The Comedian's "Economic Holocaust" ping list...
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Posted on 11/14/2010 1:07:03 PM PST by La Enchiladita
Baby boomers withdrawing funds from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going to "crush the system" in a matter of years, a member of President Obama's blue-ribbon commission on the debt warned Sunday.
David Cote, CEO of Honeywell and one of a handful of private-sector chiefs appointed to the 18-member fiscal reform commission issuing its final recommendations on Dec. 1, said he didn't realize -- even perched at the top of his field -- that the next decade will be disastrous to the nation's accounts ledger unless something drastic is done.
"It scares me that as a financially conversant CEO, I didn't know how bad this was going to get in the next 10 years," Cote said on ABC's "This Week." "The thing that everybody misses is it's my generation, the baby boomers, who are going to flow through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It's going to crush the system."
"Social Security is going to go cash negative in five years. It's going to go broke in 2037," added Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., another member of the commission who appeared with Cote.
Medicare is "prepared to go permanently cash negative in just 10 years. So, obviously, those things have to be reformed; there have to be some changes," Conrad said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Don’t forget the very first person to receive SS in the 1930’s was shown as an example by the President how great it was. The lady had never paid a dime into the system, and the taxpayers paid her until she died.
“The reason that medical care is so expensive is largely because of Medicare.”
It is expensive because there is no motivation to control costs anywhere—patients don’t pay for services so they don’t care what they cost, and doctors have no motivation to hold down costs because they make more money with more treatment.
We have to reintroduce capitalism to medical care if we want to reduce the costs. Insurance and government funded care have completely screwed up the medical system.
“’...except they wanted more benefits while paying lower taxes.’
Do you work for the government? Where do you get this?”
Giving more government services and not having the public pay for them is the way politicians have been getting elected and re-elected for at least the last thirty years. Haven’t you noticed? People want strong defense, retirement money, free health care, etc...but they don’t want to pay for them. The politician who assures the public that they can have it all and not pay for it is the one who invariably wins. Haven’t you noticed?
I am ready for that to happen.
See my first post re. SS. It has always been a tax and wealth transfer scheme. Sorry you are just discovering this.
We got along without it for a long time
I suggest we just ELIMINATE it (even though I am in it too). Save the money by everybody becoming self-reliant once again. After all, that is what once made America great.
I’ve you’ve been contributing for 30 years, you’re soon to be an “old fart.” The people who got off with very low contributions and high benefits were actually the parents of the Baby Boom generation. The rest of us have been paying 16+% all of our working lives, mostly on our entire salary or, for higher earners, on 80% of it. So the Boomers are the ones who are likely to get nothing or at any rate very little of what they contributed.
If this money had been sensibly invested, even by the government, we wouldn’t have any problem with SS. But they started treating it as part of the general fund and essentially have spent it as fast as it came in, and not on the people wh ocontributed it.
“The money was stolen starting with LBJ ...
The money was stolen from day 1. It never went anywhere except the general fund, it was always a Ponzi scheme. All that LBJ did was to adjust the accounting to better hide the theft.”
The Government is not fit to handle a dollar.
So who’s more to blame, the pols who lie continually or the electorate who hangs on every word? Do we not bear some, significant, blame for being so lazy and willing to believe lie upon lie? Anyone w/ a brain knows all of it is baloney yet we seem all too happy to trust those who don’t deserve it. In our republic the buck should stop w/ us, the owners. I guarantee you in the end we won’t be absolved by pretending we knew nothing about it.
Please show me were it is promised that SS has a return.
Please tell me what that return is.
So far I am the only poster that has put up any hard proof of what SS is. The laws and court decisions go back decades. I am sorry you SS dependent freepers did not pay attention to anything but your lying politicians.
Based on your logic we are also obligated to pay all of the bloated retirements for all of the governemt retirees. After all they were promised it, paid into it, and they are relying on it, and above all they need it.
Oh let's not forget the bondholders of our governements debt. They too have relied om promises.
Seems to me that older freeper’s generations of politicans have wrote a lot of checks that have somehow have become a sacred obligation of the younger freepers.
Should I start up the quotations from Jefferson on the transfer of sovereign debt from one generation to the next? Or do we only rely on the politicians who promise us a government secured future?
Please show me were it is promised that SS has a return.
Please tell me what that return is.
So far I am the only poster that has put up any hard proof of what SS is. The laws and court decisions go back decades. I am sorry you SS dependent freepers did not pay attention to anything but your lying politicians.
Based on your logic we are also obligated to pay all of the bloated retirements for all of the governemt retirees. After all they were promised it, paid into it, and they are relying on it, and above all they need it.
Oh let's not forget the bondholders of our governments debt. They too have relied om promises.
Seems to me that older freeper’s generations of politicians have wrote a lot of checks that have somehow have become a sacred obligation of the younger freepers.
Should I start up the quotations from Jefferson on the transfer of sovereign debt from one generation to the next? Or do we only rely on the politicians who promise us a government secured future?
You’re confusing liberal / conservative with republican / democrat.
Conservative republicans stayed true to the ideals of small government. Liberal republicans were exactly as you describe - politicians whose idea of governing was to give people stuff in orfer to get re-elected.
Liberals are completely to blame. There are many more of them in the Democrat party but there are plenty in the Republican party as well.
Most become liberal when it is their ox getting gored.
Social Security, private pension funds are already gone. The voters, when they elected Democrats in 2006 and 2008 took care of that problem.
A bit of reality about this situation: I realize that it doesn't resolve your individual problem, but it may help you understand that there was nothing nefarious behind this.
In late 2008, the cost of living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security was calculated for 2009. It happened when fuel prices of all kinds had spiked upwards: heating oil, natural gas, and gasoline. Those prices were factored into the COLA -- which I think was about 6%.
Fuel prices have since settled back down. They have crept up a bit again, and all the other prices used to calculate the the COLA have crept up as well. But, they haven't crept up enough to overcome that temporary spike in fuel prices that boosted the 2009 COLA.
THAT is the reason there has been no COLA in 2010 and will be none in 2011. The COLA in 2009 was larger than actually needed, so the Social Security administration is holding off on future increases until the rest of prices "catch up".
Another way to look at it: the COLA for 2009, 2010, and 2011 were all made at the same time. However, I know it doesn't make it any easier, especially if you budgeted for that 2009 benefit and prices have been creeping up since then.
All that money the feds got from us. “Lockbox” is wide open an the money’s all gone.
For starters stop giving any more SSI money to millions of immigrants who never paid into the system into it and the rest of the loafers who are getting it.
If they are unhappy they can get a job or return to their homelands or even better-—get those who sponsored them to come here to support them.
This is absolutely true. As a nurse, I see so many immigrants (legal or not — who even knows) on Medicare and I ask them, so how long have you lived in the States? Many of them reply with answers such as ten years or LESS. So why do these people get to sign up for Medicare when they haven’t lived here paying into it all their lives??
This is a fraud and scam that is being perpetrated on Americans everyday. There are gazillions of these people, and they’re all aging HERE, expecting us to take care of them. This doesn’t even include the illegals swarming the ER’s.
Us old farts put our money into the system for 40+ years. Based on my life expectancy, I won't get it all back out. Not to mention the lost interest.
I know exactly how much I've put into the Social Security system (and by my employer on my behalf).
I've done a lot of calculations, using the long-term Treasury bond rates since I started contributing. Note that I'm not using any other rate of return (from the stock market or anything else) -- it's the same kind of Treasury bonds that the Social Security "Trust Fund" invests in.
If I had been able to just invest my contributions in a long-term Treasury bond at the average interest rate each year, and reinvest the interest each year at the average interest rate for that year, I'd have about $700,000 right now. And, by the time I actually plan to start receiving Social Security benefits, I'd have about $1,800,000 (assuming very low interest rates on bonds between now and then).
Put another way: if I start receiving benefits at my "normal" retirement age, I'll have to live until age 123 to exhaust the value of my contributions. If I wait until age 70, I'll only have to live until age 111.
Keep in mind that I'm accounting for the time value of money. I'm not just comparing benefits to my contributions: I'm comparing benefits to contributions plus interest, both before and after retirement.
It’s pathetic how the government has handled this, isn’t it? The scenario you have described is exactly how our money SHOULD have been handled. Instead, the Social Security trust fund is now mostly full of I.O.U’s.....because of ridiculously stupid use of that money for “other” things.
This is precisely why WE should have the option to make our own decisions regarding the use of said monies.
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