Come on people, we have to pay for free housing, healthcare, food, education, bus and plane rides for illegals.
At this point Social Security is outright theft.
L
“It’s naïve to hope that the major parties would discuss such important fiscal matters in an election year (or any other year, really).”
And stupid to propose it.
SS will be fixed after it fails, not before.
Their current ‘solution’ is to kill off as many SS recipients as possible with the Vaxxes and the high inflation taking away their life savings......................
Modest? LOL
“the changes are intended to “prevent Biden’s cuts to Social Security”
Anyone who thinks that’s the way it will play out is insane.
It’s always the (R)s, being the responsible ones in the room, messing with the third rail. And it’s always the (D)s putting it, w/ false spin, on the bulletin board and campaigning on it. Remember the Cadaver’s use of Rick Scott’s musings as “the policy of my opponents — not a joke; I have it here in writing”, ad nauseam.
The only way SS gets fixed is for it to implode. Sad, but it’s the truth.
The corruption of the Social Security system and misspending of funds there is THE BASIS for my problem with the Federal government.
First of all, it’s essentially fanciful to call 27% of the electorate a “major political party”. But I understand how difficult fringe status is to accept.
Second, it works like this. Money comes into SS and money goes out. That balance of flow has been negative for some time. The way the total benefits are still being paid is via the accumulated Trust Fund of decades past.
That Trust Fund will hit zero in about 7 years.
At that point, theoretically, outflow will be limited to tax influx. This will be about a 25% cut in benefits (outflow).
Here are the proposals to fix it:
1) Raise the retirement age for FRA (Full Retirement Age). This has happened before. It’s not a new proposal.
2) Increase the FICA rate on currently working people.
3) Reduce benefit payout. That 25% mentioned above would be the number only if the reduction is evenly distributed across the entire population of people receiving SS. Odds are about 99% any such benefit reduction would be concentrated at the higher end of income and NOT evenly distributed.
4) Raise the income/salary limit at which FICA is no longer collected.
5) Increase the population of Soc Sec payers. This does not have to mean more immigration. There are many state government employees and teachers who are not in the Soc Sec program, but if you add them in order to collect more FICA, then those people will one day add to benefits collection.
6) A combination of above.
Something akin to Algore's "lockbox" is needed to make sure that today's Social Security surplus is held in reserve for future shortfalls in the program.
This raises the deficit because Congress can't raid the Social Security piggybank and spend the money elsewhere, leaving nothing but worthless IOUs in the Social Security acount. But it will ensure that Social Security remains solvent for a much longer time.
Another way to extend the life of Social Security is to means-test for payout of benefits, and remove the cap on the amount of income that has to pay Social Security tax, which is currently limited to the first $160,200.
It’s all lies, all produced and directed by the corrupt running government who looted, subverted and destroyed everything.
I want every nickel I put into social security. No cuts. Cutting what I am entitled to get is theft.
How about you greedy and thoughtless assholes redeem all of the IOUs that you gave us over the years when you raided the Social Security Trust Fund.
***Biden voted to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67***
When first passed the SS system wanted you to retire at 62 years of age, but the average life span then was 57 years.
Then came Penicillin...
1. Raise the full retirement age to 68 in 2025. Add another year to that in 6 months increments every 6 years or so until this gets to age 73 (e.g. 68.5 in 2031, 69.0 in 2037, etc. to 73 by 2085).
2. Keep the minimum eligibility age where it is, albeit with correspondingly lower benefits as the full retirement age increases.
3. In exchange for these increases, permanently remove the federal tax on benefits. That seems fair anyway, since the government frittered away any chance of getting real returns on the monies collected from us over the years.
I’d love to also phase out the FICA taxes over time, replacing them with a mandatory personal savings plan that workers can’t touch until at least age 65... but the existing retirees have to be funded, and that comes from the current FICA taxes (since the govt screwed that up, too), so somebody with better spreadsheet skills will have to do that math.
Republicans should be proposing an opt out, not a salvage plan for the Ponzi scheme.
Let people who want to stay in conventional Social Security do so, provided that the system is funded entirely by those who choose to stay.
No one would stay.
The question then becomes how to amortize the unfunded liability. Deal with that separately.
About 20 years ago the AARP Magazine had an article on why the SS system was NOT a PONZI Scheme.
All Ponzi Schemes collapse. Since SS had not collapsed it was not a Ponzi Scheme.
A few pages on in was an article by Jane Briant Quinn on how the SS system was set up. Without saying the word “Ponzi” the SS is set up just like a Ponzi Scheme except the government FORCES in new people to pay at the bottom.
With the forced mRNA “vaccines”; surely enough senior citizens were murdered, so there should be a surplus in Social Security
Biggest financial scam in history prior to the Climate Crisis scam.
The hell with that. Raising the SS age? And if they don’t then SS benefits get cut? My ass...
They spew a firehose of money at Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, etc. Hell, even the sicko Palestinians get all the US cash they need.
12 million illegals are getting in the 2000-2500 range a month PER FAMILY MEMBER. An SS retiree gets nothing like that. If they have another retirement before getting all their SS credits, such as cop, firefighter, teacher, military etc, they get their SS cut down by 40-60%. SOme get 500 dollars or less in SS despite getting fully vested by work before and after the “double dipping” job.
And then there is the penalty for additional earnings over 19k or so for people drawing SS. Every dollar over that comes off your benefit. Why? And in term of when that 19k limit was set, it would be around 40k today.
They sodomize SS retirees every way imaginable, and then say that’s the first place to cut. And idiot repubs lead the charge.
And then last but not least. Imagine a wall street company that took 14% of your pay for 45 years, and at the end of that time paid you back 1700 a month as long as you lived, and when you died, they kept the change. They would be in a cell beside Bernie Madoff.
Anyone investing 14% of their income for 45 years should have a million in the bank, draw 4k a month and never touch the principal.
And then of course, they TAX your SS benefit, lie about inflation to depress COLA.
And the idiot republicans, our heroes, charge in right before the election yammering about raising the retirement age? Not forbid illegals from going on disability, not forbidding benefits to illegals doubling the amount SS retirees get. Not a moratorium on foreign aid. Not cutting off 100,000 government farce expenditures.
No, the repubs want to squeeze retirees a little more.
Idiots.