all, at the time, most Americans died before they reached 65.
Now, however, people keep living longer. There just aren't enough young people to cover my Social Security checks.
So Social Security is going broke. This year, the program went into the red for the first time.
Presidents routinely promise to fix this problem.
George W. Bush said he'd "strengthen and save" Social Security. Barack Obama said he'd "safeguard" it, and Donald Trump said that he'll "save" it.
But none has done anything to save it.
"There is a plan out there to save it, but it requires some tough choices," says Heritage Foundation budget analyst Romina Boccia.
Heritage proposes cutting payments to rich people and raising the retirement age to 70.
Good luck with that. Seniors vote. Most vote against politicians who suggest cutting benefits.
This summer, interviewing people for my new video about Social Security's coming bankruptcy, was the first time I had heard the majority of such a group say they were aware there is a problem. One said, "We're already at a trillion dollars (deficit) ... (I)t's almost like a big Ponzi scheme."
Actually, more like a pyramid scheme. Ponzi schemes secretly take your money. But the Social Security trick is written into the law -- there for anyone who bothers to look.
Social Security isn't the only hard choice ahead of us. Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. At that point, benefits will automatically be cut. Social Security hits its wall in 15 years.
Amazingly, as we approach this disaster, Democrats say -- spend even more.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proudly announced, "Nearly every Democrat in the United States Senate has voted in favor of expanding Social Security."
How would they pay for it? "Raise taxes on the wealthy!" is the usual answer.
I tried that on Boccia: "Just raise taxes on the rich!"
"There isn't enough money, even that the rich would have," she countered, "to pay for the $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities."
One partial solution proposed by Heritage and others is to let younger workers put some of their Social Security money into their own personal retirement accounts.
"Imagine being able to own and control your own retirement dollars," urged Boccia, with genuine excitement. "You could invest it in businesses, grow the economy, whatever rocks your boat."
If history is any guide, private accounts would almost certainly pay retirees more than Social Security will ever pay.
"Even a conservative portfolio of stocks and bonds that got you about a 5 percent annual return, you would make many times more," said Boccia.
She's right. Money in government hands just sits there or gets spent wastefully; it's rarely invested wisely.
Private accounts have been tried in a few countries. In Chile, the investment they created helped make Chile the richest country in Latin America. (Before, Chile was poorer than most.)
Yet even after that success, leftists in South America hold street protests against private accounts. They're angry because capitalists get a slice of the pie.
I told Boccia that I couldn't understand why people in Chile don't loudly cheer private accounts because of the wealth they'd created.
"We lack gratitude," she replied, "for what the free market provides. That is difficult to wrap your head around. It's easy to think, 'Here is the government. This is where I go.'"
But eventually, even governments run out of other people's money.
Like most American politicians, Donald Trump campaigned saying, "I'm not going to cut Social Security ... not going to cut Medicare."
He and other politicians pretend they're protecting people's futures, but they are not. They're ignoring the inevitable.
Better to fix old-age programs now -- rather than have them suddenly go bankrupt later.
Yes. We should not be allowing SS for anyone who didn’t pay into it. I also think that a great solution may be to raise the age on benefits, but not disability. And maybe one year every four years.
The idea is to create in young workers the mindset that they won’d be eligible until they are really, really old, so they will save on their own.
A lot of people don’t know this, but when SS came into being, people started saving less for their retirement because, after all, SS would take care of it, or most of it. In the end, it’s what I did, forced on my by a divorce.
I figured out that the net present value of what I have put into Social Security assuming a 5% rate of return would be at least $3 million. The net present value of what I will receive will be in the neighborhood of $300,000. One of my professors in the finance department in 1975 warned everybody in all of his classes that this would happen. He predicted it about 1963, before LBJ co-mingled the Social Security fund with the general fund to pay for the Vietnam war.
There is an axiom in accounting. Whenever you co-mingle funds financial disaster follows.
Not everyone can work past 65. I am 77 and I couldn’t work even if I wanted to as I am handicapped.
“The takings clause of the Constitution says retirees are entitled to just compensation of their Social Security takings”
There was a 1960 Supreme Court case that ruled that Social Security payouts were at the full discretion of Congress.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/nestor.html
You buy something with it and pay a sale tax.
Triple taxing!
That’s what SS disability is for.
As I mentioned before. The original SS retirement age was after the national average lifespan. We need to return to that paradigm, still allowing for disability.
If they paid into it, why shouldn’t they get any? They deserve it just like you deserve yours.
In either case, there is NO lockbox and there never has been.
Politicians, of all stripes, will not let a pile of money lay around DC.
What FICA should have done in the very beginning was treat it as a mutual fund and invest those funds in stocks, not government bonds...................
Retirement at 70 is not long enough to save SS. Would have to move the retirement age to 75.
The only time they take social security out twice is if you work when you social security and you earn extra money after what you are allowed to.
Good idea, except that further reduces the current income stream that immediately foes to SS checks and is currently in the RED. SO the obvious question is, where does the shortfall reimbursement come from?
That is all fine and dandy to move the retirement age to 75 if your able to still work at that age. Not everyone is at that age though.
There's not enough money in the general fund to do that, that's the whole idea, it's a cash flow system from payors to payees and it is in the RED slightly which puts great strain on the "general Fund" which is also stressed with helping subsidize all the other welfare programs
Not much difference with the government DB plans, except they were buying votes.
Then it should be privatized keeping the government OUT and keeping your payments in your account.
If only it was that simple, but the same problem is occurring with the Defined Benefit public service retirement systems that are severely underfunded. I say let it crash and burn, state governors say let's increase taxes to bail us out.
Those are two easy ones and will buy it a little time. A third is to cap social security income for the top 1%, then rachet it down to the top 3%, 5%, etc.
There! Fixed it.
Not only did post-17th Amendment ratification FDR era politicians lie to us about vote-winning Social Security (SS), but FDR’s state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices scandalously declared SS to be constitutional imo by bluffing a politically correct interpretation of the Constitutions’s General Welfare Clause (GWC; 1.8.1) in Helvering v. Davis.
"3. Congress may spend money in aid of the "general welfare." —Helvering v. Davis, 1937.
But in stark contrast to FDR’s activist justices arguing that Congress may spend money in the aid of the general welfare, President James Madison had officially indicated that the GWC was not intended to be an express delegation of a specific power, but served as an introductory clause for the 16 clauses that followed it in Section 8 which are delegations of specific powers.
"To refer the power in question to the clause "to provide for the common defense and general welfare" would be contrary to the established and consistent rules of interpretation, as rendering the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper." —Veto Message on the Internal Improvements Bill.
In fact, not only did a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting Supreme Court justices clarify that Congress is prohibited from appropriating taxes in the name of state power issues, basically any issue that Congress cannot reasonably justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers, but also consider this.
The congressional record shows that constitutional lawmaker Rep. John Bingham had clarified that the Founding States had left the care of the people to the states, not the federal government.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”... the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Federal Constitution, is in the States, and not in the Federal Government [emphases added].” —Rep. John Bingham, Congressional Globe, 1866. (See about middle of 3rd column.)
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
The remedy for unconstitutionally big federal government …
Since Pres. Trump has reluctantly had to deal with a corrupt, anti-Trump Congress left over from the lawless Obama Administration, patriots need to support Trump by electing as many state sovereignty-respecting patriot lawmakers as they can who will support Trump's vision for MAGA in the 2018 midterm elections.
And to make Trump's vision for MAGA last as long as possible, patriots also need to support Trump in leading the states to repeal the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments.
Yep !
He advocated offering just 10% of the Social Security account to be privatized and let the future recipients invest and manage it themselves. It would have been voluntary not mandated.
You have thought he wanted to kill the entire SS program according to the democRATS faked outrage at the time (around 2011 I think).
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