This Is A “Good Deal”?
According to one our resident TAH liberals (yes, I’m talking about you, insipid), Social Security is a “good deal”.
Well, I guess everybody is entitled to their own opinion. But if it’s such a good deal, someone needs to explain to me precisely why. Especially now that workers retiring today and earning average lifetime income levels– both single retirees and dual-wage earner couples – are now projected to get less in benefits than they’ve paid in Social Security taxes during their working lifetimes.
Category: Politics
Doh!
Yup. Welcome to the brave new world.
As another ‘resident liberal’, I think Social Security is a pointless mess. Aside from the debate of whether it’s a good idea or not, the population and longevity dynamics at its conception lead to an implementation that simply can’t be sustained in the present day.
Insipid has his opinion, yes, but please don’t think it’s a ubiquitous one amongst liberals.
I think this is what JFK meant when he said “Ask what you can do for your country.” Maybe BO’s “paying your fair share.”
BTW we got 77 million baby boomers – born 1946 to 1964…gulp.
Hey insipid, hit me up, if you think SS is a good deal I have an even better deal for ya!
You racists!
Or cling to guns and religion peckerwood Republicans.
In MY opinion, SS WAS a good idea, and MIGHT be good for some folks. some of the many problems with SS is too many dollars are being given to adults who never put anything or put very little into it.
I feel I’ve wasted my money by paying into it for almost 40 years. Since I have a state retirement- that I’ve also paid into, instead of getting about $1,100 a month from SS, I’ll get about $200. Thanks to Ronny Reagan.
Involuntary withholding for the express purpose of nanny-state caretaking is never a good idea.
Abolish that and the withholding of taxes – make everyone write a check for their share – and we may begin to awaken to economic reality.
Ponzi scheme: a scam wherein earlier investors are paid from the “investments” of those coming later, aka “pyramid.”
Social Security: “insurance” paid to the government by current workers in order to pay back retired workers.
The current Administration has lowered the amount paid into Social Security from 6.2% to 4.2% (actually a total of 12.4% to 8.4%) thereby moving up the date at which the “Trust Fund” goes bankrupt, but not increasing the official budget deficit of the US Treasury on his watch.
Previously, the same party has blocked measures to divert the same amount of money from SSA control to private investment accounts, controlled by the individual.
In the end, any person in their 30’s or 40’s today that is relying on SSA for retirement income will be SoL when they reach retirement age (which will be higher then than now).
A good deal? The Ponzi scheme runs out of money before we get ours back.
Fellas, you’re wasting your time. If you guys remember, we had this exercise a couple of months ago with him. I linked to a GAO report that unequivocally proved that SS is insolvent and that wasn’t good enough. Besides, I’m not ready for his philippic rants…I’m still sober!?!:o
@11
When you get sloshed – no fruit references please. 🙂
Devtun, you have my word! LOL 🙂
I don’t think you understand what leftists mean when they say it’s a good deal. It takes money out of the hands of the self-reliant and puts it in the hands of the central planners while creating a political club with which to pummel their political rivals. There are probably a fair number of mathematically illiterate leftists who honestly believe it’s a good idea as a retirement plan, but I’m pretty sure most of them know it’s a fiscal disaster that they’re only propping up because it’s a political good deal for them.
Come on, folks. SS is an “insurance policy”, it can’t go bankrupt. Insipid said so, so he’s obviously smarter than anyone in the GAO, or the CBO, or anywhere else.
One problem with Social Security is that, once the legislature gets hold of the money, it inevitably gets treated as if it were part of the general fund, rather than some sort of actual retirement or savings account. Attorneys who handle client funds in this fashion get disbarred for “commingling funds.” In a business, it’s called embezzling.
Yeah, and I think raiding the SocSec funds started with Bill Clinton, to ‘balance the budget’, or some such fiction.
But… but… but there’s a drawer full of IOUs for the general fund to pay back Social Security!
Yeah, IOUs are what some retired city employees are getting in mail these days. Stockton, CA and Pritchard, AL come to mind. Folks, pension fund has been bled dry…sorry, hope you didn’t need those monthly checks you were promised.
It works in theory…
I heard someone say that about obamacare the other day…
Minor correction, WOTN. Only the employee rate for OASDI was reduced. The employer still pays 6.2%, and the total OASDI “cut” is 10.4% of employee wages up to the OASDI wage base of $110,100.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/prog_highlights/index.html
Even so, Hondo, that’s still something like a $150 BILLION shortfall for each of the two years this little “gimme” has been in place.
Thank God I don’t plan on SS being around for me and have taken steps to ensure I have other income streams when I retire.
NHSparky: agreed. But I’d rather those of us who are pointing out the BD and TU nature of Social Security be completely, 100% accurate. Otherwise the system’s defenders will use such minor errors to their advantage to cast doubt on the basic argument that Social Security as we know it today is (1) basically broken and (2) unsustainable.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme for which the time of reckoning is fast approaching. If it’s to be salvaged with only moderate pain, we need to do something NOW rather than kick the can down the road, as we’ve repeatedly done for decades. And giving the system’s defenders any chance to obscure those facts raises the probability of another “kick the can” exercise vice true reform.
Sparky, I’m with you man. I’ll retire in five tears from the city of Phoenix with a 401(a) and a 401(k) plus my personal portfolio. None of my retirement plans include getting anything from SS.
Ex-Ph2, raiding the SS trust started way before ‘Horndog’ Clinton was poking Monica Lewinsky.
Read up on the returns that some Galveston, Texas peeps are reaping before the private retirement loops were closed in the 80’s. I guarantee you that if people are made to be responsible, they will be much more so than they are now…I lost all of my retirement due to the economic downs. I’ve got nothing. And I already know I won’t be retiring. I told my kids to start putting the money aside because it won’t be there for them either.
Oh, and remember…We’re going to be paying for something we don’t get until 2015. What person would ever pay for a car just so it can sit on a lot? Not one. So, we have all paid for something we will never see because Congress voted that any surplus collections in SS/MC can be borrowed to pay for other entitlements. What private businesses do you know would ever do that? Remember, if they have, then they are not in business any longer!
Sadly, Hondo, we’ve been raiding SS for 40 years (actually 1969, IIRC) and we’re probably at the point “moderate” pain isn’t gonna make it.
But just as sadly, the AARP and other groups will scream bloody murder at the mere mention of means-based or scaling back of benefits, and these benefits are the ones being given to people who didn’t (comparatively speaking) pay jack shit into the system compared to what they’re getting out.
How are they going to react when there’s no choice but to scale benefits back to a fraction of what they are now? My income has just reached the point where it maxed out my SS contribution within the past 5-6 years, but given the fact I’ve been in the workforce for over 30 years, I know between me and my employers, we’ve put upwards of $300K into the SS system, and I forsee putting at least that much more into the system between now and the time I’m eligible to retire.
$600K–and I’m being told I’m not paying enough. And if I retire at age 62, I’ll get just under $1700/month. How far do you think that’ll go, assuming I even get it? Christ, that’s barely beer and poker money in 2030 dollars.
NHSparky: I hear ya. I’m a few years older than you, so my guess is I’ll see something from Social Security – for a few years. But I fully expect to see it means tested (or severely cut back) during my lifetime, should God grant as long or longer life to me as He did my father.
We had the chance in 1983 to fix this with a decade-long transition to a mandatory personal retirement account system like Galveston, TX, and Chile use. But we didn’t, and now we’re going to pay hell for that mistake.
Alright, generally I avoid talking Politics on MilBlogs. Im not a Liberal but Im not a conservative either, I think both parties can and do have decent ideas (implementations however never work as intended no matter which political strain its comes from). That being said, in my opinion Social Security is simply outdated.
What we need is straight up disability insurance and straight up pensions. They’d cost the average American worker less, and be much more beneficial. They dont even have to be privatized, you could run in a similar way to the TSP even, or have an option to manage it on your own.
If you wind up fucked up somehow, you should be getting paid what you paid into it instead of this hybrid quasi-pension, quasi-disability insurance thing that we have now which wont cover your bills. Same thing if you work for 65 to 70 years, you should be getting a guaranteed pension instead of having to gamble with a retirement fund that may very well lose everything you put into it. I have very little faith that my IRA, that Ive been paying into since I was 19 will actually be there in 35 years when I actually get a chance to use it.
Anyway, my mother’s on Social Security Disability, she’s genuinely disabled, and it pays nowhere near enough for a woman who worked her ass off for over 50 years and paid thousands of dollars in Social Security taxes.
Well, since Mitt Romney has just inexplicably made this campaign about the social safety net rather than the economy, I suppose it is incumbent upon me to actually answer this question which I have already answered many, many, many times: Yes. Social Security is an extremely good deal. As I’ve explained MANY times giving people exactly what they paid in Social Security taxes has never been the goal of Social Security. It is insurance, not a savings account. People retiring now may or may not get more benefits in dollars and cents that equal or exceed the FICA contributions they made. That will depend on a bunch of factors, such as their earnings, their age when they die, and whether they have a spouse or dependent children. Like other insurance its value is not dependent upon what you get back from it. You dutifully pay fire insurance and chances are you will never need it. But the peace of mind of having it makes it worthwhile. Likewise with Social Security, it was NEVER meant to replace prudent savings accounts or individual pension plans. It is insurance. It’s for the guy who was dutifully investing in mortgage backed securities- safe investments until 2007- only to see his whole life savings get flushed. It’s for the guy who has the inexplicable stroke at 30 and can’t work. As they wrote in the article you posted: “You are buying this lifetime inflation-protected benefit that you can never run out of and that will always be there for you,” Certner said. “It protects your spouse, protects your family and protects you from disability.” Also I think the article is dealing with “fuzzy math”. The employee portion of Social Security is 6.2% (now 4.2% because of the tax cut). The article says that this supposedly “average couple” invests $598, 000 into SS. So extrapolating that further we have 598000/.062= 9645161.29 this means he’s saying the “average” couple earned $241,000 or $120,000 each over the 40 years they were working. Either that or the article was counting both the employer portion AND the employee portion as… Read more »
Holy shit man, is this what happens when you crawl inside your own asshole for 2 weeks after getting destroyed during your last visit?
Conservatives and Liberals are really different species. If Hondo, or you or anyone else went away for a while I would assume they either went on vacation or felt like doing something else or just didn’t feel like debating anymore. I would never assume that it’s because i “destroyed” them or that that they were cowering in fear somewhere or that they were afraid to debate me further. A message board is essentially a time waster, a mental exercise like solitaire. I didn’t respond to this thread because we had already went back and forth on SS MANY times. And i didn’t feel like it. I’m responding now because of Ryan. It bears no relationship to our last debate, which i don’t even remember.
Not that you have any credibility in that matter. Pretty much all you do is chirp in with the usual “you totally got your ass kicked!” mantra. You also say you don’t read my posts, so how you can assess it is a mystery. Not that conservatives need any facts to arive at decisions.
I’ll take that as a yes.
insipid: bull. The old age portion of Social Security was sold from day one as a supplemental “pension” – though it was actually, from day one, nothing but a government-mandated inter-generational income transfer program, AKA “welfare for the aged”. It’s legally compulsory for virtually all US residents. As such, it’s evolved into a major portion of many people’s retirement plans over the years.
But it isn’t insurance, insipid, regardless of its misleading name or your multiple erroneous protests to the contrary. It’s payment of government-mandated taxes to support a government-mandated income transfer program. If you truly believe it’s insurance, just try not paying your “premiums” for a while and telling Uncle Sam you want to cancel your “insurance” vice continue your Social Security “insurance policy”. I wouldn’t personally recommend doing so, but you’re welcome to put your money where your mouth is and try.
Oh for goodness sakes these talking point AGAIN?!? Really?!? This is all you’ve got? I already showed you a video where the word insurance was used about a hundred times in the ten minute video. And i’ll admit the term pension was used as well, though to much less of an extent. Though we both agree that calling it a pension is a lie, it is certainly not material. The fact is that SS has paid out in the exact way described in the film and has done so for 70 years. It is not material, therefore it is not a fraud, therefore your whole “Ponzi scheme” talking point is a bunch of shit. Government programs are not voluntary. You still have to pay for public education even if you have your kids in private school or don’t have children at all. This is so because we, as a society, decided that we should have an educated workforce and this is enough of a priority that ALL of us should pay for it. We have by far the biggest army in the world because we, as a society, decided that should be our priority and militant Rambo wannabes and hippie peaceniks ALL have to ante up whether they want to or not. I still have to pay for a construction crew to build a highway I may not want and might never need simply because we, the people, deemed it more important than my individual desires. God knows that if there was a check-mark to not pay for the Iraq war, I’d of checked that box. Government-run insurance programs are not voluntary. Employers must pay for workman’s compensation and unemployment insurance employers and employees must pay for Medicare and Social Security because WE as a society decided that workers injured while doing their job should be compensated without going through the legal process; that employers should be spared the legal process; Society decided that there should be a cushion between losing one’s job and finding another; and society decided that there should be insurance against one becoming disabled or too… Read more »
@11- Actually the GAO report said no such thing and i used your own source to prove you completely wrong. But way to rewrite history, Yat.
Keep on deluding yourself, insipid. Perhaps in your own mind, you’re always right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. Or perhaps you think that repeating the same demonstrated falsehoods will somehow make them true – or make others believe them.
However, denying the truth doesn’t change the fact that it’s truth. That only shows the one denying the truth to be a fool – or a deliberate fraud.
Social security is not and never was “insurance”. It is and always has been just another income transfer program – in plain and unvarnished terms, a form of welfare. It’s financial model has always been faulty. Changing demographics, along with the extension of benefits to many not originally envisioned, have pushed the system to the point of collapse. We either fix it pronto, or it won’t matter what the American voter wants – because the money simply won’t be there to pay the benefits.
The fact that most people on this forum agree with you means nothing. If you want to we’ll fight it out on crooksandliars and democraticunderground and everyone there will loudly proclaim that it is I that is doing the ass-kicking and you’re the one floundering. Insurance is an “income transfer program” from those who don’t need it to those who do. If I never get a fire, I’ll never collect on fire insurance if I never get old I never collect on SSI. That does not mean these are not insurance programs and that they’re not worth having.
Again Social Security cannot “collapse” you have never found me a credible report that says it will collapse. Even Yat’s heralded GAO report does not say SS is going to “collapse” what it does say is that if nothing is done it will pay out at 75% of what it should. That’s not the same as “collapsing”. I agree that something should be done. But we should start from an honest premise before we start acting. There our mild fixes, similar to the ones made in 1983 that will fix this problem up until the baby boomers start dying off faster then they’re collecting. There is no need to end it or privatize it or do anything draconian. This is a problem that should be solved, not an earth-shattering crises that requires Ryanesque blood-letting.
Sip,you show your ass with this, “We have by far the biggest army in the world.” If you can’t get that right, it’s apparent that one shouldn’t take anything else you say seriously, most of the folks here, don’t.
Um,not even close. The U.S. is only behind China, India, N Korea and Russia, Pahk-ee-stahn and South Korea in the size of their respective armies. Not only fail, but Epic Fail.
By the way, who took $700B, as in Billion, from Medicare?
@UpNorth, the Social Security tax is now 12.4%. People with paychecks pay half of that or 6.2%, employers pay the other 6.2%. Self-employed people pay the full 12.4%. This is a massive drop from the 13.2% that was in effect 4 years ago, and considering that 23 million people are no longer paying FICA or Social Security or Medicare taxes because they are unemployed, this is a massive drop in funding going into the Social Security trust.
Thise doesn’t include those who have been taken off the unemployed list because they have lost benefits, however, they also are NOT able to pay into the SST fund. The actual unemployed percentage rate, including those no longer receiving benefits, is somewhere between 23.5% and 26% of the working population. Yeah, it is that high. No jobs, no paychecks, no FICA, socsec or medicare taxes being paid/collected.
Oh, and here’s an interesting statistic about China from a friend of mine who lives and works there: the Chinese male population between the ages of 21 and 45 numbers some 100,000,000++ men who have no prospect of getting a wife, because men grossly outnumber women in China.
I was very clearly speaking in terms of spending priorities upnorth and not in terms of manpower. Either way it was a rather transitive point and the fact that you need to glom onto that as an AH HA! moment proves that you really don’t have an argument.
The savings President Obama is deriving from Medicare comes from stopping over-payments to private insurance companies and cutting back on fraud and abuse. Both the Kaiser foundation and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services state that the PPACA will not cut benefits, in fact they both say that the law will increase them:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/fact-checking-romney-does-health-reform-cut-medicare-levy-500-billion-tax/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-28/medicare-scare-ad-makes-false-claim-of-cuts-for-seniors.html
http://factcheck.org/2012/06/romney-obama-uphold-health-care-falsehoods/
If you want more, i have them. I can see why you’re mad at President Obama for cutting government waste and fraud. You’re only supposed to SAY you’ll do it, ot actually accomplish it! The nerve!
How are the automatic cuts to defense spending reducing waste and abuse?
It doesn’t. But let’s review exactly how that came about. For the first time in history the Republicans in the house tried to play a game of chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States. Instead of simply authorizing a debt increase the way it was done 7 times under Bush and 8 times under Reagan they decided they’d put the President Obama in his place. Had they simply authorized the increase as President Obama had originally requested, there’d be no issue. But they didn’t and now they have to live with sequestration. It’s Republican’s that made up the rules to this game and now they’re crying like the school yard sissy because they got out-played.
If they want to stop the sequestration, they know the solution and it involves increasing revenues. If they’d rather coddle to the rich than stop sequestration, that’s the Republican’s call.
And here we go again. Hey, the French have decided on a top tax rate of 75% (though the new President there admits that he doesn’t expect that to raise much revenue-rather it is intended to be “symbolic”-and several wealthy Frenchmen have already looked at migrating to England which would be glad to have them) so the only question is how much you intend to jack up the tax rate on “the rich” (whoever they are) and what you think the result of that will be.
However the good people over at Reason have pointed out that Federal revenue has hovered around 19 per cent of GDP regardless of tax rate (see http://reason.com/blog/2010/11/29/the-remarkably-stable-amount-o for the specifics) since World War II. So maybe the Federal Government should restrain itself to not spending more than that (BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!). The conditions that created the “blue social model” that guys like insipid seem to think is a permanent feature of American government disappeared long ago. The only way we can temporarily prop it up is more debt, but that isn’t sustainable either. Cuts are coming to those sacred cows, like it or not. Right now it is more politically palatable to make military cuts, and those other programs have a lot more clout politically-but they will be cut eventually (or inflated into worthlessness).
And the point I was making, @68W58, is that with a substantially lower number of people paying INTO those sacred cow funds, the cuts and/or modifications seem to be inevitable. The obvious alternative is to revive job growth. Increased job numbers equals increased revenues for consumers and government alike.
The prospect of increasing the US debt load is neither palatable nor practical. The US credit rating was downgraded more than a year ago, the first time this has ever happened in the history of this country. Therefore, if the US were an individual person trying to get a loan or a credit card, the US would be turned down flat. Without revenues from payroll taxes, the US will not be able to buy back those bonds that the Chinese government bought four years ago. Should the US default on its debt, the probability of a global financial collapse is VERY VERY REAL.
Right now taxes are as low as they’ve ever been. Not only our all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in place, but all the Obama tax cuts for the middle class our in place. By your reasoning, the economy should be booming right now. But your reasoning is based on a lie. We do not have a tax problem we have a revenue problem: http://consortiumnews.com/2011/07/29/the-big-fat-gop-budget-lie/ Or as Paul Krugman put it: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/opinion/krugman-this-republican-economy.html ======================================================= What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high. Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. In F.D.R.’s case, however, this was an unforced error, since he had a solidly Democratic Congress. In President Obama’s case, much though not all of the responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House. That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. As I said, for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy. ============================================================= Despite your rhetoric, President Obama is NOT asking… Read more »
The reason the U.S.’s credit rating was downgraded was because of political machinations, not because of an underlying structural problem with the U.S. economy. No, the U.S. would not be “turned down flat” for a credit card. In fact we’re being offered virtually interest free loans.
I’m sorry, but right now wealth inequality is at a higher rate than any time since the guilded age (and we know how that ended). Six Waltons have more wealth than 40% of the enire U.S. population. The top 2% have more wealth than the bottom 60% of the country. It is not a sustainable position on your part that we should gut all the programs that serve the bottom 60 in order to sustain historic wealth for the top 2%. The top 2% our CERTAINLY more to blame for the shape this country is in then the bottom 60 and it is not incumbent on the bottom 60 to pay ENTIRELY for fixing the problem. You’re not being reasonable. You cannot gut the entire social safety net just to preserve a patently unfair status quo.
They need to bring back the CCC. Except nobody’d join, cause its manual labor- oh noes!
Ex-PH2: actually, OASDI taxes (AKA Social Security Taxes) have been a combined 12.4% since 1990. That’s the highest they’ve ever been; they’ve never been 13.2%. A temporary reduction in the employee contribution (but not the employer contribution) to 4.2% has reduced the OADSDI rate to 10.4%. That temporary reduction expires at the end of this year.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/content/pdf/ssrate_historical.pdf
Since 1986, Medicare has added an additional 2.9% on top of that, split evenly between the employee and employer. Unlike OASDI, there’s no cap to the income taxed for Medicare.
insipid: no, fool – insurance is NOT an “income transfer program”. Insurance is a voluntary contractual arrangement between a buyer and a seller. The buyer agrees purchases a policy, which specifies contractual conditions agreed to by both parties. The buyer typically agrees to pay a specified amount, usually in periodic payments called premiums; the seller agrees to pay a (generally) larger amount in the event that specified conditions occur. The seller is required to pay claims out of total assets on hand – not directly from current premium payments. This is why some insurers end up going bankrupt – they don’t have sufficient assets on hand to pay claims when an unexpected number of claims occur in a short period of time.
Insurance is, in essence, a legalized form of gambling. The policy holder essentially bets something bad will happen, and the insurance company bets it won’t and sets odds (e.g., sets premium levels) accordingly. If the company gets the odds right, they’ll pay out less over time than they take in in premiums and will stay in business. If not, they’ll pay out too much and will go belly-up. Because unlike the government, they cannot compel people to purchase their product – insurance. In contrast, income transfer programs like Social Security depend on the ability of the government to compel people to pay for them through taxation. Absent that power, they would only exist as voluntary charities.
Bottom line: if you didn’t buy it and have no lawful choice regarding continued participation, it’s ain’t insurance.
Insipid-well you didn’t even come close to addressing the point: since WWII Federal Revenue has pretty consistently been about 19% of GDP regardless of rate (I never claimed that lowering rates would raise revenue, so you can stuff that red herring). How do you think raising taxes will increase revenue, given that?
We only have a revenue problem relative to what our political class wants to spend, they know what they’ve got coming in and what they will have coming in for the foreseeable future, but it’s easier for them to try and buy votes with increased debt.
Ex-PH2: looks like we are totally in agreement.