I've PAID for Socil Security and Medicare for 45 f'n years. The other stuff is giveaways, paid for by picking the pockets of working Americans to give to the (largely) indigent class. And what about the illegals, here to vacuum the pockets and purses of working Americans so they can have six or seven bastards to flood our schools and commit crimes ? Are THEY "entitled" ?
Dont' talk to me about Social Security and Medicare until you deport every single "public charge" parasite and their spawn. All the people riding in the wagon should lose their sinecures FIRST, not the elderly who've paid into ths crap their whole lives.
Entitlements, my ass.
I agree with you Jim but any minute now comes the brigade to call us moochers and welfare bums. F.’em.
Obama Spending Cliff File.
Hey, who needs retirement supplements?
Everybody just keep working and work harder....millions depend on you.
I also want to puke when I hear about Santabama’s “Middle class tax cut” which is nothing more than de-funding SS & Medicare.
Ummmmmmm. Yeah.
And there's a reason for that ...
Currently employed as an engineer, I included my pay there along with my pensions and discovered that 85% of my social security benefit will be subject to taxation.
I checked it out without my full-time job pay. No change.
I am going to apply for social security starting in April. I fully expect that Obama and his pet RATS will means test me out of it within a couple of years, anyway.
I need to have my other knee replaced as well as my left shoulder. I hope I can get those done in 2013, because starting in 2014, I will be considered not worthy of being a recipient of a scarce, societal resource.
Do you know what the word “entitlement” means? Because your argument for why they aren’t entitlements is a better argument for why they should be considered so far more than the freebies you mention. The definition, I should think, is that the government is liable for them because of promises it has made. You’re saying is you are entitled to them because you paid for them. So why not call them entitlements?
By the way, you did not pay for your SS and Medicare. You were taxed, and that revenue went towards whatever it went towards. What you will or will not be paid in future has no connection with what you paid in the past. That’s merely what they wanted you to think, whitch is why originally it was sold as an insurance scheme.
If you end up getting benefits it will only be because they are taking money from other people they may or may not eventually give money, which will have been taken from other people altogether.
“Don’t talk to me about Social Security and Medicare until you deport every single ‘public charge’ parasite and their spawn.”
We’re gonna hear a lot of this in the coming years. Oh, yeah. “My welfare’s better’n yours.”
Sorry dude. Social Security is a wealth transferring entitlement program. The nominally conservative middle American clinging to his “I paid in to this” SS program is on the same side as Roosevelt and Obama.
Any economic program relying on seizing wealth from one neighbor to give it to another neighbor based on the condition of that neighbor is wealth transfer and an entitlement program.
I’ve benefited from SS just like anybody else, but we can’t go around claiming that SS is somehow different than food stamps.
“I’ve PAID for Socil Security and Medicare for 45 f’n years. “
More correctly, you paid for someone elses social security and medicare entitlement for 45 years. The sad fact is that now that you have come around to collect your entitlement there isn’t enough money from other people to pay you.
That’s just the way it is.
Big Government will disappoint every time.
Except the trust fund is more national debt borrowed to buy back those IOUs the gov gave itself. So it is bankrupting us right NOW.
I oppose any ‘reform’ until this is made clear.
Until then Here's my reform : cut those benefits now and save the phony trust fund for my retirement, its all a scam anyway, let the scam benefit me.
The propaganda blackguarding of the word “entitled entitlement” is underway folks.
Bound, free, to earn, labor, camp, an income, State Banking;Insurance Fascist Riders;
Wait till “they” (two Parties using Federal power to enrich their assets at the expense of the People), define:
Retirements as “entitlements” (401K, etc.,)
“Life” insurance as “entitlements” (Mandate #2, you know “personal responsibility”
You will get more back by far than what you paid in. That is
Welfare.
The problem is that you haven't paid enough for the benefits you receive. Did you know that by law, the premiums you pay for Medicare Parts B and D only pay for 25% of the costs? The rest--75%--comes from the General Fund. In 2011 the GF ponied up $222 billion to pay for Medicare Parts B and D. And the Medicare Trust Fund (Part A) has been running in the red since 2008.
This graph shows that the average man and woman (average defined in the study as average income over their working lives and living to the average life expectancy) who start receiving benefits in 2010 get over 3 times more in benefits than they pay in to the system! Of importance, the study accounts for inflation by calculating all past taxes and future payments in 2010 dollars to provide an accurate comparison.
If the notion that Medicare recipients are simply "getting back what they paid in" is false then where is the money coming from? Simply, the excess received is being borrowed from younger generations and the cost is more than we can bear.
Every time I hear that Social Security and Medicare are "entitlements", listed right along with Medicaid, food stamps, TANF, SSI, ad nauseum, I want to puke.
I want to puke every time I hear someone say they have paid for their Medicare and SS benefits. The Dems have brainwashed the public that somehow these benefits are paid for. Nothing could be further from the truth. These programs are unsustainable and the benefits are being paid for by increasing our debt and borrowing. 42 cents of every federal dollar spent is borrowed, and that includes the so called entitlement programs.
Why do we need Pell grants? Because the cost of receiving a college education keeps rising and rising, to the point that students can't get jobs to cover the costs. Instead, they take on an enormous amount of debt up front, and pay for it the rest of their lives. This is education? Too bad the students don't learn from it.
I'm all for national standards, I push them at every opportunity as a solution to the medical cost crisis. If the Department of Education would stick to just setting standards, to be adopted by the States, that would be a good use of money. All other spending can be cut, and we would be a better country for it.
Ditto the Environmental Protection Agency. Provide guidance to the States, not ram the ideas of 0.001 percent of the population down the throats of everyone else. If the Sierra Club thinks that something is a good idea, let them lobby the 50 legislatures directly. Or the thousands of county legislatures.
What I would love to see is a tax form you file with the IRS, that has major line items of the Budget of the United States listed, with three checkboxes: Approve, Disapprove, Don't-Know. Lazy people can omit the form, and would be counted as "don't-know". The tabulation would provide Congress with *real* input as to "what the people want." But it will never happen.
How about making it part of the 10-year Census poll? Would that be more acceptable to everyone? It wouldn't be as reactive.
Oh, that's right. We don't have an agreed-to budget.
How about making the full United States Budget -- when the President and the Congress get around to it -- available on CD-ROM, to anyone who asks? To reduce the cost, use a government server to host an ISO image, which can be downloaded and burned by interested people onto $0.99 blanks using Windows or Macintosh or Linux. (At the library perhaps, or at Fedex Office.)
Here's an idea: continuing resolutions require a 10-percent spending cut and head-count cut for the departments affected by the continuing resolution. That will put pressure on the President, House, and Senate to create and approve a budget so that appropriations in the form of a continuing resolution can "fully fund" the government. And expose the largess to the public. Especially when published on something more portable than the Greater New York Phone Book.
For the record, "Entitlements" is a term of art in Washington DC, not a judgment on the worthiness of the funds. As other people have pointed out, Social Security was sold as an insurance system, but executed as a Ponzi scheme. You and I "paid" our way in those systems, all our working lives. Ditto Medicare. The idea that people who have never sent a single dollar to Our Capitol are "entitled" to money taken from us at the point of a gun is sad, and not in keeping with our heritage.
I'm not heartless, but I'm a firm believer in the adage "give a person a fish and they eat for a day; teach a person to fish and they eat for years."
Disaster relief: Hurricane Sandy taught me that some people just don't want help, they want help on their terms. Take those electricians who came up from Alabama to help get city people back on the grid as quickly as possible, only to be turned away because they came from a "right to work" state. That tells me that New York City doesn't need help to get back on its feet. New Jersey? If it happened there, then the same to them. I bring this up because disaster relief is another entitlement -- don't want it, don't take it and lump it.
Bank Bailout: I'm also "heartbroken" about the people on Wall Street, who became the new members of the Entitlement Class. So I like the idea of taxing every single financial transaction with a value of $50 or more.
All transactions of $50 or more. Every stock and option trade. Every welfare check. Every payment to a vendor or employee. Every refund. Every rent/lease check. Every bonus check. Every withdrawal from an ATM machine. Every EBT transaction. Every contribution to a political campaign. Every credit card transaction. Payments to your IRA. Even deposits to your Christmas Club account. Anything involving a bank or other financial institution.
This would be a targeted tax, specifically to pay back all the money borrowed by the Federal government. Paying off the credit card, as it were.
This would include all government checks $50 or more, without exception. (Tax on the government? Why not? It's only fair that the departments that are part of the problem become part of the solution. It exposes the volume of payouts for everyone to see.)
What about cash transactions between non-bank people and companies? Exempt. Cash deposits and withdrawals to and/or from a financial institution? Not exempt. Inter-bank loans, and bank/Fed loans? Not exempt. (Think of this fee on bank-to-bank loans as "points" to help pay off the debt.)
My formula would be different, though: five cents per instrument plus 0.01 percent of the money exchanged.
Why the $50 floor? To make the tax progressive, so that children with their nickles and dimes don't see a huge part of their transaction go to the government. Don't like that floor? I'm not married to the amount, just the rationale for having a floor. Besides, think what retailers would do to price things just below the floor to boost volume?
There is a risk. The whole Boston Tea Party was a reaction to the Stamp Tax imposed by England. My proposal could be viewed as a modern version of the Stamp Tax. But then again, we have post-Revolution precedent that this is an acceptable way to dig ourselves out of a fiscal hole. We just have to make damn sure it doesn't become permanent. (It's going to run quite a few years as it is.)
We are entitled to be free of debt imposed by other people. That includes our representatives in Congress and the White House. The proposal by Obama of using just the 1 percent just won't do the job. Everybody has to pitch in. And I do mean everybody.
My constant question is why the first thing policitans of both parties want to cut is SS and Military pensions and benefits.
Why does no one mention the hundreds of billion spent annually on illegals, brand new immigrants on the dole, legal immigrants who work at such low salaries that their jobs are subsidized by tax payers, $25,502 million in foreign aid to countries that hate us, eliminating some less than useless cabinet departments (e.g. Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration, slashing the budgets of the remaining cabinet departments, $ 8 billion per year on communist Chinese students, fixing up Mexican trucks to compete with americans. etc
They want to destroy the Worlds Reserve Currency. That is their plan for the future. That is their hope and change.
People often get out a lot more than they “paid in”
Guess what, people pay taxes too.... so I guess there is no such thing as an entitlement and wasteful spending at all
we were all worried about nothing