I spoke with an AARP phone solicitor last week, recently turned 50, and he was completely briefed on the party line. My parents use them strictly for the travel discounts, but there has to be an altenative. Could we form a Freeper group to counter-balance them. I know that well over 70% of persons aged 50-65 are conservatives, there would be a huge groundswell of support for an alternative.
Yeah, the Conservative AARP or "CAARP."
I'm 47. Unfortunately for you and me, the die is already cast. The President's plan won't let us invest our contributions. It only applies to younger workers.
The only dog we have in this fight is that if nothing is done, then the trust fund will become insolvent and our benefits and our kids' benefits will be cut.
The claim is that the President's plan would drain the trust fund by diverting contributions. That may be true in the short run, although in the longer run, it will reduce the drain on the fund by eliminating payments out of the fund since younger workers will be drawing their benefits from the private accounts.
And you don't solve the problem by leaving things as they are, you only enable further delay. The longer we delay, the bigger and more unmanageable the problem is. Diverting some of the contributions out of the trust fund and into private accounts would force the government to deal with the problem sooner. That might mean a tax increase or a benefit cut to keep the trust fund solvent thru the retirement of the older workers like us, but if that's what we're going to have to do anyway, then the sooner we do it, the better. The worst thing we can do is wait until it's a crisis, and then have no alternative but a huge tax increase or a huge benefit cut.
Ther's the big problem with the AARP. It's a very successful business because it offers a lot of travel, insurance, and medication discounts. Once it gets members thorugh that legitimate route, it claims to represent those members politically, althoug many of its members disagree with its politics.