You totally missed the point. We're not talking those who are fully paid-in to the system. With that crowd, the main issues are reform and aggresively grandfathering the age up. 65 was close to life expectancy when SS began in the 1930s. It's now 75 years later, life expectancy has gone way up, and you have to wait one whopping year longer to get a full retirement SS check. And you can still get it a reduced rate at 62. Totally arbitrary numbers, but the public is brainwashed into thinking they deserve a retirement at that age. Folks like me? You mean those who don't live on the dole and aren't brainwashed on entitlements, class warfare BS rhetoric, green energy or a thousand other lies from the snake-oiler in chief? Heaven forbid anyone listen to us. No functioning brains allowed around here. I know how the system is gamed--I've talked to enough welfare giver-outers whose political convictions were cemented when they saw the abuses and attitudes of the "gimme my check" crowd. Yeah, 2010 was a warning alright...but not what you think.
Well now, speaking of the "gimme my check" crowd and 350-pound parasites who live with their mom and think the "rich" owe them sustenance for nothing. Now get off the thread. Take your drive-by drivel elsewhere.
I was talking about the election in the 26th district of New York. That was a warning: to you, and those who agree with you. The economics of our Social Security system are way better than the economics of any other rich country's pension system. There's only a few things we need to do, none of them particularly radical, except of course to the Tea Party folks: 1 - Make the SS tax mildly progressive, which would allow it to both take in more revenue AND allow small employers to reduce their costs: exempt some amount, say equal to the personal deduction a person can take on their taxes, from SS. Then tax the rest, no limit. No one thinks about this: a landscaper employing a few guys at the minimum wage has a higher per-employee tax rate than Goldman Sachs, or any other financial company employing a lot of highly paid people, because the SS limit applies both to the employer and the employee side of the contribution. This is stupid. It also discourages the formation of small companies, the exact opposite of what we should be doing. 2 - Allow immigration of unskilled folks. The Mexican problem is caused by the fact this country admits no one legally if they don't have a skill. This too is stupid. We need younger workers to keep the system in balance, both short-term and long-term. Admit some number in legally of unskilled workers, and you'll have a much easier time policing the US/Mexican border. That really just about covers it. SS's projections are based on wildly pessimistic predictions about the productivity increases our economy is capable of. That gives paid-for pols like Paul Ryan, who I hope is being even as I write this whipped like the idiot he is by the Republicans from the establishment, those who have been around long enough to know how the political game is played and aren't like Pa(b)st Prime or you, too ideological to know that in a republic you have to compromise. Any realistic projection of actual productivity increases, which have only been running above trend (a trend defined way down by the parlous 70s and 80s) since the Clinton years, nearly twenty years by now, would keep SS in balance indefinitely. As for the rest of your post, I said it before: neither anecdote nor anecdotes equal data. SS runs on data.
Wow, magical productivity increases solve everything! And I guess we'll get them in your dreamy world of high taxes and increased regulations? No, they won't be enough even in the SS trustees world where taxes remain constant as a share of GDP...much less in the CBO's draconian scenario of taxes rising dramatically as a share of GDP. Sorry, your productivity silver bullet won't work. Not when the whole system is based on trust funds that aren't. Not when the CBO assumes ultra-optimistic things like borrowing long-term at historically low interest rates a decade from now. Not when Medicare, SS, Obamacare, etc. all come in way over budget. When Medicare was passed, they estimated it would cost an inflation-adjusted $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost? $98 billion â only off by eightfold. So what should we make of this? http://thebenefitblog.com/2011/05/25/medicare-bankrupt-by-2024-say-trustees/ And don't lecture on anecdotes when all you offer is conjecture and sweeping generalizations. You have no nothing about me, yet continue to make these asinine assertions about "my" kind. Talk to BHO if you want to complain about anedcotes. After all, he relied on them heavily as he sold Obamacare via "letters" he received. And of course there were all those feel-good stories about green energy. Those of us with even a rudimentary grasp of energy, math and physics knew they were fairy tales. Oh, and to top it off, you never even admitted to missing the distinction between age/retirement based entitlements vs. "needs"/welfare entitlements and the fraud that goes along with them. As for your "warning," well to paraphrase Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Especially when one snake oiler promises more goodies than the other.