Posted on 01/02/2011 10:24:47 AM PST by rabscuttle385
Seniors should be older before the receive Social Security and wealthy Americans should receive less benefits across the board, says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
He made the argument in an interview on Sunday's Meet the Press, but it's a position Graham has advocated for on the stump in South Carolina, including a 2009 stop at The Citadel with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"What I'm going to do is challenge this country to make some hard decisions," Graham said at the time, telling the crowd of cadets, Tea Partiers, and Graham supporters that they shouldn't give Congress a pass on the tough stuff.
(Excerpt) Read more at charlestoncitypaper.com ...
Many of those under-65 disabled people have multiple sclerosis, end-stage kidney disease and a few other goodies. Should we cut them off too?
Looks like a white flag to me. You can get mad all you want, but this argument is ceding the political battlefield to the Marxists at the get-go.
No, there isn’t sufficient money “in” Social Security to meet future liabilities as the program is structured now.
First of all, there are so many misconceptions about what Social Security is and isn’t here on this thread it makes me want to scream.
What Social Security is:
1. An entitlement. If you meet the benefit class qualifications, you are entitled to the benefit. It is therefore NOT welfare, which is means tested.
If Social Security were to become means-tested (ie, disallow “the wealthy” from collecting), then it would become a welfare program. The reason why the Democrats do NOT want means-testing of entitlement benefits is that it devolves their most popular program into a mere welfare scheme, and people won’t and don’t like paying into welfare schemes. The cunning scheme of the Social Security fraud in the first place was the entitlement aspect, where so many people were duped into thinking that what is basically a ponzi scheme was “their money.”
2. There is no such thing as a Social Security “fund.” There is no pot of money that is set aside for “Social Security” or “Medicare,” “Medicaid” or any of the other entitlement schemes. They’re all structured like a ponzi scheme, where new people paying into the “fund” are providing the funds which are used to pay out the benefits being withdrawn by currently elegible people.
Like a Ponzi scheme, the “pay-as-you-go” entitlement schemes (as they’re now structured all over the OEDC 12 countries) are facing the exact same problem(s) as any ponzi scheme faces when it hits the wall: a declining number of new “investors” paying in money to pay out to the people who got in early. This problem is NOT unique to the US. Japan, much of western Europe, the US and the Scandinavian countries are facing the same big problem to greater or lesser extents: a “baby boomer” bulge of claimants is becoming eligible to withdraw funds from the systems at the same time two other problems are converging: rapidly rising costs of medical care and rapidly rising life expectancies.
3. The money paid into Social Security in excess of benefit withdrawals from the 60’s through about 2007 was spent on everything else by the government. The surplus is gone. Spent. Frittered away on everything else by loaning it to the “general fund” by buying Treasury debt as we were engaged in deficit spending. As the Social Security fund pays out more money than it takes in, the “fund” will pull Treasury notes and bonds out of their filing cabinets and redeem them, which will increase the amount of money that the US Treasury needs to raise in new debt.
4. When Social Security was first structured, the age 65 was the median life expectancy of men in the US. This means that HALF of adult males were DEAD by the age 65. That solved a whole lot of mathematical issues of a ponzi scheme - structuring the benefit starting age at such a point where the pool of eligible claimants was going to start declining rapidly.
Today, the median life expectancy of men in the US is 75+ years (for males born today) and the life expectancy for females born today is over 80.
In 1900, the life expectancy for males born in the US was something like 49 years.
Right there is THE crux of the problem. The “Grey Panther” movement of the 70’s and their red welfare warrior, Claude Pepper, fought tooth and nail to prevent raising the retirement age of SS/Medicare/Medicaid to keep track with the rapid rise in life expectancy. Now we’re in a situation where we have to cram 40 years of adjustments into a very small period of time. In 1950, there were over 16 people paying into Social Security for every senior withdrawing benefits, and today there’s only about 3.3 people paying into SS for every person withdrawing benefits. There is NO way that the math of this continues working as the Boomer Bulge starts rapidly increasing the number of claimants on the system while we have no rapid increase in the number of people paying into the system.
What we have always had in Social Security is a transfer of money from the younger generation who is paying into the program to the old people who are withdrawing money from the program. There is no account “set aside,” there is no “lock box,” there is nothing but accounting sleights of hand at the US Treasury and Social Security administration as to where the money comes in and goes out.
Well, the time of cashing the IOUs is upon us, and that money comes out of the general fund (so the general fund is technically paying the SS Trust back). But the general fund lacks the cash to do it. So we borrow yet again, issuing another IOU to someone else to keep this whole charade going. Eventually someone is going to have to kick over the cash to square the books.
But all I hear right now is “Not me!” Too many people are willing to kick this fiscal tin can down the road so someone else has to deal with it. The time to solve it is now, because it will only get harder every year.
On a couple of side notes about your post; the budget surplus Clinton was talking about was actually the SS surplus for that year. He knew that it wasn't going to shore up squat, so he used it for a soundbite the MSM would lap up. Boy did they.
And second, the only prohibition on standing armies in the Constitution is of duration of appropriations for it at any one time. It sets a limit of two years for the funding of it.
Many of those under-65 disabled people have multiple sclerosis, end-stage kidney disease and a few other goodies. Should we cut them off too?
Please read what I said, rather than putting up straw-man arguments. I'm not talking about legitimate physical disabilities, I'm talking about rooting out faked disabilities and cutting off the addicts.
“Let’s take a stab at trimming back gov’t employee benefits (perhaps means testing?)”
I think anybody who gets a check from the government - no matter what it’s from - should be concerned that those checks will stop.
Exactly.
The only people who EVER believed that Social Security (and all the other entitlements) would not be in this situation today are the people who are innumerate enough to believe the political twaddle substituting as “analysis” of the actuarial and demographic issues that cause even government-sponsored ponzi schemes to fail.
This is yet another case of where people who have the mathematical background we engineers do were never suckered into this nonsense. It was always, always mathematically unsustainable. Always.
All ponzi schemes are. Even when they’re called “entitlements” and sponsored by the government.
Indeed, that is the whole argument to me - whose checks bounce first.
Reduce benefits for those who paid the most? That is fair, how, exactly?
The ONE battle that every conservative should join is to have entitlements means tested.
Once these benefits become means tested, they devolve into mere welfare schemes and they lose their political “third rail” status.
Raising the retirement age is mathematically necessary to string these ponzi schemes along for perhaps a decade more, but means testing is THE way that we get to start salami-slicing Social Security and other entitlements to a death of a thousand cuts. Breaking the entitlement legal status and turning these programs into welfare is the liberals’ Rubicon - they know that once we cross that threshold, these programs are dead. All we’re going to argue about after we means-test these programs is how quickly they die. But they will die, count on it.
Well, then it comes down to how the politirats define “means testing”. That will be another 1000-page law.
“Indeed, that is the whole argument to me - whose checks bounce first.”
I think really, at this point it’s whether we want EVERYONE’s gov’t checks to bounce.
Since the easiest thing, politically, is to pretend to “cut spending” while still increasing spending - that is what will happen, until it can happen no longer.
To manage things would mean to make judgments about someone not getting “their” check. That’s not a strong suit of Congress.
I ain't ready to let them off the hook. I demand they prioritize. How about you?
Any welfare scheme is political third rail in the view of their recipients.
What really matters is how the public reacts to video of bums lying under newspapers & poor children with flies in their noses on the nightly news.
We haven't been able to get rid of a single scheme yet.
You've swerved into the real solution of the problem - control of the flow of information.
I think, generally, the arguments revolve around the age of the poster. For me, about to begin drawing, to hell with the “means testing” (provided the definition is based purely on assets), it is unfair (and I pay double rate as a sole proprietor).
The other argument is to crash the system as soon as possible to at least stop the insanity of the SS ponzi scheme, even it means losing what we long-timers have put in over the decades. And hopefully come up with another system that is equitable. This argument would lean toward the younger crowd who have not “invested” as much.
We have, however, been able to seriously cut some schemes.
Once a transfer payment is no longer an “entitlement,” and means-tested, we can set other conditions upon receipt of the money as well, just as we do for other welfare transfer payments.
The GOP got rid of FDR’s Depression-era farm welfare scheme... only to replace it with something more expensive because too many in the GOP are too stupid to hold the line and allow dependence upon government payments to die out.
We now are in a situation where the entitlement schemes will cause the financial downfall of the US, and within 10 years. Bond rating agencies are already warning of downgrades to the US AAA status. Once we start down that road, the cost of rolling the national debt starts to go up - rapidly. Thanks to the profligacy of the last 10 years and especially the last two, we’re now compressing the debt maturity horizon ever-closer, so when our cost of borrowing does go up, the interest cost on the national debt is set to explode upwards in a very short period of time.
“I ain’t ready to let them off the hook. I demand they prioritize. How about you?”
I don’t want to sound like I’m discouraging you, but how do you plan on demanding anything? I vote for the most fiscally conservative candidates that I can vote for.
Congress is not going to make judgments on cutting programs - they ARE willing to discuss the relative merits of new spending programs, but collectively, never about cutting.
This is a GOP and a Democrat trait.
Short of tarring-and-feathering (which I am NOT against) - nothing will be effective.
I’m at a loss - how do you “demand” anything from a Congress that is never punished (pushed out of office in large enough numbers) for doing the wrong thing?
It won’t happen until the checks stop - and then the priority will only be to get the checks going again.
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