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Australia & Chile have privatized systems. So should we. The tricky parts are the transition to such a system and making sure the fees in a privatized system are low. The fee part should be easy. It could be modeled after what the federal government's plan for its employees, which is super low cost. Wealth levels in Australia are much higher than in the U.S. as a result.
Jeb Bush is fear mongering when he says Social Security cannot survive. It will never go broke, it will never fail. Eventually it cannot pay full benefits if nothing is changed. Raising retirement age is the worst option - many people cannot physically continue to work to an older age. Some demographics, such as white women with low education, have had a lifespan drop of five years. 401k's have not provided retirement security for most Americans. What Jeb Bush is proposing is forcing people to pay into a 401K that they cannot withdraw from until they reach retirement age. As 2sleepy just pointed out, there then would have to be a supplemental public system to pay for low income earners. A public system funded by general revenues.
Problems start when the federal government must repay those SS IOUs. The money must come from somewhere; so either the government uses tax dollars and or borrows.
The US Federal government is the issuer of a sovereign floating-rate nonconvertible currency which also happens to be the world's reserve currency. They neither need to tax or borrow to spend.
Jeb Bush is fear mongering when he says Social Security cannot survive.
+1
What "Privatize Social Security" really means is to contract out the management of the Soc Sec Fund to Wall Street and the big banks. Yup, Bush wants to hand over SS funds to the same unprosecuted criminals who nearly crashed the economy in 2009, and who got huge bailouts from his brother, to manage the SS trust fund for us. Big banks can't even calculate a LIBOR rate without committing fraud, so why should we trust them now?
Yep, give the tax money to big banks... that's always worked well.
Exactly. It'll only take those worthless sociopaths a few months to "disappear" everyone's money into their own bank accounts and bribes for the useless politicians who they bought up.
What "Privatize Social Security" really means is to contract out the management of the Soc Sec Fund to Wall Street and the big banks. Yup, Bush wants to hand over SS funds to the same unprosecuted criminals who nearly crashed the economy in 2009, and who got huge bailouts from his brother, to manage the SS trust fund for us. Big banks can't even calculate a LIBOR rate without committing fraud, so why should we trust them now?
Yup.
Of course, that is the plan - the American people haven't been completely impoverished - yet. So, as long as there's money to steal, the big banks will be there, robbing everyone blind.
Social Security is never going to go away. Why? Because the majority of the population will never have the earnings to be able to accumulate the wealth to stay out of abject poverty when they age to the point where they can't work. Due to global competition and automation, we have enormous income stratification. The working class in the service economy looks to be more than half the population in another generation. If you kill Social Security off, those people who are 25 now and never likely to advance beyond an hourly wage service sector job are going to starve to death or freeze to death in the streets when they get old enough to not be able to work. Social Security is somewhat progressive now. I make high income and have maxed out my Social Security payroll deduction since my 5th year working in my mid-20's. Inflation adjusted, I'd have to live well into my 90's to get back what my employers and I have pushed into the plan. That money gets shifted to working class people who don't contribute as much but still receive a benefit large enough to keep them above poverty level. With the income stratification we're seeing, the program needs to become more progressive or it falls over. The cap at $118K will certainly go away fairly soon with no increase in benefits for people like me who will be paying more tax. The percentages will likely need to be bumped a little. Combine that with raising the retirement age to reflect 21st century medicine and the non-physical work most people do should allow the program to continue on forever.
I'm betting the 25 year old who wrote this is not maxing out Social Security and is nowhere near capable of building up the $1 million+ net worth in 2015 dollars to be able to retire comfortably. It's very lazy to buy into the Fox News rhetoric that Social Security needs to be abolished. Nice post from another Fox News watcher temporarily embarrassed that he isn't a millionaire but certain he is going to get there.
Oh, boy, here we go.
While you spend time trying to sound intelligent and holier-than-thou, you obviously failed to read the content of my rather short post. I clearly said the "solvency" of Social Security, rather than the system itself. Depending on who you consult, the trust fund will run out somewhere between 2032 and 2040, at which point the Social Security program will either (1) pay out only a fraction of its intended benefits; or (2) make yearly appropriations from the general fund and thus create a budget deficit so large that the Bush/Obama trillion dollar deficits look like pinpricks by comparison.
Rather than counting on it as a portion of my retirement, I instead consider it to be a permanent tax on my income which I'll likely never see back. Does it make it more difficult to build wealth? Absolutely. But then so have many of the "progressive" economic policies that you undoubtedly believe in.
I'll have to ignore the Fox News red herring, however. Nice try, though... come back when you can actually discuss facts and substantive policy solutions.
Who is advising him? No one will go for this except people with Bush Family money.
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