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They paid what the law said they were supposed to pay. It isn't their fault the actuaries and designers were wrong.
Sorry pal, the Actuaries had it right since it was enacted by FDR, the tables and the Actuaries said it was unsustainable then.
The problem is YOU. You expect benefits to come out of thin air without taking into account the greater life expectancy and demographics changes. You keep voting for Democrats whose only solution is to increase benefits that are unsustainable, and then raise taxes as a last resort when it is too late.
Its even worse for Medicare. Unfortunately people like you don't get it and continue to vote for higher unfordable benefits.
The other point I will make is that the cost of living adjustment for social security overstates inflation.
So the poor making 10K per year get a whopping 90% while the rich get something like 27%, or 1/3rd the benefit relative to their tax contribution.
The life expectancy differential at age 67 does not make up for the difference in contributions between rich and poor.
It doesn't? Do you have anything that actually demonstrates this? As I said before, I was not able to find much on this topic and I'd love to see some actual information. I'm not interested in your conservative claptrap.
The point of my previous comment was that looking at benefits in relation to income isn't by itself enough to determine who gets more total benefits. Once this is considered I really don't know who comes out better. You and the poster that made the initial comment have yet to provide a single piece of information that shows that low income actually benefit more from social security in terms of total benefit pay-outs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hartford_renter
As far as the iphones and cable go, have you ever been in a poor neighborhood and seen these kids? Everyone has a cell phone and everyone has cable.
Yes I have, would you like me to take you to an actual poor neighborhood so you can count the number of iphones you see? How about this...I will give you $10 for each one we find.
What you are talking about is a modern conservative caricature of people on welfare, there is little truth to it. But, feel free to provide evidence that shows that the poor are running around with iphones, etc.
Wouldn't removing the cap from the wage tax be better? That would make Sociaal Security Solvent and cost 95% of Americans nothing
Why should the burden be placed on younger high-income earners? In what sense is this a fair solution?
Secondly, the wealthy would just adjust their tax strategies to largely avoid the tax in the first place. This would primarily effect upper-middle class, that is doctors, etc.
Pretty simple, boomers paid a lower percentage of their income towards social security. Right now workers pay 6.2% and their employer pays another ~7%.
Before 1988 the tax was much lower. Get it? FICA & SECA Tax Rates
Using your useful table (thanks for the link), it is clear that the payroll taxes, although lower in the past, were not "much lower". I prefer to add in the Medicare (HI) tax to the 6.2 current rate that workers are paying and use the figure 7.650%. Let's go back to 1978, 33 years ago, when the combined rate (Social Security and Medicare) was 6.050%. 7.650 percent minus 6.050 percent equals 1.6%. In 33 years, the payroll tax deduction rate has increased only 1.6%, hardly enough to justify the idea of generational theft that User I.D. is talking about and also hardly enough to justify your interpretation of it being "much lower" before 1988. You would have to go back to a point before many boomers were employed for the rates to be "much lower". Also, I note that the current rate has prevailed since 1990 (not 1984 as I myself erroneously stated in a previous post - I do apologize for that). Therefore, the Boomers have been paying the current (highest) rate for the past 21 years themselves.
It seems to me the following conclusion is inescapable: While it is true that younger workers are paying at a higher rate into Social Security and Medicare, this higher rate is only marginally higher than it was in 1978, and boomers have shared the higher rate for the past 21 years (since 1990).
It doesn't? Do you have anything that actually demonstrates this? As I said before, I was not able to find much on this topic and I'd love to see some actual information. I'm not interested in your conservative claptrap.
Here is how the benefit is calculated. You shouldn't make statements if you can't back them up.
And what I said was correct, you make 10K it gets counted at 90% towards your benefit, you make over 43K to 106K your benefit is calculated using a 15% factor. Its the truth and it's at the govt website. The difference is a ratio of 3:1. The life expectancy, a rough estimate of total benefits, is not 3 times longer for a poor vs. a rich individual. So you are factually incorrect. I should know I work as an actuary, although not on social security.
Also go here and compare the benefits for different income ranges.
Right. Social security is essentially a pay-as-you-go system, but that wouldn't work with the boomers so the government built a surplus in the social security trust fund. But the trust fund isn't sufficient to pay out all boomer benefits. Most solutions involve changing future benefits that will keep most boomer benefits intact while reducing benefits on younger generations to make up for this shortfall.
There is also the issue that the trust fund didn't really work as it should have, boomers continuously supported tax cuts and increased benefits (for them) which eroded among other things the benefits the government should have received from the surplus social security dollars.
My reference to spending was in relation to their lack of retirement savings. The numbers are pretty clear here, they were a spendthrift generation. Whether younger generations operate in a similar fashion is yet to be determined.
But the McMansions and other pseudo-luxuries aren't the big problem here, the problem is that the boomer lead government operated in much the same way. In particular, it built up debt as a way of increasing boomers standard of living while forcing future generations to pay for it.
Huh? I've been citing a specific case the entire time, namely, social security benefits. Keeping boomer social security benefits intact by forcing younger generations to pay more for less benefits is a system of generation theft. You are propping up the standard of living of one generation by reducing the standard of living of another.
This is by no means the only example though. Have you taken a look at the deficit recently? Who....do you imagine is going to have to pay it down? The increase of the national deficit over the last 2-3 decades has increased the standard of living of the boomer generation and will reduce the future standard of living of younger generation as they pay it down.
The boomers lived beyond their means both in germs of their personal lives and the government, younger generation will be forced to live below their means to pay for this excess. In what sense is this not generational theft?
More specifics? No problem. The favored spending cuts by boomer lead government have been cuts to programs to younger generations. Just look at today, where are the spending cuts coming from? Education, medical care for children, welfare programs for children, etc. Not much talk about cutting benefits for boomers though....
Fortunately the boomers forgot that we have a fiat currency and the younger generations have a lovely tool to roll-back most of the theft. Namely....inflation. The younger generations will soak the boomers with inflation and this will largely balance matters.
Thank you for that reponse, which does give us a bit more to go on in the debate. As for the Social Security part of it, I answered that in my post number 84 which was technically in response to another poster.
Both of us agree about the serious downside of the excessive debt taken on by the federal government. Where I part company with you is blaming it all on the boomers. (I am assuming when you wrote "boomer lead government" you meant "boomer-led government"). I question whether a single generation had such a lock on our government. All other generations combined substantially out-numbered the boomers, who are hardly all of one mind anyway.
Yes, unsustainable entitlements are a real problem for this country, but those entitlements go in various directions, not just to the benefit of the boomer generation.
I am thinking that the "Gray Panther" movement (remember them?) may have played a major role in advancing entitlements for the elderly. However I don't remember the dates when they were active. I'm thinking they were the generation older than the boomers? Perhaps you or someone else can refresh my memory about the Gray Panthers.
The Grey panthers is an organization in the United States founded by Maggie Kuhn in 1970, in response to her forced retirement at age 65. The organization supports a single-payer system of health-care, as well as an increase in welfare payments, supporting peace activity, life-long public education, the rights of workers, reproductive rights, abolition of the death penalty, legalization of same-sex marriage, the legalization of medical marijuana, and environmental activities through advocacy, education and action.[1]
The Gray Panthers were also in the courtroom when they brought a class action suit in order to change Medicare regulations.[10] The case, Gray Panthers v. Schweiker, occurred in 1980. The group saw that the current way older patients were notified that their Medicare reimbursements were denied was an unconstitutional violation of their due process rights, arguing that the notification was laden with jargon and thus difficult to understand. While they lost the initial court case, they were successful on appeal.
The other point I will make is that the cost of living adjustment for social security overstates inflation.
. . . which just happened to be ZERO for the past two years running. It's hard say that zero overstates anything. Of course, no retiree's gas or car insurance or cable bills or apartment rents have gone up, either, have they?
Sure, I want the boomers to give up some of their benefits, after all the problems with social security system all stem from them not paying enough into it to support their benefits. What's the alternative? Cutting benefits for younger workers while not cutting the taxes they pay.....
Yeah, but the boomers didn't save much in their 30's..40's....etc either. Not sure why younger generations should be forced to make up for this folly...
Don't have enough for retirement? Keep working...and stop stealing $20 out of younger workers pockets...
the problem of social security isn't that people didn't pay in, but rather that the government stole the money that people paid in- and now they have a bunch of useless IOUs for it.
those people at least put some of their money away, which is more than i can say for the government.
i suggest that we stop all the useless foreign aid, the endless wars, the handouts for illegal immigrants, and even 1/10th of the government waste-- and then see where we are in terms of social programs.
i suggest that we stop all the useless foreign aid,.
Every time anyone talks about foreign aid, I just want to laugh. Or cry.
When surveyed, the average American said they thought about 10% of our national budget ought to go to foreign aid. That is ten times the amount that we actually currently budget for foreign aid. Our annual foreign aid is about 1% of our government budget, or 0.15% of our GDP, and virtually every other indusrialized country in the world gives a larger share of their wealth to foreigh aid than we do. The world average from industrialized countries is 0.7% of GDP, about five times as much as generous Americans grudgingly dole out.
Furthermore, a great deal of our foreign aid comes right back to us, because it is tied to commitments to import American products, use American corporations, or process the funds through American banks.
Last edited by jtur88; 05-22-2011 at 06:11 PM..
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Much lower?
