Leave Social Security Alone !

[mohawkx]

Originally Posted by newhandle

Social security has done several things well. First, one intention was to let older people retire and not work until they drop dead or if they could not work, die with no income. Another intention was that it would permit people to retire so that younger people could enter the workforce. It has done that well. It needs refinement to keep it going. It would not be broke if there was no limit on the amount of money that would be subject to the tax.

It has also kept the young families from having to bear the burden of caring for their parents. Social Security is critical in assisting in the self sufficiency of the elderly.

[texdav]

Originally Posted by descentofman

Moving Social Security into private accounts would cause substantial reductions in traditional Social Security benefits. Privatization would, over the next 47 years, reduce benefit levels by as much as 44% below 2005 levels
Getting a privatization system started is too costly. The transition costs of setting up new personal accounts while continuing to provide benefits to Social Security's current beneficiaries would require an extra $1 trillion to $2 trillion

Private accounts would reduce special insurance protections, such as disability and survivor's insurance, that are also provided by Social Security. Cuts will have to be made to these programs in order to fund private retirement accounts.

Privatizing Social Security, which essentially is putting peoples' retirement money at the whim of the stock market, will weaken the federal retirement system through potentially risky investments.
Putting their Social Security funds into private investing accounts exposes US workers to be victims of unscrupulous stock brokers and of their own investment choices.

Many people either do not know, or do not want to know, how to make the sound decisions about their own long-term investments that private accounts require.


The upfront costs of setting up the individual accounts and of advising individuals of the system would take away any fiscal benefits that moving toward privatization could bring.

Social Security is a program that provides benefits through one, centralized process dictated by the US government. Moving benefits into individual private accounts creates a decentralized system that will have to take into account the millions of diverse opinions, preferences, and expectations of individual investors, making the program too bureaucratic and unwieldy.

Privatization of federal retirement benefits has proved disappointing in other countries. Private retirement accounts in the UK that started in 1988 have had management fees and marketing costs eat up an average of 43% of the return on their investments.

Putting money from Social Security into private accounts means moving retirement savings from a simple, easy to comprehend system into a complex structure of investment portfolios and stock market shares that is more difficult to understand.

Invested private Social Security accounts will not benefit the US economy but will put billions of dollars in brokerage and management fees into the pockets of Wall Street financial services corporations.


Instead of upsetting the system through a new plan like privatization, future budget shortfalls can be fixed within the system. The current system will work by reducing benefits, increasing taxes, and/or raising the retirement age.

Social Security paid benefits to over 39 million retired workers in 2008. Creating and managing this many individual private retirement accounts would generate more, not less, bureaucracy. This enterprise would require costly hiring and training tens of thousands of new government employees.

Because private accounts would be financed by taking money out of Social Security, privatization would increase Social Security's funding gap and move forward the date of the system's insolvency up from 2037 up to 2030.

Social Security taxes are weighted to balance the system for all levels of wage earners. Private accounts will create disproportionate returns since higher-wage will have more money to take bigger risks for higher yield investments than can low- and moderate-income workers.

If we want to balance the budget why not look at the bloated military? Two wars that we are never going to win, I.E. Iraq and Afgan. is never going to be a Japan and become like us. According to the Pentagon's own list PDF, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup.

As it is the government itself said SS will be broke now by 2037.47 more years is alot better if it coud be achieved. Remember that democrats on the presidential commission said it was fine in the early 2000 ;so wanted to do nothing.That was the Breaux commisssion.