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My financial advisor, who's pretty conservative, showed me a chart of the market, relative to every crisis that happened around the world in the last 100 years. That includes wars, currency crisis, recessions and depressions, you name it.
Yet here we are, Dow 19k, solid home lending, and low unemployment. How is it possible if everything is supposed to crash all the time?
I'm not saying this with any political slant, I'm not saying this as a cheerleader or bear, I'm just saying that we somehow seem to always get along. The sun rises everyday.
Not for the foreseable future. With Exxon chief becoming Foreign secretary, there will another boom cycle to boost revenues for the .1$%.
I don't doubt, even for a minute, that measures can be devised to prevent a total financial meltdown; some of them, such as Supplemental Security Income (which is financed from general revenues, rather than Social Security payroll taxes), are already in place. Elderly widows ravaged by the inflation of the Seventies were the first beneficiaries, but I'm given to understand that the prime clients are now "displaced breadwinners", usually mature males, from sectors of the economy hit hardest by globalization.
SSI was established in 1972 -- before all the Arab oil embargo inflation got underway. Regardless of what you may have been given to understand, it was and still is a welfare program to assist elderly blind and disabled people with very low incomes and assets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2nd trick op
More foresighted measures have been introduced within the framework of Social Security; those who retire at the new age standards (66 or 67 instead of 62) can now earn any amount without reduction of benefits, and increases for those delaying retirement up to 70 & 1/2 are still in effect.
Your eventual monthly benefit will increase for every month you wait between age 62 and full retirement age. It will increase even more for each month you wait between full retirement age and age 70. Age 70½ is the point at which you must begin Required Minimum Distributions from an IRA.
Removing the wage cap while not removing the benefit cap would more than fund SS forever.
The current SSTF surplus is meanwhile better than $2.8 trillion. There are no markets that could efficiently handle such a large sum coming in and then going out again according to known schedules. The feasibility of investing federal trust funds in assets other than US Treasuries was looked into during the Clinton administration. The bottom line then was "bad idea." Nothing has changed since.
While the tax rate for SS has not been changed since 1983, the wage base increases in most years. For 2017, it is $127,200 up from $118,500 last year. Only about 7% of earners will be affected by the increase though.
Their attempt talk about the devastating marginal rates is commical because marginal rates don't mean anything to me and they don't for you either. Their example at marginal rates for a single 125k earner is 1400 which would or should mean nothing to said single filer 125k earner.
You may as well try to opt out of income taxes. SS is an insurance program, not an investment program. You are required to carry coverage if you work in a covered position. UI and workman's comp coverage are also commonly mandated
Exactly. One cannot get interest on a program where an individual has no balance.
Their attempt talk about the devastating marginal rates is commical because marginal rates don't mean anything to me and they don't for you either. Their example at marginal rates for a single 125k earner is 1400 which would or should mean nothing to said single filer 125k earner.
What do you mean by mean nothing. When I was working I can't wait until I max out on my SS because that means more money o my pocket.
Just paid a visit to Facebook page; full of the usual rants about "protecting" Social Security and Medicare. What disturbs me most is that so much of the ranting revolves around the old, and mistaken belief, held among so many of the more simplistic over there, that "I paid into it, and now I want my money back".
You just can't seem to get these individuals to understand that Social Security doesn't maintain individual accounts; that the system merely takes from those still working to pay those who aren't, and that the ratio between those two groups continues to deteriorate.
No matter how many times the facts are repeated, there remains a large, and completely delusional clientele who cannot understand that: (1) Social Security is little more than a Ponzi scheme; (2) that the end of American dominance of a global economy means that wages in many industries will be depressed, and (3) a heavier burden is falling on a diminishing number of younger workers.
Those of us with a bit better education and a realistic picture of the problem are going to be able to defend ourselves. but what happens when an economically-ignorant mob comes looking for somebody to blame?
I checked into your diary because I was curious as to which "economic melt down" your thread title referred to. Well, suffice to say that it's not the one I was hoping it would be and that I am disappointed in your oversimplified logic (?) in what you assume people mean when they say that they want their money out of the system they paid into. A simpleton even knows that there are no individual accounts maintained in the system. Ironically there were failed GOP effort to push us into such individual & privatized accounts after George Bush was re-elected in 2008 but they failed miserably along with other aspects of his administration.
A good dose of honesty in looking at the problems of social security, which are solvable with an application of old-fashioned American will power, & an acknowledgement of the partisan & misleading nature of the the attacks upon it would have been refreshing here. As such, your thread opening salvo is extremely disappointing
Last edited by toosie; 01-08-2017 at 04:50 AM..
Reason: Deleted partisan political reference from quoted material
A simpleton even knows that there are no individual accounts maintained in the system.
As such, your thread opening salvo is extremely disappointing.
Apparently, there are plenty of simpletons out there, and most of them are Pavlovian Democrats.
Exhibit 'A'
It's like a savings account for those who worked and had money taken out of each check for the government to hold for us until we retired, it's not just ANYONE's money, it's MY money and each person who WORKED all those years for it. Just because it's there doesn't mean anyone can dip into it! Why don't people get this. It isn't giving us something for free.. It was always ours!
Does anyone want to make a bet with me that the market will not have another crash?
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The coming melt down
