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Same goes with SS and healthcare. We put the lawfully required amount of contribution into SS by having it with-held from our pay and then we forget about it, trusting the federal government to take care of it for us until it is time for us to begin making withdrawls.
SS is not an investment plan. It is an insurance plan. Like any insurance plan, Social Security uses your current premiums to pay off current claims. What it has left over, it socks away as reserves against known or potential future claims. The is no box or account with your name on it. There is nothing you could withdraw. Once you meet the conditions specified by law, you may apply as the result of having paid premiums for a benefit that is defined by law. That's all.
Those IOU's of yours are US Treasury securities, the safest, most secure investment vehicle in the history of the world, and the very thing that all those savvy Wall Street types went rushing off to buy (sometimes at yields below 0%) in their September 2008 "flight to safety" from collapsing equities markets.
And who will be taxed when these securities are cashed in to deal with the shortfalls in the coming years? ME. I will be double taxed and I will not get full benefits.
Quote:
Originally Posted by saganista
Where does Treasury get the money? It borrows it. Sometimes, the same borrower is not just willing but anxious to take a new note in place of the old one. In other cases, the funds provided by a new investor are used to pay off an old one. We've been doing this through thick and thin since 1836. 10-year Treasuries closed today at the historically low yield of 3.72%. Ten years ago today, it was at 6.38%. We are not having any trouble finding people who are willing to buy our debt. What makes you think that YOU will have to buy it instead?
Couple our already massive debt (and the serious future fiscal problems we face because of Medicare and Medicaid) and anybody with a brain will realize that the money isn't going to be there. People will be loathe to lend to us in the coming decades and our credit rating could take a hit. The money IS NOT there to pay for all of this **** and we will face a day of reckoning. Insolvency is inevitable when you crunch the numbers.
And who will be taxed when these securities are cashed in to deal with the shortfalls in the coming years? ME. I will be double taxed and I will not get full benefits.
Its even worse as I'm sure you know because in the vent of your death, you get $0.. If your money was in "your" box, at least your children will get the funds.. SS, the biggest celebrated ripoff of todays working class by todays seniors who get far more than they paid into it...
Its even worse as I'm sure you know because in the vent of your death, you get $0.. If your money was in "your" box, at least your children will get the funds.. SS, the biggest celebrated ripoff of todays working class by todays seniors who get far more than they paid into it...
I view the S.S. program to be economic tyranny and un-Constitutional, but that is a different subject altogether. I was more referring to the economic realities that face it and us taxpayers who have to deal with the whole unsustainable mess.
Those aren't Bush's plan. They are the best efforts of Time Magazine and CNN to take one of what would become many changing sets of incomplete white papers and bullet-pointed fact sheets into something approximating a coherent plan. As the CNN article points out in bolded text, Many issues remain unclear. There was never an actual plan. It was a bob-and-weave exercise that was ultimately brought to a halt because the phony basis underlying the very notion of privatization was at last revealed.
The boomers are clueless and they will suck this country dry. You ever look at the projected cost of Medicare in the coming decades and how this nation will struggle to pay for it all?
Know anyone who would have a hard time getting by without social security and/or medicare? I do. Plenty of them. The Republicans fought against those programs tooth and nail. Thank god they lost.
Maybe if the entitlement programs were never passed the dead beats trying to live off the system would have been achievers instead of leeches
Many issues remain unclear. There was never an actual plan. It was a bob-and-weave exercise that was ultimately brought to a halt because the phony basis underlying the very notion of privatization was at last revealed.
Umm...when the President quite clearly lays out the major points of a plan in his State of the Union address, I consider that to be a plan - or at the very least a framework for a plan.
Did you miss the snippets about the voluntary nature of the plan, the figures given out, and the basic framework? And while I didn't agree with his plan (mainly because it relied upon borrowing even more money to make up for the shortfall), at least he tried to face the problem. The Dems pretend that there is no problem.
And who will be taxed when these securities are cashed in to deal with the shortfalls in the coming years? ME. I will be double taxed and I will not get full benefits.
Last month, the Treasury "cashed in" $423 billion worth of marketable securities as scheduled. You paid not one cent toward the accomplishment of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iwonderwhy2124
Couple our already massive debt (and the serious future fiscal problems we face because of Medicare and Medicaid) and anybody with a brain will realize that the money isn't going to be there. People will be loathe to lend to us in the coming decades and our credit rating could take a hit. The money IS NOT there to pay for all of this **** and we will face a day of reckoning. Insolvency is inevitable when you crunch the numbers.
Our debt as a percentage of GDP was 50% higher than it is today just after WWII. What happened? Japan's was another 50% higher than that in the 1990's. What happened?
Projected future liabilities are just that. They are not here yet, and they are not real yet. Everyone knows what they look like. But there are larger emergencies to deal with that ARE here and ARE real. There is no choice but to deal with those. Once we begin to get those under control, we can look at what else needs to be done. One of those things would be to get spiraling health care costs under control. A good start is made at that in the pending health care bill. Pass it.
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