No social security check anymore (Representatives, Pelosi, soldiers, regular)
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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...
Should those in this country get Social Security, Medicare, and other government sponsored / funded entitlements?
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.
Would you allow someone to voluntarily withdraw from the social security system - with their acknowledgement / agreement that they can never recieve any benifits from the system including SS and Medicare??
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.
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.
No, it shouldn't make any differnece, but in the real world it will, and some will go to great lengths on that account.
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.
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.
You've simply repeated your opinions with a different patina of razzmatazz. The drumbeat of history is moving away from you.
Besides, the army of strawmen you have constructed threatens to outnumber the real people on this bbs. Among other things, I have never argued that SS should be done away with, nor that anyone should get any shaft.
I would quote your last sentence in toto, with the observation that the impending "shaft" is the collapse of Social Security as presently constituted.
Should those in this country get Social Security, Medicare, and other government sponsored / funded entitlements?
I assume that the word 'illegally' was omitted, and note that immigration violations are status crimes, similar to driving a car without a valid license and registration in your posession, or (in an earlier era) being caught on the street without your draft card.
As I have no reason to believe that you are actually La Shawn Barber in real life, I'll assume that you believe that if the house of an illegal immigrant family catches fire, the local fire department should respond and proceed to rescue screaming illegal-immigrant children from the second-story window of the blazing building. I'll assume that you believe that if an illegal immigrant orders and pays for a new sofa, the merchant is actually obligated to deliver the sofa, not just take the money and walk away. I'd further assume that you believe that an illegal immigrant who has a work and payroll deduction history that warrants a collection of benefits from Social Security, those benefits should be paid. But there seems to be some doubt on this one.
Would you allow someone to voluntarily withdraw from the social security system - with their acknowledgement / agreement that they can never recieve any benifits from the system including SS and Medicare??
No, not on any generalized basis, just as I would not allow people voluntarily to withdraw from their income tax obligations on the strength of a promise to defend themselves against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Universal schemes require universal participation if the free-loader syndrome is not to be their undoing. You can see it on a spreadsheet, and you can see it in well-established law.
As you know, exemptions from SS taxes and benefits have been granted on a very limited basis to certain practitioners and members of particular religious organizations, principally those that have an established doctrinal objection to participation in any form of insurance regime at all, not just SS. Given the importance of defending religious rights as the individual rights that they ought and are are defined in the Constitution to be, I don't have a problem with offering those limited exemptions.
You mean the Nats have leapfrogged those two teams and are in the playoffs for the first time since Bucky Harris was the catcher?
Bucky Harris was a secondbaseman, and the team he played for is now the Minnesota Twins. Still, the Nats do not have a glorious post-season record to point to, the franchise having last appeared on that stage in 1981. The times, they are a-changin', however. Though perhaps slowly at first...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf
Fess up: you just don't want all the rednecks to have private retirement accounts!
On the contrary, in the interests of helping to assure their long and comfortable retirements, I advise all rednecks within the sound of my voice to open and, to the maximum extent that they find feasible, to contribute to whatever they see as the most appropriate to their circumstances from among the plethora of tax-favored and other private investment accounts that are available to them. I do expect that they will use their own money in this undertaking, however, and that they will not use their desire for secure elder years of their own as some lame excuse to deliberately undermine the networks that provide such critical security to others...
You've simply repeated your opinions with a different patina of razzmatazz.
The replies in question were in response to unsubstantiated qualitative assertions. Otherwise, track back through the posts. Sift that which is opinion from that which is fact. The former will comprise a very small pile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf
The drumbeat of history is moving away from you.
Ah, another unsubstantiated qualitative assertion. If the claim has merit, though I doubt very much in this case that it does, it would not be the first time that mass hysteria had driven a nation into the abyss of collective folly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf
Besides, the army of strawmen you have constructed threatens to outnumber the real people on this bbs. Among other things, I have never argued that SS should be done away with, nor that anyone should get any shaft.
Others have and continue to do so. Perhaps your only failing is in having come unwittingly under the nefarious influence of these latter-day Lorelei.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeledaf
I would quote your last sentence in toto, with the observation that the impending "shaft" is the collapse of Social Security as presently constituted.
Where is the evidence for this impending calamity? It isn't in any of the numbers. Those quite plainly show the system rolling along exactly as planned for decades to come. In the immortal words of Clara Peller...Where's the beef?
I assume that the word 'illegally' was omitted, and note that immigration violations are status crimes, similar to driving a car without a valid license and registration in your posession, or (in an earlier era) being caught on the street without your draft card.
Yes, thank you, I did leave the word "ILLEGAL" out - my bad
I note however you did not directly answer my question - even though you clearly undersood my intention. Instead, you attempted to give a strawman answer -
So, once again, would you permit someone in this country ILLEGALLY () to collect social security? IMHO, a simple "yes" or "no" would suffice
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