The money’s not sitting in a lock box. It’s not even invested, because there’s no it to invest. The taxes go into the general fund and the payments go out of it. The rest is just accounting fictions. If we need to lower payments because the outflow is being economically burdensome we can do that or if we need to increase the taxes we could do that. We could do that on anything though. Just like we fund the military through taxing anything and paying out of the general fund. There’s no military fund that can get depleted, even though we all know that funding the military could be a burden on the economy.
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They have been told for many years that Social Security was in trouble, but refused to vote for anyone who would reform it or increase taxes to better fund it… to the extent that it’s known as the third rail of politics.
In other words, for years they’ve been voting to take the full amount of money with no reforms, knowing the bill will fall on future generations who will have to pay more and/or get less while they comparatively pay less and get more.
You can argue that they’re too uninformed to understand, but then who’s fault is that?
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Rick Sanchez ITT
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You saying cops freak out when you hand them a license that says “Canada Matt”?
Seriously though as a privileged white guy, in appearance and name, and I hear others talk about white privilege being a myth I laugh. You have to go no farther than how police react to you to see a massive helping of privilege.
I was thinking anout this last night, how many young blonde girls end up in a police murder porn? Is it because they are always so well behaved and never causing a fuss?
Every police video I see now I have to ask, how did it get there. In almost every case if the police were not racist assholes looking to provoke people into a head crack it would have never gotten there.
I was reading a story yesterday where a black guy was frantically going through his credit cards at an ATM trying to get money.
Some idiot decided that was no good and told the police who then treated the guy like a criminal and harassed him while he proved every credit card was his. (He had a lot of credit cards). His wife had her car break down and he was trying to take out money to help her but he could not remember his pins.
Police are Zebra specialists in a world of horses.
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Every generation is a product of their time. People in the 50s and 60s were told they were in the land of perpetual milk and honey and it probably did seem that way to the middle classes, and as most people from any place at any time aren’t going to question that it seems unreasonable to expect boomers to be any different.
…and who were the politicians with those policies who boomers should have been voting for?
“Vote for me, I’m going to make you pay more tax and work longer until retirement” is unfortunately not gong to win elections, no matter what label you want to put on the majority of voters at that time or how much you might want to demonise them.
Do you think millennials or gen Z’ers would be any different?
This is a human problem, not a generational one.
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Right, so “running out of money” really means reducing benefits (by about 20%) for anyone collecting after that event. By transferring some money from rich people’s stock portfolios to a publicly owned and run portfolio, there would be some money that is available for paying benefits in addition to whatever the current tax collections support. Then again, simply removing the cap solves the problem immediately, and allows for an exemption at the low end.
I think in general, it would be good to have the benefits be more of a chunk of the economic output of society over the beneficiary’s working life rather than the current system of benefits paid out of current taxes. Especially since the vast majority of people think it works kind of like a retirement fund, where you put some money in, and it grows, and then you get out more than what you put in.
Hate to say it but get ready for 4 more years. WAAF
Closer to the fourth Reich than four more years.
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This. If he gets 4 more years, there will be nothing to stop him from getting 8, 12, etc. and then passing on to Ivanka.
Isn’t Jr the heir apparent? I was assuming Ivanka would be Secretary of State given her impressive background in meeting foreign leaders.
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The amount of over the top pandering from Jr., indicates he knows he’s not the favorite and it trying to make up for it. Trump seems to actually listen to Ivanka and Kushner and give them real roles in government. Jr. on the other hand just goes on TV and talks about stuff but never actually has any real power. It also seems like he’s just a figure-head at the Trump Organization and not actually running the show there.
S.S. is much much healthier than when I was in college in 1990, as an fyi.
Doesn’t this make him the natural successor to Donnie Dumb Dumb the Elder?
https://mobile.twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1298655060822548480
https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkSZaidEsq/status/1298668597292736514
I agree with all your comments, but wanted to add some color to this. I was a practicing pension actuary for a decade so this is a rare area where I can contribute more than my usual charming snark.
Modulating the taxes and benefits up or down on an ad hoc basis is a very risky way to go. This is basically how social security systems are always run at the outset when benefits are low, and basically every Western country last century saw one way traffic on the contribution rates - as the plan matures and benefit distribution ramps up, contribution rates follow. This is problematic because as the rates climb they tend to crowd out other tax and spend opportunities. Country after country tends to have a “come to Jesus” moment on this stuff where they say we just can’t deal with this anymore, we need a stable rate that will work over long periods.
The current US process supports this. The Soc Sec admin is a strong team and they forecast these contributions and claims over long periods so policy makers can have confidence that if contribution rates are maintained then most people are very likely to get most of their benefit. That doesn’t sound impressive on its face but its basically the ceiling on what a pension plan can guarantee.
All that to say, long term forecasting adds real value and people really should fight the idea of reducing the “payroll tax” in the short term just because we can “easily” fix the imbalance later by increasing contributions or cutting benefits. Stable and reliable inputs and outputs for Social Security are more valuable than flexibility.
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