Fucking with social security might be the only policy issue that could get a Republican voted out of office
1 Like
âSocial Security remains strong and will be able to pay full benefits for many years to come â until 2034.â
Americans canât even close their eyes and hypothetically consider a world in which everything does not go their way. In most other countries, old people get a spare bedroom. In the USA, those are the âgolden yearsâ where you go on cruises, buy new cars, spend hundreds of thousands on end of life care and nursing homes. Itâs totally insane and the bill gets passed down to the next generation with the sole tidbit that population can never decrease. Yeah, maybe it will all workout. Arizona is the fastest growing state despite running out of water. There is just the absolute certainty that it will work out in the end.
1 Like
Itâs not like Social Security will be able to pay 0% of benefits after 2034. And the easy fix is raising the cap on payroll taxes that go towards SS.
you are paying early investors with money from later investors and require new investors to keep the train moving. that sounds like a ponzi.
the only real way to combat climate change is population decline.
1 Like
This probably doesnât belong in the Crypto thread, but yes the point of the 2034 date (itâs actually 2035 as of the most recent report) isnât to provide notice that the program is going to die on that date, itâs the date by which policy levers need to be pulled to keep the program healthy. There are many policy levers available, including raising the SS tax cap, or they could adjust the retirement age adjustments again (basically just cutting benefits but not describing it that way), or they could change the rules for how much of social security is taxed as income to the recipient and direct new tax revenue to funding the benefits.
I basically wouldnât trust any news reporting on SS solvency because itâs all going to be Dems say X, Rs say Y, mumbo jumbo. There is plenty of thorough, strong analysis readily available on the SS website at Research, Statistics & Policy Analysis.
1 Like
admittedly i am not as smart as you guys about this stuff but that all sounds like fuck over late investors for the benefit of early investors. ok, they donât get zero, they just get less and less and less etc?
1 Like
The average SS benefit is $1700 per month, not exactly cruises and champagne. It gives people dignity as they age and is rightly one of the most popular government policies ever, maybe the most popular.
77% of Americans say they would pay more taxes to preserve it!
1 Like
Ponzi schemes fail because they run out of new investors and run out of money. Social security is mandatory so itâs not running out of new investors and if population growth tapers off the government can always print money to pay for it. It only looks like a Ponzi on the surface.
In pension plans there is the concept of intergenerational inequality, i.e. one cohort of people through the system gets a better benefit/contribution ratio than another generation. This is not the same as a Ponzi scheme, where the entire value proposition is fake and the whole thing mathematically must blow up at some point because of exponentially increasing output demands vs. linearly growing inputs.
Intergenerational inequality in pension plans isnât like this. Any pooled pension plan arrangement delivers value by pooling money, investing it, and distributing the proceeds in an orderly fashion. But investment returns are unknowable and a pension plan can only be sustained with regular tweaking of the ins and outs to deal with investment experience different from expected. It is inevitable that periods of investment gains and losses will happen, and basically by definition there will be people who get lucky by being contributors in good time and recipients in bad times. But thatâs not a Ponzi scheme. Thatâs the nature of a collective social system.
5 Likes
Social security is an insurance program.
How confident are you that youâll get back whatever you put into your car insurance policy?
1 Like
My fantasy football buddies are awarding the number 1 pick in the draft to guess the price of Bitcoin on Aug 28th (draft day).
Their guesses ranged from 15k-24k. I was the lowest at 12,345.67.
I feel like I have a chance to be right, but them just staying in this range is wrong. I think itâs equally likely to be >25k or <15k than to be in that range.
Guess Iâm rooting for Tether to be insolvent in the next month!
2 Likes
With btc the lowest or highest option have to be +EV
2 Likes
Printing money to make up shortfalls is exactly how many of the crypto scams that get breathlessly posted are supposed to work.
See if you can spot the difference.
1 Like
One of them has irrational expectations of long-term stability?
This is also correct.
Im never sure what people even mean when they call something a âPonzi.â Itâs a term of art people on both sides of this use in very loose ways.
I think a lot of people, myself included, have used Ponzi when the better term would be Pyramid scheme.
1 Like
I donât even think thatâs right most of the time people use it. Lots of people driving up the price of a speculative asset to unsustainable levels isnât a âscamâ or âschemeâ in any meaningful sense. Not sure that a social program with dubious long-term funding is a scam either.
A crypto lender promising an 8% interest that they plan on delivering through wildly speculative bets is arguably not a scam, although the part about hinting/suggesting that investor money is FDIC-backed moves it into scam territory imho.
civilization is a ponzi
4 Likes