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Because they already pay twice as much, enough is enough. You kill small businesses and there will be no jobs creation.
And the cap is too low but I bet you are not paying one cent more. Other people are paying. You are an armchair liberal. Sit in a chair, drink your beer, and spend other people money freely.
If I don't pay another cent in before retirement, it barely has any effect. I have maxed out for several years. I support raising the cap anyway. The idea that everyone has something to gain or they would not support something probably makes perfect sense to you.
Ideally, they would leave the current cap where it is, then pick it up again when income hits $300-500k a year again. Plenty of hard working and small business people in the $120k (not considered rich) to $300k ( considered very well off income). This would not penalize the actual workers that finally are "getting their rewards for risk, etc", but start redistribution of wealth in the very upper 1% or so, where the effect is more neglible to them. I Only have 4 more years to go, so I really have no skin in the game, though I have barely maxed out every year for the last 35. The Christmas bonus I get for having paid off SS in Nov is nice but not a life changer. If I was paying it off in Aug or Sept, then thats some worthwhile money. But these guys paying it off in Feb or March, really? They need that extra 6%?? Let them have a few months like the few else that payit off at the end of the year, then pay it again. It could be a badge of success.
The banks are allowed to continue to rip off the people to the tune of tens of billions per year. Thats the reward for giving billions in donations to politicians. The rich get richer, the working class suffers, and you have to choose whether you want massive income inequality or democracy. You cant have both.
How do they rip people off I think mine are marvelous. Seriously
If I don't pay another cent in before retirement, it barely has any effect. I have maxed out for several years. I support raising the cap anyway. The idea that everyone has something to gain or they would not support something probably makes perfect sense to you.
I download the Windows program from the Social Security web site a year or two ago and keyed in all my data. I looked at what happened if age 57 was my last year working. Working until 65 1/2 with maxed out contributions barely changed the amount. I recall it was about 5%. I already have 35 high income years.
I'm not wild about expanding Social Security.
Personally, I think the better approach is to require the top half to save for their retirement. Make it so all employers have to offer a 401(k) plan. If you earn above the median wage, you have a mandatory contribution that you can't touch until you hit retirement age. I'd also find some way to give corporations incentive to do 401(k) matching. I don't think we want to reward people for doing the bare minimum so they don't have much in the way of lifetime Social Security contributions and start collecting the moment they turn 62.
I download the Windows program from the Social Security web site a year or two ago and keyed in all my data. I looked at what happened if age 57 was my last year working. Working until 65 1/2 with maxed out contributions barely changed the amount. I recall it was about 5%. I already have 35 high income years.
I'm not wild about expanding Social Security.
Personally, I think the better approach is to require the top half to save for their retirement. Make it so all employers have to offer a 401(k) plan. If you earn above the median wage, you have a mandatory contribution that you can't touch until you hit retirement age. I'd also find some way to give corporations incentive to do 401(k) matching. I don't think we want to reward people for doing the bare minimum so they don't have much in the way of lifetime Social Security contributions and start collecting the moment they turn 62.
The more you gave invested the easier it is to begin collecting early or it is easier to wait. Investments give you flexibility to establish goals and a pathway to them.
How do they rip people off I think mine are marvelous. Seriously
That's because you have direct deposit, you don't bounce checks, you don't have maxed out credit cards at 18%, and you didn't buy your car at a Buy Here / Pay Here lot where the car has a GPS tracker and remote ignition disabler.
The only issue I have with my bank is that they started charging for a few things that used to be free. Free check printing went away. I don't write many checks so it's no big deal but they're passing on a bit of their cost to me. They started charging a fee for the overdraft line of credit on my checking account that I pretty much never use. I closed that down. I can move money from another bank if I see that I'm going to need it. They started charging for international ATM use. That used to be free and was a great perk. Those are nits. Other than a few ATM fees when I'm out of the country and a small fee for a box of checks every 5 years, I don't pay anything for household banking. The bank has branches in my travel pattern and tons of ATM machines. They certainly lose money on me.
People who can't manage their personal finances pretty much all hate their bank because it is somehow the bank's fault that they're bouncing checks and paying huge interest on unsecured debt because their credit rating is in the toilet.
The more you gave invested the easier it is to begin collecting early or it is easier to wait. Investments give you flexibility to establish goals and a pathway to them.
Could you expand on this a bit? I'm not sure I understand what you wrote.
I think you're saying that if you have wealth, it's much easier to create a strategy to accumulate more wealth or to retire earlier. If that's what you're saying, I certainly agree with it. Creating wealth is a bunch of baby steps of saving rather than spending. We all point at "The Millionaire Next Door" as the poster child of how this works.
My elitist liberal view is that most people lack the willpower to save and invest. The best we can do is save them from themselves and their bad decisions by forcing them to save. Social Security is the bare-bones version of that point of view. I think it probably doesn't go far enough since most of us won't ever have a defined benefit pension and most of us didn't do slow and steady retirement savings from the moment we entered the workforce.
Could you expand on this a bit? I'm not sure I understand what you wrote.
I think you're saying that if you have wealth, it's much easier to create a strategy to accumulate more wealth or to retire earlier. If that's what you're saying, I certainly agree with it. Creating wealth is a bunch of baby steps of saving rather than spending. We all point at "The Millionaire Next Door" as the poster child of how this works.
My elitist liberal view is that most people lack the willpower to save and invest. The best we can do is save them from themselves and their bad decisions by forcing them to save. Social Security is the bare-bones version of that point of view. I think it probably doesn't go far enough since most of us won't ever have a defined benefit pension and most of us didn't do slow and steady retirement savings from the moment we entered the workforce.
Many folks are trying to create predictable fixed income streams that can change in amount and source. MathJak is a big fan of discussing that and his various strategies. For us it was easier because we had pensions along with SS and our investments. We retire at before 60 and created what we thought was a predictable income strategy until age 70. That included using the various age and claiming strategies for SS and investment distribution options. Pensions were a matter of taking spousal benefits or not and were the first decision. We decided on spousal and that meant if we want a higher income stream we needed to use investments as a bridge to our first SS decision. Because of the depressed housing market we decided to have my wife take her own SS benefit on her own account and used that as the opportunity to buy a place at the beach independent of investments after down payment. At age 66 I deferred taking SS and am 1 1/2 years away from taking at age 70. Again investments bridge the gap. I did take spousal on my wifes account at 66 which minimized our use of investments. The additional income at 70 from my full benefits will be all invested as we are still investing now. We could have done this anyone of a number of ways from ages 60-70. Yes you are right in your assumption and the Millionaire Next door should be read by all. There are so many ways to skin the cat. MathJak and others are big on annuities especially if you don't have pensions. I know some will be outraged about how we are using our SS benefit but I am being truthful. I could have said we were using investment income but that would not have been fully true because we were already using investment income to supplement and buying the condo didn't
increase the use of. Yes we may spend a lot but it is within a plan and leaves us with even more growth after age 70. It is all a matter of options. Consider the couple at 62 who have 3 million invested and need 30k a year to supplement benefits. They have 100 years worth to be able to take early and not wait til later.
My elitist liberal view is that most people lack the willpower to save and invest. The best we can do is save them from themselves and their bad decisions by forcing them to save. Social Security is the bare-bones version of that point of view.
I wish there was some way to scrap Social Security entirely and replace it with something like the Australian Superannuation program, where every worker and every employer MUST pay a fixed percentage of the employee's wage into a retirement fund that belongs specifically to the worker in question and is invested conservatively. That would fix the problem of folks not saving enough for their retirement even though they earn enough to do so.
SSDI I would spin off as a separate, means-tested welfare program. And of course if a person lived long enough to outlive his or her Superannuation funds, that person would be eligible for all of the other means-tested welfare programs we already have in place, such as low-income housing vouchers and food stamps.
Because it tries to be both a "pay in, pay out" retirement program and a redistributionist welfare program simultaneously, Social Security doesn't do either job as well as it could.
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