Posted on 07/03/2011 4:03:53 PM PDT by rabscuttle385
I agree, but I should point out that I am very near SS age. We need to recognize that the only way to reform SS and Medicare is to abolish them completely. If any roots of those toxic growths are left in place, they will grow back like Mesquite.
If “No payments to illegals” is already the law of the land, then start enforcing it. There’s probably $50 billion going to illegals in goods/services in southern CA annually.
My plan gets government substantially out of the pension business in a generation.
If smoking- and obesity-related illnesses are not a substantial portion of Medicare/Medicaid, then what is?
OK, I give up. Who is going to do that? Jerry Brown? The Dem state house? The Mayor of Los Angeles? The federal government?
My plan gets government substantially out of the pension business in a generation.
Your plan continues the Ponzi scheme and there is no way that it will end SS. The political will doesn't exist to do it.
If smoking- and obesity-related illnesses are not a substantial portion of Medicare/Medicaid, then what is?
An aging population. 10,000 people are retiring every day and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. By 2030 one in five residents of this country will be 65 or older, about twice what it is now. And by 2030, there will be only two workers for every retiree. FYI: Obamacare adds 18 million to the Medicaid rolls.
My plan would effectively end Social Security in about 35 years.
As far as there being no political will to correct any of this, I never said there was.
What’s your solution?
My solution would be personal accounts except for a small defined benefit program for disability and survivor benefits. The program would be phased in similar to what was done in Chile. SS would then become a real program for wealth accumulation for the individual. Their contributions would belong to them and be part of their estate. Participants would be given choices similar to the federal Thrift Savings Plan ranging from supersafe investments like T-bills to bonds to stock mutual funds and any mix thereof.
What will probably happen is what happened in 1983. Congress will raise the retirement age, increase taxes, and change various formulae re computation of benefits and COLA. In other words, they will kick the can down the road for another 30 or 40 years.
Don’t get chapped at older generations whose money was voted out of their pockets years ago as well.
These people on here who fancy themselves in the “younger generation” seem to imagine that we elders just appeared one day without having our own pockets cleaned out. Many of us were actually born here, worked here and in some cases STILL work here, and were “young” once, too.
“We Were Young - and Soldiers”. Hard to imagine when you see the gray headed old geezer in Walmart, isn’t it?
I am not chapped- i can see how it happened and how politicians lied topeople.
But young people I talk to about politics are already getting mad
I am in the middle- (age 53)
I am still young enought that I would gladly give up my ‘social security’ if they would let me stop paying into it
As (relatively powerless) individuals; we tend to think of this or that which we’d be glad to do, if only the career “public servants” in our government would take the steps needed to fix this problem - and not persecute us off the face of the earth if we tried to buck the system.
As I said before, my Medicare card kicks in this month. It feels bad enough that I’d gladly go on paying my own medical bills myself just like I’ve always done. (I did have insurance years ago when I had to have - through duress - a couple of stents put in an artery. For a long time now, I’ve gone the natural route to do my due diligence to try to fend off illnesses.)
I don’t know if my nurse practitioner would let me go on paying my own bill or not; but it would seem she would do better money-wise with me doing it myself instead of settling for the amount of Medicare Obama will likely allow.
For the rest of it; I’d like to just rustle up some work, live off that, and let the SS Dept. just keep it. - I still work some in our business; husband works a lot in it. We don’t “draw” much; but are reasonably able ,system is broken, just like everything they’ve decided to “run” over the years. (Yeah; yeah; we worked all those years and paid other people’s grandparents’ SS and medical stuff, but something’s gotta change - and it might as well start now as later.)
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