Posted on 01/08/2008 7:59:45 PM PST by tralfaz7
The exit polls have shown, the Democratic primary is turning into a battle between the people that pay for Social Security and those that collect it.
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Curious statement. Are not the dems the ones who say that we cannot allow the unwashed to take charge of even part of their Social Security with private accounts?
Does that not mean that the collectors of Social Security have already paid for it?
Many times over?
Of course. Social security and medicare recipients will screw the next generations financially to protect their entitlements.
Hillary also has women who want no husbands and a government who will pay them as if they are married.
Hispanics love Hillary and her “let everyone in” mentality.
In short, Hillary is the High Priestess of Entitlements! Bring us your lazy, stupid and criminally motivated.
Yesterday we were told it was generational. Today the two old fuddy duddieds of status quo won.
I Hate New Hampshire. tonight they chose not to live free.
>will screw the next generations financially
Haven’t those elderly already been paying SS all of their lives?
NH: Tax hard or cry.
Social security is NOT an entitlement for those who have been paying into it for 40 years. Entitlement implies getting something for free......SS is hardley free at 7% of each paycheck.
Honestly, it *is* an entitlement. It certainly isn’t an ‘investment’, as it really returns *less* than inflation. It’s basically an entitlement that the working folks pay to the retired. As was the case before. When you pay the 7% it’s to pay for the currently retired. From that standpoint, I can see how a good number(myself included) would want to break the cycle, ie, not pay for a current entitlement in order to expect their own entitlement later.
Furthermore, in order to break that cycle, I’d be willing to pay for the said entitlement for another 5 years without expecting anything in return in order to get rid of it for the time after the 5 years expired.
By the way, ‘entitlement’ doesn’t imply getting something for free. Entitlement means getting something that someone *else* pays for, because there is no free lunch. And that is EXACTLY what SS is. The fact people have been duped by the govm’t to pay into it for 40 years is something those people should face, and those of us who’d like to *not* pay for it shouldn’t have to.
Most people, probably 75% or more, who are collecting social security benefits have passed their break even points by years.
I believe that the present time to break-even for most retirees is aobut four years. After that, it’s a free ride paid for by the next generation.
A huge fraud perpetrated in 1983 when the so-called social security trust fund was set up so that the boomers could pre-pay their retirement, and the money was proptly spent. As a result, new retirees and their children face a double whammy. All the trillions that were spent will have to be taxed back from our grandkids, and the folks whos pockets have been picked weren’t able to save that money on their own.
The alleged bargain of 1983 was that the Government would save the money for the boomers, but it lied, and spent the money instead.
Everyone has been swindled. We’re all victims.
But never ever allow yourself to think that the the benefits that seniors are drawing now were fully paid by them through their payroll deductionas and employer contributions. That’s just not the case.
[sigh]
Does this really have to be explained again? What you and I have been paying “into” is not really a retirement system, and there’s nothing there to collect. SS is just another tax. The money you and I paid into it is gone, already spent as part of the general fund.
It’s true that people have been collecting SS money for years, but that’s just a hook to fool the mass of rubes (the soon-to-start-retiring-in-large-numbers baby boomers). Politicians from an earlier era, many now dead, promised voters that if the voters would just support higher taxes, then yet-unborn generations would pay for everyone’s retirement.
Thing is, those yet-unborn generations didn’t take part in that deal, and they have no obligation to fund it. SS may owe you, and I, vast amounts of money, but, unfortunately, SS doesn’t really exist. It’s an accounting fiction. Might as well claim that the tooth fairy owes you cash for the teeth dropping out of your head.
Just curious, where did you get that figure?
The person recieving SS already paid into it. There is no free lunch any more than getting money back on a savings account after 40 years is a free lunch.
And that is EXACTLY what SS is. The fact people have been duped by the govm’t to pay into it for 40 years is something those people should face, and those of us who’d like to *not* pay for it shouldn’t have to.
Its not a matter of being duped, its required by law to pay into SS. Most of us would happily opt out for a 401k or something else but we cannot.
What you want is to steal the money from those who have already paid into it by not giving them their deserved benefits. But this is a moot argument anyway. Like it or not SS is here to stay for at least a while and you WILL be paying into it. Hopefully when it is your time to recieve benefits you won't get the same illogical diatribe we are getting from you now.
Xer Ping
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
And, of course, the employer is required to match that 7%, so it is actually 14% per year that goes in. No one but the government could manage a lifetime withholding of 14% per year so badly.
Oh no, I'm sure that people who call it an "entitlement" will stick to their guns, when they are old enough and not accept any SS checks.
No doubt they will, in fact they will publicly burn their SS checks in protest./s
Here is the problem that America is facing today. We have two generations that have been taught and believe that everything should be free. They have taken the bait of promised give aways and fail to understand that nothing is free. America has chosen the way of socialism through the Democrat platform of promises. The day will arrive when the tax rate is so high in Americal that people will be slaves of the state. When we hit the 80% tax bracket, who and what will be “FREE?” Americal has lost her way and the fundamental principles she was built upon. The change has already taken place, judgment has fallen, and America is dead. With two lost generations — America has lost her soul.
Ah, but that’s the fallacy. You’re blaming us who’re paying for it right now and complainging about it for the fact that those who paid into it let the goverment spend it/waste it otherwise.
In my opinion, as I oppose the whole concept, it’s not my/ours fault or obligation. However, I’m willing to *donate* *MY* *HARD* earned money to transition things, and therefore are doing a favor to the system, so don’t give me the ‘illogical diatribe’ crap. It’s perfectly logical from my standpoint, just because you don’t agree or scared others think like this doesn’t make it so.
I personally don’t expect to see a damn dime out of the deal. And, being self employed, I’m double on the hook. Whoever right now my age (Gen X) is counting on SS 30 years from now, is living in a pipe dream. I’m not looking to ‘steal’ anything from anyone, just don’t believe that I owe anyone anything just because they failed to change the system.
And let me add to that, more and more folks are getting smart about taking their income offshore, and I’m not talking just about ‘rich’ folks. One of these days I just might say forget all that and take it all out of reach. Have fun then.
Instead, we should all work towards a solution that should work for everyone. Everyone will have to sacrifice, *including* those who have put in money for 40 years, and those of us who are forced to contribute now but won’t see (or expect to see) anything in the future.
As a matter of fact, I will be greatly surprised if 30 years from now a SS check (or any kind of check) arrives from the goverment. And if it does, I will be quite disappointed.
I’ve arrived here with nothing, and expect nothing other than what I earn with my skills and hard work. Certainly not a check from other hard working taxpayers.
Not to mention the travesty of the horrible returns the SS money is really making.
While true, it’s MORE of a battle between the DC Democrat Establishment, or “Shadow Party”, and the rest of America..
Those that have become dependent on Gub’ment money, from Welfare recipients, to Social Security recipients, to “Non-Profit” 527’s and Democrat “Issue Groups” knows that they can coount on Hillary for more “Free Stuff”..
I disagree. For one, marginal tax rates before Reagan have been in the area you speak of - around 70%. He took them down to the 20%’s. We’re still in the same area, and, there’s lots of us out there like me, making it in the real world, with only our skills and entrepreneurial drive that keeps us running.
While that exists, America’s soul is alive and well.
Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, and not everyone can take the risks. But as long as there are those of us that will, the American Dream lives. And from where I stand, it’s doing quite well.
Yah, and when your’e 62 and have paid into SS for all those years you will have someone half your age saying the same things you are saying now. They will be whining and blaming you for not stopping SS and a whole slew of other things that may be the hip gripe of the time.
Grow up kid and stop blaming your parents and grandparents. You want to get rid of SS, fine, good luck with all that.
I am one who has paid into Social Security for my entire working lifetime, and maxed out each and every year since 1960.
I reached my full retirement age in the middle of 2007 and started collecting benefits. So, I sould be among the best funded participants in the system. Still, I will have collected all the contributions of myself and my employer plus interest, by the time I am 72 1/2.
Now, I assume that most SS participants will reach full payout a bit faster than me.
In my case, time to payout break-even is about 5.5 years, but my understanding is that for most it is closer to four years. That means that most people currently 69/70 years old have already recieved in benefits all their contributions, their employer’s contributions, and interest and are into the dessert portion.
My figure of “probably” 75 percent is just a wild-*ssed guess on my part of the proportion of SS benefit recipients older than 70 years. I think it could be MORE than 75%, but I don’t have the figures to back that up.
I am confident of the core truth of what I am saying.
And I know you will just shred it.
With all due respect, sirs, I don’t believe it’ll be there (and I doubt you do either), and, furthermore, should it be there by some miracle, whatever that may be will be insignificant compared to the rest of the holdings I am planning for right now.
I won’t shred it, it’ll go to a charity of my choice.
A mere $200 a month is 2.5M 35 years from now, in today’s dollars. If I need any kind of assistance from the govm’t by then I’ll consider myself a failure. I don’t care if one is making a minimum wage, with proper budgeting and sacrifice it’s quite possible to individually save for retirement. I know, I was there. I lived on $3 a day in college.
And - my parents/grandparents didn’t live in in this country. I’ve got no one to blame, nor I do. I just object to the imposed responsibility while I expect none in return. And, again, I consider all of this a *voluntary* expenditure on my part. I could easily take vast majority of my income offshore, and not pay a dime in SS or taxes. But I don’t. For now. I do expect something to be done eventually.
I get kinda ticked off when, for example, my property taxes triple, and I’m paying more in escrow than my mortgage payment is, as is the case now, as the local county govm’t is spending whatever it wants to spend. That whole attitude makes me nuts. When/IF things go south social security and taxes-wise in the same manner, I’ll arrange my financial matters in such a way as to not incur said liabilities. And - let me assure you, I’m by no means
all that smart either. If I can figure it out, tons more will too.
Furthermore, you sir, should (here’s hoping you’re in good health), live far into your 80s-90s. Advancing medical technology will see to that.
The problem is that the return on the money invested in SS was so bad (barely breaking inflation, if that), that the current system requires more and more working folks to support the viability of the system. Considering the demographics, reality is the system is untenable, and will require a compromise between us ‘kids’ and the current beneficiaries of the system.
Social security and Medicare are generational Ponzi schemes. The greatest generation paid much lower payroll taxes. The boomer generation and later generations have allowed the greatest generation to steal part of their retirement. I do not understand why boomers and later generations did not demand privatization a long time ago. The greatest generation with their lock step voting and entitlement mentality have ensured that their benefits were high in comparison to their payroll taxes.
It is too late to fix entitlements. It is only a matter of how benefit cuts are made. I prefer the solution offered by Bush and now by Thompson. Increasing payroll taxes and the earnings ceiling should be off the table. Increase the retirement age and provide incentives for seniors to work by eliminating payroll taxes after retirement age as long as benefits are not taken.
Pretty much 100% agreed - as I’m advocating in this particular conversation thread, and, willing to finance the transition myself.
The fallacy in your thinking and the thinking of others is that they do not expect to receive benefits. Politicians will never vote to curtail benefits although they may vote to reduce benefits through the retirement age. I would join you in not receiving benefits in exchange for a reduction of my payroll taxes. However that solution, essentially partial privatization, does not seem feasible in the current political situation.
The rat solution involves a series of massive tax increases. The rats will begin with lifting the earnings ceiling, or at least a substantial increase in the ceiling. The rats may also try to reduce payroll taxes for lower wage workers. Lifting the earnings ceiling will not provide enough revenue so the rats will seek additional massive tax increases. Eventually, the rats will just declare that there should not be any relationship between payroll taxes and benefits. The tax increases will have a devasting impact on the economy over time especially when combined with all of the other rat spending ideas.
In the worst case scenario, your benefits will be worth much less due to inflation and tax increases on other parts of your earnings and savings. This indirect way of cutting benefits will be much worse than simply forgoing the benefits. However, the rats are in charge so the benefit cuts will be largely indirect and unpredictable.
Had to search for the old boring piece at: Move Over Boomers -- Gen-X And Gen-Y in the Coming Decades
Sure looks like it from the polls and recent primary results.....Huckabee, Obama, Clinton, McCain. If any of those make it to prez SS will be a minor annoyance compared to the full blown socialism that will be all the rage.
Don't count on the x and y gen to do any better than the boomers, and as it stands now, they are looking to take the country to its final socialist doom. And boy are they going to get their arses blamed for it too by the Z generation.
Let me explain this to you in simple words.
I started collecting Social Security about 3 months ago. I would rather that I did not collect it. I would much rather have invested the money myself. But, the government took my money and paid it to someone else older than me.
Now that it is my turn to collect, I realize that I will never get back the true value of all they took from me, but I will fight to the end to keep getting something, because it was promised to me when they took my money in the first place.
Go ahead, call me lazy and stupid. I voted against SS every time I could, but I was still forced into the program under threat of imprisonment.
Where were you when I was fighting a lonely battle against this screwjob?
Now that it is my turn to collect the miniscule (and for most people, negative) return on what was taken from me, you want to claim SS is "screwing the next generation". Fine lets quit. Give me back a lump sum payment for the amount I put in, plus interest for the past 40 years.
You are completely correct. The system is absolutely unsustainable as presently structured.
My Dad is still going strong at 93, collecting SS and medicare benefits. If I last as long as he has, my SS payout, not including Medicare, will be about $1,050,000 assuming a 3% annual cost of living adjustment, and that is very conservative. I think the actual payout would be more like $1,250,000.
This is a commitment that I think will be very difficult for the government to make good on.
I think you are dangerously naive.
For the past century, the compound average growth rate for money invested in the stock market has been 12 to 14 %. I don't know how you do the calculations, but I use MS excel and know how to calculate compound interest and internal rate of return.
I will never reach break-even in getting back the money I have had stolen from me.
If you have just started receiving benefits, you are likely to get back everything you paid, your employer paid, and all the accred interest within 5 years of the start of benefits. You are likely to receive FAAAAR more than you ever paid in, that is until the whole thing collapses into bankrupt rubble.
See my other posts.
Obviously, I am NOT using stock market rates of return. Why on earth would I? These kinds of calculations are normally done using something more like the prime rate.
I used 5%.
But I agree, if you assume that you could have invested both your contribution and the employer’s contribution and achieved a compounded return of 12 to 14%, you get a result very different from what I describe.
They’ve been doing that for decades. No one listened or cared until our familiar cry was at their back door. That and it didn’t matter much when they had 10 workers for every recipient. Now I will work yet another 20 years or so and contribute to more and more recipients that should have saved there money in the first place.
Wonder what $200,000 in SS payments over the past 35 years be worth today?
Nor will I.
I’ve been paying since I was 16 and I really doubt that that 60+ years of payments are disposed of by 48 months at $500 a month or so, even discounting inflation and COLA, but maybe its close enough for the purpose of showing the utter failure of the setup, and one that was openly seen and predicted back in the 70s, at that.
Allowing me to opt out of this government fraud, and mandating a private account for those monies would mean that I would probably be worth closer to a million bucks on that alone.
I suppose that my views on these socialist thefts are closer to libertarian viewpoints.
And I do understand that the money was spent, but what control do we have over money once they reach into our pocket and take it from us?
Actually, I could get angry at the whole concept just writing this, but its too early in the morning. :)
I never did think that there was some fund that the payments went into. - Its just another government tax that you pay or else.
Given the present state of education and politics in this country, how do we get rid of it especially when most of the illegals are politically leftist?
They will vote sooner or later, and the democrat's class warfare will continue.
I'm very pessimistic. Thank you for the post. - Bill
Hear,hear.
You aren’t alone. What I am fairly confident will happen is that our standard of living will devolve to the lowest common denominator present in the squalid countries that the millions of future voters are coming from.
And that doesn’t include the socialist states of
America such as NJ, et al.
I suggest that you also make provisions for your children to relocate to another country, if it comes to that, since I also believe that this country will not be looking friendly upon your viewpoint, and those who espouse it.
And my dad passed away in 1974, having paid in since SS inception and never collected a dime.
I am saddened to hear about your Dad. The situation you describe is one of the real tragedys of the existing system - NONE of us have any ownership rights over the money we have paid in. It is not ours. We can’t bequeath it to our heirs. We have no real accounts.
We need to reform the system (or get rid of it entirely - an unrealistic expectation) so that the money we put in is:
1. ours
2. invested, not spent
3. managed honestly and transparently
None of these things are true today.
I am going to check in a bit more detail when I get home.
What folks who have been paying in for a long time need to remember is that for many years the maximum contribution was really REALLY small, like just a few hundred dollars a year. Even after 50 years, those small contributions have not grown huge. The contributions didn’t start to grow large until after 1983.
“Increase the retirement age and provide incentives for seniors to work by eliminating payroll taxes after retirement age as long as benefits are not taken.”
Yours is one of the better ideas I’ve seen. But the masters of the printing press in our corrupt government will never allow it to happen.
Allowing tens of millions of citizens to keep their entire earnings would result in massive increased consumer spending and probably trigger inflation to the point where that inflation would be obvious to all. One of the primary reasons for taxation, in my opinion, is to sop up all those extra fiat dollars manufactured by the Fed so inflation does not overwhelm our printing press economy.
You may have a different opinion since my forte is not business while your occupation is exactly that.
The reason why you should use stock market rates of return is that even back when I started working, before the 401(k) was invented, every financial advisor I read said that long term savings should be invested in stocks. And, I read dozens of financial advisors' writings.
This was especially true for younger workers, since their money had longer to grow and compound.
Even way back then large employers had retirement plans and the money in these plans was most commonly invested in stocks.
Essentially, I see no reason at all to accept a lower rate of return than that achieved by professional money managers, especially on what should have been the largest pot of retirement money in the world. If a private employer accepted a 5% return on their pension plan they would have failed in their fiduciary responsibility to the plan participants and would have been sued. In fact, I have read about examples of this, but do not have a reference.
You can have any opinion you want, by my contention is that the funds stolen from me by Social Security should have received no lower a rate of return than the average of either the stock market, or the average of large company pension plans, both of which are in the 12% to 14% range.
This is not 20/20 hindsight or pie in the sky, but real results achieved by real pension plans.
I have no argument with either investing in equities or in mutual funds, as I have done so myself for decades, and I too would be very dissatisfied with a long term return of 5%.
I am certain, however that many highly secure investment funds do in fact only offer a return of a few percent, and as long as they don’t misrepresent the expected return, they won’t be successfully sued, at least not on that account.
While such investments might not satisfy either your requirements or mine, they certainly do have clients. And I would suggest to you that viewed as an investment, social security is more like one of these highly secure investment offering a very low rate of return than it is like an equity investment.
You may well argue that you would not have so invested had your money not been taken from you under color of law. I’d agree with you; mine would not have been so invested either - and what I did keep and invest was not.
But I think it is a bit unfair to use a 12 to 14 percent rate of return to judge social security’s return.
Let me do a bit more math, and I will come back to you with the actual rate of return that I am getting from Social Security. I think you may be surprised. Or then, it may be me.
Well, figure it out.
At retirement, I will have been forced to pay SS for just short of 50 straight years.
While income was way lower, the money was worth an large amount more.
When I was 16 I could walk into the Ford dealership and plunk down $4,000 and change for a brand new Mach one with the Boss 302 option.
Of course after high school graduation, I was earning the princely sum of $1.90 per hour.
That money that they took - and supposedly invested, haha - was a lot of money to me, and if it were saved and invested for all of that time, I would be wealthy from that alone.
That 69 Boss car that I bought then now goes for anywhere from $75 to $250,000 today.
As far as I can see, SS was outright theft.
Now, were they to structure a mandated free market type of system, with matching contributions from employers, we might all be very comfortable indeed after 50 years of input and compounded interest.
But no, its the agenda for change and the class warfare struggle
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