Posted on 12/28/2012 4:33:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It is important to understand that the fiscal cliff is a charade. There are, to be sure, many conscientious debt reformers working to avert our proclaimed year-end epic fall—along with many cynics who are using the occasion to advance pet projects that will make the debt problem worse. But all concerned are working within a fiscal system that has become seriously pathological. The cliff is the latest expression of that pathology.
Just last year, the president and Congress agreed by statute to (a) increase the federal government’s public debt by more than $2 trillion (up to $16.4 trillion) and (b) begin reducing annual federal spending by less than one-tenth that amount starting in 2013. A variety of temporary tax reductions, aimed at spurring recovery from the Great Recession, were also scheduled to expire in 2013. Now that the new debt has been borrowed and spent, the prospect of actually reducing our annual $1 trillion deficits by a significant amount is regarded by all sensible people as a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs.
And what is to be done to stop the spending cuts and tax increases? This month’s partisan positioning over raising taxes on the wealthy masks a consensus, embraced by the leadership of both parties, on two essential principles of cliff-avoidance. First, the vast majority of Americans who are middle class must be spared any clear-and-present impositions: Their direct income taxes must not be increased, and their Social Security and Medicare benefits must not be reduced any time soon—meaning that any reductions will be as contingent, and possibly ephemeral, as last year’s debt-reduction accord. Second, the federal debt must be immediately increased by yet another $2-3 trillion, with further increases of equal magnitude certain to follow.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
You can't "earn" that which is derived from fraud. Social Security is a fraud called a "Ponzi scheme". Early "investors" are rewarded using the payments of later suckers. When the geometric nature of the required participation rate is discovered, one must finally conclude that the program is unsound.
Unfortunately, the government is determined to allow the fraud to continue by simply printing money to cover the shortfall, effectively taxing those who hold dollars to make the payments. This will not end well.
Your suggestion to prevent this “fraud?”
Immediate reduction of all "entitlement" payments by 5% followed by the same percentage reduction over the next twenty years. The final remaining third of present payments to then be eliminated. In twenty years the entire program is gone.
Payments into social insecurity will remain as is except that they may be reduced when no longer needed to make scheduled payments.
I think your plan would be super for all the unearned entitlements like food stamps and SSI.
Perhaps not. But hyper-inflation and the growing awareness by the younger generation that the well will be dry when they arrive may well result in the same outcome. I can hardly imagine what our grandchildren are going to be thinking when they contemplate the burden we have created for them.
Also, I am on Social Security and I agree with my plan. It's a start.
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