Posted on 02/16/2023 7:18:13 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Currently we are hearing a great deal of consternation from the Left about the planned sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare. To them, this signifies Republicans stealing food from the mouths of their babies. Can you not feel the pathos?
For those who are not in the grips of emotion, conservatives have been warning about these entitlements, or payments made to citizens instead of to an agency, since they began with the income tax in 1913.
Our forefathers back then told people that any free program becomes an alternative to the responsible way of doing things, so people shift their costs to the free program and soon demands expand toward infinity. Infinite demand leads to Soviet-style collapse.
Since the income tax began and funded the entitlements, government spending in this sector has risen over a hundredfold and now is the major item in our budgets. Our economy changed since 1950 from being free market to being government-directed because such a huge part of our economy consists of payments from D.C. A quick look at our budget shows that of our $4.8tn mandatory spending every year, $4tn of it comprises three programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and welfare -- and that this swelling has caused our inflation crisis by diluting our money supply since WW II.
Fast forward a few decades and we have $32tn in debt, almost all of it from entitlements. We can repay war loans but no one can stop the slow grinding advance of the free stuff from government, and a sensible observer will note that leftism has risen along with the entitlements. The more people who depend on the free stuff, the more people vote leftist, especially among the young.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The last time we had conditions like this, the Great Depression was raging because that income tax in 1913 led to rapid inflation which caused speculation to rage out of control, culminating in a stock market crash and run on the banks. America got out of that depression only by going to war, and humanity saw how world war makes big winners. Whoever wins gets to keep their economy while everyone else starves, as Europe did up through the 1960s.
Going after SS is a foolish strategy and anyone suggesting this is a deep state shill.
We are at war; have been for a long time.
It’s just that most of us are content to eat sand while being distracted by the likes of those who bluster about foreign matters while we’re destroyed from within.
There is no political will for such a thing. I don’t see the entitlement spending requiring war, though it will likely lead to serious inflation and a universally lower standard of living for nearly all.
All of the money is intentionally part of the General Fund to make it available to politicians to buy your vote on non-value added projects.
The debt will NEVER be paid, not a dime.
Entitlements will never be reduced.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the end game.
> Going after SS is a foolish strategy and anyone suggesting this is a deep state shill. <
I half agree with you. Gong after Social Security truly is a foolish strategy. The necessary of reforming SS aside, it would shove the GOP into minority status forever. Then if you think deficit spending and government wokeness is bad now...look out below.
Cut elsewhere. There are many places to do that.
But I don’t think every SS reformer is a shill. Most of them are just hopelessly naive. And that’s probably as dangerous as being a shill.
To get to the point, the article is BS....a real load.
Social security is not a free gimmee. I paid what amounts to insurance premiums for many years. The only difference in social security and an ordinary insurance policy is that social security is a system mandated by law and enforced by the government.....and mismanaged by the government.
So now we are to be penalized by the very government that passed the law, enforced the law and then mismanaged the money?
There in a nutshell you have the lack of wisdom and the incompetence of liberal big government.
Also return the Graham-Ruddman-Hollings laws. Obama repealed them. "Free money for Beltway bureaucrats" was the result.
It appears that this article has a compelling headline with content that doesn’t support it. The author does a terrible job of making the case that entitlements and world war are an either-or scenario.
“Social Security can NOT be “going broke” because there is no Federal SSI “lock box”.”
But Al Gore assured us!
BIGLY ditto on that, FRiend.
Our participation in the Ukraine war can, and should, be terminated regardless of entitlement spending. The need for a connection is phony.
Social Security is essentially "forced retirement savings" funded by garnishing wages (FICA) from both working employees and the employers that hire them. (Many people don't realize that their FICA contribution is only half of what it actually is, because employers are required to pay the other half).
Nobody should have a problem with older people drawing a Social Security check after a lifetime of working. After all, they and their employer paid into it all those years.
Welfare and SSI Disability are where the real abuses are occurring. This is nothing but a transfer of money from those who work to those who do not work.
Eliminating those programs from the Federal Government (states and local governments can do as they wish) will leave plenty of money to fulfill the promises made to the working people who spent all those years putting money into the Social Security program.
The government wastes too much money on stuff everyone knows is garbage for them to ever go after Social Security. The optics alone would kill any politicians career
“Oh you want to starve grandma …didn’t you just vote to give Rwanda a billion dollars to study butterflies??”
“Social Security, Medicare, and welfare”
Wait just a minute!
Don’t lump “welfare” in with Social Security and Medicare!
We PAID FOR Social Security and Medicare. (I paid INTO Social Security for forty-six years)
Welfare recipients DID NOT PAY for welfare. Likely paid nothing into Social Security and Medicare either.
Apples and watermelons!
STOP paying these lowlifes and lazy bums to sit around smokin’ weed and/or drinkin’ moonshine, and pumping out babies they refuse to support.
CUT EVERYTHING ELSE instead.
I’m sure I’m not the only one out there.
Socialist always say they paid something. These are all ponzi schemes. The us cannot afford these schemes. Massive cuts will happen, in one way or other via market forces, hyper inflation, etc but we will all suffer. Gen x, y, a, more
Yes, the article is provocative nonsense.
Social Security and Medicare are not “free stuff”, they are paid for by taxes. They can be adjusted by bi-partisan agreement only, but not terminated.
Who is the WEF that their opinion should be trusted?
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