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Old 09-29-2007, 07:06 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ArizonaBear View Post
Thanks for the heads-up re: age 67 for the 1959+ cohort. Anyway one cuts it: the age 65+ crowd is a much greater percentage of the population today than the 20 YO's on down compared to 1936. Something needs to give.
Something always needs to give. Social Security has been through about a dozen significant corrections, though not typicallly as significant as in 1983. There will be a continuing need for tinkering at the margins to assure that projected premiums are sufficient to cover scheduled benefits but not much more than that. This isn't all that hard to do. You can see people as soon as they are born. You have 67 years to get ready to pay their scheduled benefits. At the moment, there are what are called imbalances in the system beginning around 2060. We don't have to fix those now, but the earlier you do, the cheaper it will be. Balancing that to some degree is the idea that each generation should try to shoulder as much of its own burden as it can, a la the boomers in 1983. People who will retire in 2060 with full SS benefits are currently in junior high school. They have their entire working lives to get ready for the event. For my money, we should try to help them out some, and modest funding improvements can easily be made in that direction. But nothing such as the privatization schemes put forward by the Bushies is either necessary or productive toward that end...
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:13 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,264,523 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista View Post
Something always needs to give. Social Security has been through about a dozen significant corrections, though not typicallly as significant as in 1983. There will be a continuing need for tinkering at the margins to assure that projected premiums are sufficient to cover scheduled benefits but not much more than that. This isn't all that hard to do. You can see people as soon as they are born. You have 67 years to get ready to pay their scheduled benefits. At the moment, there are what are called imbalances in the system beginning around 2060. We don't have to fix those now, but the earlier you do, the cheaper it will be. Balancing that to some degree is the idea that each generation should try to shoulder as much of its own burden as it can, a la the boomers in 1983. People who will retire in 2060 with full SS benefits are currently in junior high school. They have their entire working lives to get ready for the event. For my money, we should try to help them out some, and modest funding improvements can easily be made in that direction. But nothing such as the privatization schemes put forward by the Bushies is either necessary or productive toward that end...
Why is it a "privatization scheme" when the "Bushies" propose it, but sensible retirement planning when millions of the rest of us DO it - as we are doing now?

You have yet to provide a reasonable rationale for denying the average American an opportunity to invest a proportion of their payroll taxes in a prudent, structured voluntary retirement account.
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:22 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Well, at least we don't have to worry about the cost of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit mushrooming into something unmanageable for today's young folks to cover. The estimates I've seen anticipate an unfunded cost of only 73 trillion or so in the next four decades.
Well, I can't do Medicare and SS at the same time, so I'll just say this...in the paradigm of the moment, there are four legs to the stool of retirement security: Social Security, Personal Savings, Employment-based Pensions, and Medicare. Of these, it is Social Security by far that is presently on the firmest footing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
As someone nearing retirement age, I would like to epxress my heartfelt gratitude to all you younger folks for heeding the President's call and providing such a windfall for us geezers in our declining years. And I mean that from the bottom of my (cough cough) heart. No,wait. I'm okay. I'll be around for years and years. And years.
Well, I submit that you're no Ida May Ludlow. Ms. Ludlow was the first person ever to receive a retirement check from SSA. She lived to be 100. Over the course of her working years, she had paid a total of $24.75 in payroll taxes. In her retirement, she received $22,888.92 in benefits. And people complain about the ROI...
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:51 PM
 
1,354 posts, read 4,574,091 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NewToCA View Post
I think the disconnect here is that your funds are used to pay the benefits of others receiving SS today, while folks not yet born will have their SS withholds paying your SS benefit (if you are fortunate enough to reach the age to collect).
Where is the money that they paid into it
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:54 PM
 
1,354 posts, read 4,574,091 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NewToCA View Post
I think the disconnect here is that your funds are used to pay the benefits of others receiving SS today, while folks not yet born will have their SS withholds paying your SS benefit (if you are fortunate enough to reach the age to collect).
Where is the money that they paid into it
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgussler View Post
The math ain't cutting it.

Is everybody saying, that for instance, we had 10 people in the US. And along came the baby boomers. So now we had 20 new people, paying the "pay as you go" for the 10 people that are retired. So our 20 people were paying double what was needed? The 10 retired were pulling twice as much as they should? I'm not real sure that's what happened. It should have stockpiled somewhat.

If the gov hadn't borrowed out of it for wars, it might be a tidy sum.
those were the words that i was looking for The math isn't adding up here based on these other explanations I'm reading
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Old 09-29-2007, 07:54 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Your projeciton of the future date of Social Security's insolvency are speculative, as best.
All projections are speculative. You get used to it after a while. It doesn't mean that they are worthless, or that one might not be better than another.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
And "indefinitely"? Please. Let us entertain conjecture of a time.
These particular projections would commonly be done to 75 years, comprising three full generations and parts of two others. But there is no reason statistically to do that, and one could easily project out to infinity, which is exactly what these recent Republican propagandizers are doing when they talk about making SS 'permanently solvent'. By permanent, they mean infinite, because they have run their numbers to infinity to make them look absolutely as bad as possible. As I said in some earlier post or other, none of us needs to be concerned over whether SS will be solvent in the year 2525. That's something that those folks can figure out for themselves.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Who can predict that our population will continue to increase at rates sufficient to yield those results?
They're called demographers, and because these types of demographics tend to change only slowly over time, their projections when done properly stand a better chance of being accurate in the outyears than most.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
The adjustments need to address the situation RIGHT NOW are substanital. In the future, they will be intolerable.
No, no adjustments are needed right now at all. There is no situation to address at the moment. Even under the most rigorously pessimistic assumptions, every SS check scheduled over the next roughly 35 years will be paid in full as is. There are imbalances that will actually materialize somewhere around 2060 if we do nothing. There is room for sensible debate over how much we should try to do about that and how we should try to do it. But the administration and its disinformation henchmen have been in no mood for sensible debate on this or very many other issues. From my perspective, the best bet now is to wait until these people have packed up and left town, hoping that those who replace them will be a of a type more amenable to addressing problems as they actually are.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Good topic. Have you looked at my thread on "rates of return", below?
No, this one and the Nats game and a batch of chicken cacciatore have kept me from it. Maybe tomorrow...
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:06 PM
 
Location: Near Manito
20,170 posts, read 24,264,523 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista View Post
All projections are speculative. You get used to it after a while. It doesn't mean that they are worthless, or that one might not be better than another.


These particular projections would commonly be done to 75 years, comprising three full generations and parts of two others. But there is no reason statistically to do that, and one could easily project out to infinity, which is exactly what these recent Republican propagandizers are doing when they talk about making SS 'permanently solvent'. By permanent, they mean infinite, because they have run their numbers to infinity to make them look absolutely as bad as possible. As I said in some earlier post or other, none of us needs to be concerned over whether SS will be solvent in the year 2525. That's something that those folks can figure out for themselves.


They're called demographers, and because these types of demographics tend to change only slowly over time, their projections when done properly stand a better chance of being accurate in the outyears than most.


No, no adjustments are needed right now at all. There is no situation to address at the moment. Even under the most rigorously pessimistic assumptions, every SS check scheduled over the next roughly 35 years will be paid in full as is. There are imbalances that will actually materialize somewhere around 2060 if we do nothing. There is room for sensible debate over how much we should try to do about that and how we should try to do it. But the administration and its disinformation henchmen have been in no mood for sensible debate on this or very many other issues. From my perspective, the best bet now is to wait until these people have packed up and left town, hoping that those who replace them will be a of a type more amenable to addressing problems as they actually are.


No, this one and the Nats game and a batch of chicken cacciatore have kept me from it. Maybe tomorrow...
"Henchmen", huh? I guess you want to wait for 14 months for Hillary to present the "privatization scheme", and it will miracuously become workable.

The Nats? Are they still in the league?
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:08 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Sorry, but that's absurd. No one I know wants to "scuttle" anything. Do you really believe this?
I think we must talk to different groups of people, and it isn't so much a belief as an observation. There are plenty of Republicans who will complain over a Skye martini that SS is the only reason that any Democrat ever gets elected to anything anywhere, mostly because so many of these sympathetic old people love it so much and believe that only the Dems will protect it for them. And they still haven't gotten over the related beating they took over the government shutdown of 95-96 which of course, was hung up over Republican insistence on cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits. Didn't do much to help the image with Grandma. These folks would LOVE to take that SS card away from the Dems and somehow put a Republican stamp on it. Some, like the Norquist types at the Club for Growth, are very happy about these staggering deficits because they are seriously undermining the government's ability to fund any new, and even some old, social programs going forward. Others are a little less militant...they would settle for taking the puzzle apart and reassembling it for the benefit of themsleves and their friends, then claiming that they were the ones who saved Social Security from the awful ogres of Democratic ineptitude and mismanagement, and shouldn't all you old folks really start voting for us from now on. Sound simplistic? Come have a Skye martini sometime.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
What lies? That private investent accounts -- which are already held by millions of Americans, including you and me, are somehow not appropriate for anyone else?
No, the other lies. That SS is going bankrupt. That today's younger workers will never see a dime from it. That the Trust Fund has been stolen and replaced by worthless IOU's. That the program has a mediocre ROI. That privitization isn't essentially a scheme to further enrich Big Money. That sort of thing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
And besides -- does it really make any difference who "gets the credit" for making Americans more secure in their retirement?
No, it shouldn't make any differnece, but in the real world it will, and some will go to great lengths on that account.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
You seem to think that only Democrat ideas are sincere ideas, and Republican ideas are somehow "tainted." Isn't that kind of partisanship pretty much what you are accusing the GOP of?
If it were derived from partisanship, it would be, but unfortunately it's derived from knowing more than a little about the system and running a lot of numbers. The Republican ideas are tainted. They are deceptive. They are lies. Those are just the inescapable facts. The Democrats haven't come out with any comprehensive proposal for SS reform (mostly because one isn't needed), so I can't have an opinion on it. The alternative bits and pieces they've spoken about here and there re shoring up funding are more or less various forms of what's obvious and there hasn't been much addressing of the difficult details, but at least they aren't pernicious. Given the choice, I'll take Option-B.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
As an inteligent person, I think you know that it is inevitable that it WILL fly. You just keep hoping that a Dem is in the White House to take credit for it when it does!
No, my hope is that my faith in the eventual intelligence of the American people hasn't been misplaced. The disinformation media had succeeded in putting a serious crimp in that faith for a while, but I do see some signs that at least the worst of that is over. We'll have a better reading on all that I think a little past January 20, 2009. Meanwhile, privitization of Social Security is a bad idea that would be likely to damage every sector of society except the very well to do (who don't care about SS one way or another) and the officers and stockholders of the big banks and brokerages for whom privitization is a license to steal. None of it will matter to me personally, I'm basically set for life. But a whole lot of people aren't, and it wouldn't at all make me happy to see so many others get such an obvious and crippling shaft.
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:12 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Veiled Prophet View Post
And always remember that the majority of the new workers to the workforce are service people who get paid next to nothing and illegal aliens. Isn't that wonderful? Never forget that we also pay Mexicans ss and many other countries to boot.
No one receives SS benefits who has not earned them. Earning them requires compiling a work history of a particular length and having payroll taxes deducted from the wages paid in that work. Many Mexicans are eligible for US Social Security, just as many Americans are eligible for Mexican Social Security. That each of them would get paid the benefits that they are owed under those programs is not causing me to lose any sleep...
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Old 09-29-2007, 09:40 PM
 
19,198 posts, read 31,406,452 times
Reputation: 4013
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
Why is it a "privatization scheme" when the "Bushies" propose it, but sensible retirement planning when millions of the rest of us DO it - as we are doing now?
Because, as should be obvious, it involves disassembling an existing (and very valuable and successful) public sector system and attempts at constructing an equivalent system within the private sector. Hence, the word 'privitization'. The word 'scheme' could be neutral, but is not in this case due to the fact that the Bushie ideas for privitization are deliberately deceptive and destructive.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf View Post
You have yet to provide a reasonable rationale for denying the average American an opportunity to invest a proportion of their payroll taxes in a prudent, structured voluntary retirement account.
Anyone at all can put whatever money they can amass into a mutual fund. Anyone who works or has a spouse who works can open an IRA. Anyone who works for a company that offers a 401-k can contribute to it. Access to a wide variety of investment vehicles is already universal.

The argument favoring a diversion of payroll taxes into private accounts fails on various grounds, most of which have been outlined earlier. The first is that before you pay them, payroll taxes do not belong to you in that they are included in your gross pay only for the purpose of allowing you to pay the tax. If the tax were to go away, so would that portion of your gross pay. The second is that after you pay them, payroll taxes do not belong to you in that they are not set aside in your name, but used (as in any insurance regime) either to pay or pre-fund the benefits of others. It is those other people who have rightful title, and the claim of any payer to them is an unwarranted trespass and presumption.
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