“My point was clear”
Your point is clear that you think that SS is somehow an “investment” when it is a tax.
When you say “deserve” you really mean “entitled”.
If your point is that if someone didn’t have to pay taxes, they’d have more money, then I’d agree, but that is rather obvious, isn’t it?
We do not have the productive capacity as a nation to pay everyone a cool million in retirement cash and benefits. Put another way, one day the government checks are going to be a lot smaller or non-existent for folks who get ‘em. If you are counting on one, you should probably make plans for not having it.
EXCERPT Public outrage over lavish government employee compensation and pensions is becoming more heated as new revelations about excesses seem to crop up every week. The latest: Newport Beach, California, where some lifeguards have compensation packages that exceed $200,000 and where these "civil servants" can retire with lucrative government pensions at age 50.
Newport Beach has two groups of lifeguards. Seasonal tower lifeguards cover Newport’s seven miles of beach during the busy summer months. Part-time seasonal guards make $16-22 per hour with no benefits. They are the young people who man the towers and do the lion’s share of the rescues. Another group of highly compensated full-time staff work year-round and seldom, if ever, climb into a tower......... the typical Daily Deployment Model in the winter for these lifeguards is 10 hours per day for four days each week, mainly spent driving trucks around, painting towers, ordering uniforms and doing basic office work—none are actually manning lifeguard towers.
........last year the top earner received $211,000 in pay and benefits, including a $400 sun protection allowance. In 2010 all but one of the city’s full-time lifeguard staff had annual compensation packages worth over $120,000. Not bad pay for a lifeguard - but what makes these jobs most attractive is the generous retirements. One recently retired lifeguard, age 51, receives a government retirement of over $108,000 per year—for the rest of his life. He will make well over $3 million in retirement if he lives to age 80.
In 1999, California legislators, including many Republicans, felt very generous with the public's tax dollars and created "three at fifty" for public safety workers. SB 400 allowed these government employees to retire as early as age 50, well over a decade before their counter-parts in the private sector, and calculate their annual retirement pay at three percent per year or 90% of their final year's pay.
With the ability to spike final year's pay based on over-time, vacation and sick leave time, uniform allowances, etc., many former government employees now earn more retired than when they worked. There was a domino effect of this incredibly generous law resulting in local communities jumping on board to stay "competitive" by offering local public safety personnel, including lifeguards, the same great deal. Thousands of state and local employees are locked into generous pension contracts which the courts have decided cannot be broken despite the lack of budgets to pay for them.
According to a Stanford University study, California taxpayers are facing a pension liability that could exceed $500 billion, a figure the non-partisan Little Hoover Commission says will "crush" government.
As bad as Newport Beach's situation is, it pales in comparison to some other cities in California. The city of Fresno currently spends 53 cents of every payroll dollar on pensions. The state average is 31 percent and is expected to rise significantly in the next few years. --SNIP--
SOURCE http://media.townhall.com/Townhall/Reu//b//2009%5C243%5C254f62a0-a420-4f58-b614-1b2fd0b8bd1b@news.ap.org.jpg
>>Your point is clear that you think that SS is somehow an “investment” when it is a tax.<<
No. My point was that if I had put the money in an investment I would have had more than the amount I’d ever receive from SS, and SS was designed as “forced investment” on ones future. Yes, it is a tax, but a tax that benefits far less than if it had been actually invested, which is what it replaces - or at least what it was supposed to replace. And replace is really the wrong word. It was to “augment” your income in the later years.
Also, when it started, it didn’t kick in until age 65, and the average life span was less than that.
>>We do not have the productive capacity as a nation to pay everyone a cool million in retirement cash and benefits. Put another way, one day the government checks are going to be a lot smaller or non-existent for folks who get ‘em. If you are counting on one, you should probably make plans for not having it.<<
Yep. And that is one reason our country, like all the rest of ‘em, is going down hard. You can’t turn it off without huge pain, and you can’t leave it on without total collapse. Western culture is about to go the way of Rome, Babylon, et al. And it collapsed of its own weight. No house of cards is permanent. It’s just very painful for those alive when it happens.