Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Why don't you ask this question to a person 75 years old who worked hard all his life and was barely able to put a roof over the heads of his family. Ask him how Social Security has destroyed his life and proven itself to be an utter failure.
While imperfect, Social Security was intended to provide for everyone, using a fairly simplified set of guidelines to apply to everyone. The fact that you have the personal acumen and discipline to have provided for yourself, does not mean you have the right to deny everyone an assurance of a retirement security. The utter selfishness of the elite knows no bounds.
But it is not sustainable! No matter the good intentions, SS is not self-sustainable, and thus is failed. Besides, government is not your mother. As noble is it is to help others, the government does not have a responsibility to the financial well being of individual American citizens.
Why don't you ask this question to a person 75 years old who worked hard all his life and was barely able to put a roof over the heads of his family. Ask him how Social Security has destroyed his life and proven itself to be an utter failure.
While imperfect, Social Security was intended to provide for everyone, using a fairly simplified set of guidelines to apply to everyone. The fact that you have the personal acumen and discipline to have provided for yourself, does not mean you have the right to deny everyone an assurance of a retirement security. The utter selfishness of the elite knows no bounds.
I'd ask you, but you're not quite 75, and obviously never worked very hard to do anything but talk a lot.
On the other hand, I could ask my own father, who is 74. But he's too busy working and doing all the stuff he still likes to do. He never intended to have the government provide his retirement for him, so his SS Checks don't play much of a part in his life.
Point 2: The utter selfishness of he who is sucking at the government teat knows no bounds.
Social Security is NOT a government pension and was never intended to be a pension system. It was intended to be an income insurance system to keep some cash flowing in the economy when all the banks failed and took the elderly folk's pension savings with them. It was not so much to help the pensioner as it was to help the landlords, grocers and electric companies.
The system has been morphed to an expanded insurance system and been looted as a regressive tax system but it still is an insurance system not a pension. Too bad if you are twenty four and do not expect to ever receive any benefits. You can believe anything you want but your taxes are needed to pay the current expenses.
The system was not set up to be an investment based pension although some argued for that design. The fear among the conservatives was if the SS system was an investment fund it would wind up owning everything and they did not want the government in the market.
Any of the current problems with social security can be solved by applying the tax to ALL income from ALL sources and readjusting the rate to cover current expenses and not feeding a phony “trust fund”.
If we want a government pension system it could be created but would likely result in a one size fits all pension with the amount paid spread over the entire retiring workforce instead of being related to how much money you made during your career. The majority might benefit from this but the controlling minority would never let it happen.
But it is not sustainable! No matter the good intentions, SS is not self-sustainable, and thus is failed. Besides, government is not your mother. As noble is it is to help others, the government does not have a responsibility to the financial well being of individual American citizens.
Do you disagree with that?
In the first place it's not the governments money, it's your money, you paid into this retirement system, the government is only giving you back what is already your.
Any private retirement that is operated like our SS is, the owners of that system would be thrown in jail for fraud and misuse of funds.
The SS should be not be touched by any federal agency except for the intent that it was designed for.
Why would anybody suspect that the government in the 1930s was any better at devising a workable plan than the present government, faced with reform of health insurance? In 2010, we took a terrible health-care situation and did the only thing that could have possibly made it worse.
Indeed the SS money should only be used for SS payments but it is NOT a retirement pension. It is a pension insurance that is morphing into a very low payout retirement system. This was done because the public believed it was a retirement system and wanted everyone to "get their money out". It is an insurance system and, like all insurance, you only get your money back only if you need it. I pay auto insurance every year. I have yet to recover what I have spent but I buy it anyway.
If your private pension is secure you do not need Social Security. If your pension investments tank they you need Social Security to just pay your minimal living expenses. Therefore social Security should not only be applied to everyone and include all income from all sources, it should only be paid to people that have had their pensions fail or could never save for one.
It seems that everyplace it is tried, the idea of the government trying to run a pension system has run into serious liquidity issues. Greece is all but certain to defalut and the levees are cracking in Spain, Italy and the UK. Our SS system, along with Medicare, is said to be short 50 trilllion in future fiscal outlays.
Do you think the age of state funded Social Security is over? What do you think should happen to people working jobs too low-paying to genuinley save for retirement?
Social Security, brainchild of Roosevelt, is, of course, a failed experiment. It is basically one large national Ponzi Scheme where payments from today's "investors" (taxpayers) are used to pay off yesterday's "investors" (current retirees). Anytime you let government provide some part of your personal life, be it health care (as we shall soon find out) or your retirement, etc., it can't help but "go wrong" because nobody cares more about you, than you. That is why the Founding Fathers made no such grant of authority in the USC (but Congress, power-hungry maggots that they tend to be), couldn't help themselves, and created it anyway.
I say, phase it out gracefully until everybody currently paying into it is paid off, and then end it.
Say what you will, I like it. My wife and I both have defined benefit retirements from our former employment which are adequate. I started drawing Social Security at age 62 when I retired and my wife, also retired, will begin drawing it this year when she reaches age 62. We both put money into the SS system and now we are and will be reaping the benefits. No apologies!
No one has touched on the real problem here. The problem is not that government funded pensions schemes are wrong, immoral, or doomed to failure. The rightwing may try to peddle that propaganda. Its just nonsense.The problem with social security is just simple demographics. When human life expectancy increases from 63 years from a man in 1936 to 78 years for a man in 2010, you have only a few choices if you wish to avoid the eventual collapse of your program: 1. You can increase the age at which retirement takes place; or 2. You can increase tax revenues to fund social security; 3. You can "means test" social security and make people who earn more than a certain amount of income ineligible; or 4. You could increase the pool of people paying into the fund.Option number 2 (increase taxes) is politically unpopular and probably a bad idea with anyway with a recession going on. Option number 3 is a difficult choice too because people have always thought of social security as a retirement plan, not a welfare plan. By cutting some people out of it who have paid for the program, you convert it--at least partly--into a welfare plan. I won't totally rule out option 3, but it will be very controversial. Frankly, option 3 should only be considered if there is simply no other way to keep the program going. Option 4 could only result from a substantial increase in the birth rate. That's the only way you'd get the pool of people paying into the fund larger. Birth rates rise and fall over long periods of time and have fallen significantly over the last 30 years. So, option 4 is probably unrealistic. This leaves option number 1 which I completely endorse. We need to raise the retirement age and the sooner the better. I would suggest raise it to age 70. This is far less of an increase than the increase in life expectancy that has occurred since the program was conceived.Abandoning social security is simply not an option. We'd have a poor elderly population living in the streets without it. I'm open to considering options such as an enforced savings plan or a highly regulated pension plan that is primarily privately run. What no sane person could advocate is simply letting people "do it all on their own". It won't happen and the social crisis that would result from just abandoning the poor elderly in this country would be cataclysmic
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
