The gummint screwed up again

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Here, this simple infographic should clear everything up:

http://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/p ... 00c43fb5c8

Do you really believe that most people collecting Social Security are rich? Seriously? And do you actually believe that Social Security is some form of communism? You do realize that Social Security payments are based on the amount of money paid in by the individual, don't you?

Since I'm not a liberal, and believe in an objective reality, what I believe is beside the point. Here are the facts:

Older people, by virtue of having lived longer, on average have more money than younger people. What's more, since older people worked for their money, they should have it. What they have no right to is the money of younger people, which is the essence of Social Security.

Communism, by definition, is a system in which there is no private property; all property is held in common, and allegedly for the common good (though this is never the case in actual practice). Since I have no claim to what I have paid in to Social Security, and the money is allegedly held for the common good, by definition it is a communist program. What's more, FDR, the program's originator, was very sympathetic to communists and communism, as evidenced by his love affair with good old Uncle Joe.

The amount taken out of Social Security in reality has no bearing on what one paid in to it. Many people receive far more than they paid into it, while others receive little or nothing (e.g., my parents, who died before they were old enough to collect on what they paid their entire lives). Others, particularly those on some disability program, receive payments and never paid anything into this system. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

What's more, SS is a Ponzi scheme that would make even Madoff blush. Younger workers will have paid in more of their income into this fraud than any cohort in history, yet will never see a dime from it. Why? In order to maintain current disbursements, collections far in excess of one hundred percent of workers' paychecks would have to be collected. That's not possible no matter how liberal one may be.

Where did you get your information on older people having more money? Is it based solely on the fact that they have lived longer? As for Social Security, the estimated date on which it becomes "insolvent" is the estimated day that the current amount of reserve cash that has already been set aside will be used up, not when checks will stop going out.



You do have a claim on what you paid into Social Security. Look at your annual statements, and it will tell you exactly how much.

So FDR was a communist? That's news to me.



Yes, it does.



Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It is not based on an ever exponentially increasing collection base. It was designed originally based on historical birth rates and life expectancy. It is not about me paying someone else's benefits (until the money runs out, at least). Not sure where you are getting the idea that more than 100% of worker's paychecks would need to be collected in order for the system to maintain disbursements. There are still around 2 workers paying in for every one who collects. I'm not saying that the current system will work indefinitely , just that your gloom and doom predictions are still more than 20 years early. Assuming that nothing will change at all between now and then seems a bit hasty.

There are plenty of ways that the system can be altered to improve its longevity without taking a higher percentage of your pay. For starters, both Republicans and Democrats can stop using long term Social Security funds for filling spending gaps in their pet projects. The full collection age could also be adjusted annually to reflect changes in life expectancy (at the same time that the inflationary adjustment is made). Early collection can be further adjusted to allow for even earlier collection at further reduced payments (which on the large scale would save huge piles of cash). SSI could in large part be privatized through employers. Survivor benefits could be streamlined. Money that was "borrowed" from the SS fund over the years could be repaid to it.

Social Security is basically an overly complicated government maintained retirement plan. If your employer takes a little of your pay for a pension plan, does that make your company communist?

There were times when he could have buried us. They were the first to put a satellite in orbit, the first ROV of any kind, on the moon. They provided their citizens with cheap fuel, housing, child care, and 100% employment. They failed for many reasons, but one of them was constant attack by capitalist countries, the cold war was hugely expensive.

The fact is that everyone in the country will need health care at some point, this is inevitable. It makes sense to organize a system that provides health care with no profit motive. Not that Obamacare is socialized medicine, that would be ideal, and it works for every other industrialized nation on Earth.

As for forcing you to buy something, that has some very old precedents. I refer you to the Militia Act of 1792:

I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, by the Captain or Commanding Officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this Act. And it shall at all time hereafter be the duty of every such Captain or Commanding Officer of a company, to enroll every such citizen as aforesaid, and also those who shall, from time to time, arrive at the age of 18 years, or being at the age of 18 years, and under the age of 45 years (except as before excepted) shall come to reside within his bounds; and shall without delay notify such citizen of the said enrollment, by the proper non-commissioned Officer of the company, by whom such notice may be proved. That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack. That the commissioned Officers shall severally be armed with a sword or hanger, and espontoon; and that from and after five years from the passing of this Act, all muskets from arming the militia as is herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound; and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes.

i prefer fruit flavored gum over mint flavor.

I must admit I am a little surprised when people will defend mass murder. Would you defend the mass murder of the Nazis too? Is it cool to murder completely innocent people by the millions?

Having said that, your naivete is almost shocking. Have you never heard of the Potemkin Village?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

Yes, the Soviets were the first to put a man in to space. They were able to do so because their citizens lived in terror and privation. The best it got for ordinary Russians was waiting in lines for hours for some half-rotten sausage and some moldy bread.

There wasn't even a welfare state. After WWII, Russian cities were full of the most horribly maimed beggars injured in defense of their country. The way Stalin got them to fight was to place secret police machine gunners behind the troops with orders to fire on their own men if they retreated one inch. The result was unbelievable casualties. Then these horribly wounded were left to beg in the streets for their sustenance.

Stalin flushed out his enemies with a very liberal constitution in 1937 guaranteeing freedom of expression. In 1938, those naive enough to take the bait were either shot in the Lubyanka torture facilities. Just to make sure he got all of those evil dissenters, Stalin gave the secret police quotas as to how many "enemies of the people" they were to bring in every night. If they failed, they were shot or sent to Siberia themselves.

When Soviet socialism finally collapsed under its own dead weight and inertia, it was found that 85% of hospitals didn't have running water.

Pray tell, are they teaching love of the communist abomination in public schools? Or are you simply lacking in any kind of decency, sir?

Where did you get your information on older people having more money? Is it based solely on the fact that they have lived longer? As for Social Security, the estimated date on which it becomes "insolvent" is the estimated day that the current amount of reserve cash that has already been set aside will be used up, not when checks will stop going out.

Sir, were you able to set your prejudices aside, the answer to your question is as simple as a few keystrokes in Google. I am including the entire list to preclude you from claiming it's some kind of right-wing conspiracy.


https://www.google.com/search?q=do+olde ... annel=fflb

You do have a claim on what you paid into Social Security. Look at your annual statements, and it will tell you exactly how much.

If you are really naive enough to believe that monies paid in to SS are really yours, I challenge you to request that what you paid into this system be refunded. If it is really your money, they would have no choice but to return it the way a bank would.

Yes, those annual statements aren't worth the paper they are printed on. They do tell how much has been robbed from us, but how much of what we get back is solely up to the government.

So FDR was a communist? That's news to me.

While you wrestle with your straw man, I stand by every word I wrote, especially since you have offered no reasonable refutations. Oh, and I just scratched the surface. If you were open-minded, I would recommend you do research on Project Venona.

SS is Ponzi scheme in the truest sense of that term. It requires an ever-larger number of payers to payees to remain solvent when just the opposite is happening. If you bother to do any research you will find that when this abomination started in the thirties, there were over fifteen workers to every recipient. Today that number is under four, and declining quickly, especially considering all the people helping themselves who never paid a dime into the system. Under pre-Obama projections, there were supposed to be more payers than payees. But since the numbers of non-retirees dipping into this system is growing exponentially, the day is soon forthcoming when there will be more payees than payers. Not even liberal math can create enough wealth to sustain such a system.

I can also only hope you don't believe in the "lock box"; it is full of IOU's. The left is correct when they claim that Reagan only cut taxes for the rich. He did offer everybody an income tax cut. But what he gave with one hand he took with the other in the form of huge hikes in SS taxes that hit those who can least afford to pay them.

The rationale was that since SS is a Ponzi scheme, and demographic projections clearly showed that there wouldn't be enough money to pay for the retirement of Baby Boomers, they not only had to pay for the retirements of their parents and grandparents, but their own. The problem is that what was not looted from the "lock box" by the AARP to give their constituents far more than they ever paid into the system was used to mask the true size of the deficits. Now, every dime in that "lockbox" is gone. The only way to get it back will be for somebody to pay it all a second time--with interest--in addition to all of the non-retirees sucking out of the system who never paid in a dime. The only way that people can receive something they didn't work for is when others don't receive what they did work for.

I simply don't understand how anybody not sucking from this teat could defend such a fraud. I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are naive and acting in good faith, and tell you to read your Gramsci. Gramsci said that the elites and government can only be trusted to act in their own interests, and not the interests of the citizens whose interests they are morally obligated to defend. Gramsci's Theory of Cultural Hegemony is the rationalization and codification of elite predatory behavior toward ordinary citizens through the vehicle of government. I'm not sure how any decent person could support such a thing. Assuming you consider yourself decent, perhaps you could tell me.

The ACA forces us to be under the dictatorial control of the insurance companies. And there will be nothing "affordable" about it. They will be able to get away with things an elected government couldn't do. They will be our new government.

Just plain bad news no matter how you rationalize it.

Rather than address all of the errors you are making in your assumptions of how Social Security works, I will simply post a link to the Wikipedia page, which breaks it down fairly simply:

info on Social Security - link

After you read up on Social Security, please respond with a revised post that omits the misinformation.

I was painstakingly specific, and I must insist on the same from you. I don't buy into your postmodern belief that inconvenient facts can be wished away. If you have specifics, let's here them. Otherwise, I trust you will have the character to admit you are wrong, sir.

Ok, I'll just quote some bits from the link you didn't bother to click:

Had you read a little further about Social Security "surpluses", you would have discovered this:

Since 2010, Social Security has taken in less money through payroll tax revenues than it pays out in benefits, generating cash-flow deficits. Social Security’s 2012 cash-flow deficit was $55 billion.

Social Security covers cash-flow deficits by drawing down interest payments from the U.S. Treasury on previous trust fund borrowing. Cash-flow deficits mean the Treasury can no longer cover interest payments to the Social Security trust fund by issuing additional IOUs; instead, it must produce actual cash from taxes or borrowing. Thus, Social Security is adding to today’s deficits.

http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... nefit-cuts

Social Security is currently estimated to keep roughly 20-40% of all Americans, age 65 or older, income above the Federally defined poverty level.

Meaning sixty to eighty percent of seniors would not be in poverty were their SS cut out. Cut out the incomes of younger people and that figure would approach one hundred percent.

A limited form of the Social Security program began, during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, as a measure to implement "social insurance" during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when poverty rates among senior citizens exceeded 50 percent.[10] The Act was an attempt to limit what were seen as dangers in the modern American life, including old age, poverty, unemployment, and the burdens of widows and fatherless children.

Okay, did you ask what the current poverty rate is among seniors? Is it close to zero? Here is the poverty rate of the young people paying into the program:

"15.1 percent— just over 46 million Americans— were officially in poverty in 2010. This is an increase from 12.5 percent in 2007. - See more at: http://stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-s ... CdzQi.dpuf"

Again, SS is about taking from the poor and giving to the rich.


To minimize the impact of these taxes on low salaried workers the so-called "Earned Income Tax Credit" and the Child Care Tax Credit were passed which largely refund the FICA and or SECA payments of low salaried workers through the income tax system.[16] The amount of the monthly benefit to which the worker is entitled depends upon that earnings record they have paid FICA and/or SECA taxes on and upon the age at which the retiree chooses to begin receiving benefits.

Yes, this is one of the reasons the system is going broke. A lot of the workers paying for these people are barely above the poverty line themselves.


A worker's retirement income benefit is based on his or her average adjusted FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) and SECA (Self Employed Contributions Act) salaries for 35 years and the workers age at retirement. Only wages lower than the "ceiling" income are considered. In calculating the average wages 35 year averages are always used and the wages of earlier years are "adjusted" by multiplying each annual salary by an annual adjusted wage index factor, AWI, for earlier salaries (see:[18]). If the worker has fewer than 35 years of covered earnings these non-contributory years are years are assigned zero earnings. If there are more than 35 years of covered earnings only the highest 35 are considered. The sum of the 35 salaries (or less if worker has less than 35 years of covered income) times its inflation index, AWI divided by 420 (35 yrs x 12 months/yr) gives the 35 year covered Average Indexed Monthly salary, AIME.

Yes, and workers making above the "ceiling" don't pay taxes on those earnings, meaning above $115,000 a year. SS is a surtax on those who can least afford to pay it.

A worker who has enough Social Security credits to qualify for benefits, but who is not currently receiving benefits on his or her own Social Security record and who is not a Medicare beneficiary, can obtain an estimate of the retirement benefit that will be provided, for different assumptions about age at retirement.

A worker who has worked long enough and recently enough (based on "quarters of coverage" within the recent past) to be covered can receive disability benefits. These benefits start after five full calendar months of disability, regardless of his or her age. The eligibility formula requires a certain number of credits (based on earnings) to have been earned overall, and a certain number within the ten years immediately preceding the disability, but with more-lenient provisions for younger workers who become disabled before having had a chance to compile a long earnings history.
The worker must be unable to continue in his or her previous job and unable to adjust to other work, with age, education, and work experience taken into account; furthermore, the disability must be long-term, lasting 12 months, expected to last 12 months, resulting in death, or expected to result in death.[29] As with the retirement benefit, the amount of the disability benefit payable depends on the worker's age and record of covered earnings.
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) uses the same disability criteria as the insured social security disability program, but SSI is not based upon insurance coverage. Instead, a system of means-testing is used to determine whether the claimants' income and net worth fall below certain income and asset thresholds.
Severely disabled children may qualify for SSI. Standards for child disability are different from those for adults.


What about people receiving benefits who are not workers? Again, those who receive something they never worked for means many will work for things they never received.

Social Security taxes are paid into the Social Security Trust Fund maintained by the U.S. Treasury (technically, the "Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund", as established by 42 U.S.C. § 401(a)). Current year expenses are paid from current Social Security tax revenues. When revenues exceed expenditures, as they did between 1983 and 2009,[42] the excess is invested in special series, non-marketable U.S. Government bonds. Thus, the Social Security Trust Fund indirectly finances the federal government's general purpose deficit spending. In 2007, the cumulative excess of Social Security taxes and interest received over benefits paid out stood at $2.2 trillion.[43] The Trust Fund is regarded by some as an accounting construct which holds no economic significance. Others argue that it has specific legal significance because the Treasury securities it holds are backed by the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. government, which has an obligation to repay its debt.

This is just what I was referring to. The money cannot be spent twice: "Thus, the Social Security Trust Fund indirectly finances the federal government's general purpose deficit spending."

One criticism of the analogy is that while Ponzi schemes and Social Security have similar structures (in particular, a sustainability problem when the number of new people paying in is declining), they have different transparencies. In the case of a Ponzi scheme, the fact that there is no return-generating mechanism other than contributions from new entrants is obscured[117] whereas Social Security payouts have always been openly underwritten by incoming tax revenue and the interest on the Treasury bonds held by or for the Social Security system.[118] The sudden loss of confidence resulting in a collapse of a conventional Ponzi scheme when the scheme's true nature is revealed is unlikely to occur in the case of the Social Security system. Private sector Ponzi schemes are also vulnerable to collapse because they cannot compel new entrants, whereas participation in the Social Security program is a condition for joining the U.S. labor force.

There is no "return-generating" mechanism in SS other than poor fools being forced to pay into this fraud at gunpoint. At least a participation in a Ponzi scheme isn't mandatory. This is the ONLY difference between a true Ponzi scheme and SS: "The sudden loss of confidence resulting in a collapse of a conventional Ponzi scheme when the scheme's true nature is revealed is unlikely to occur in the case of the Social Security system. Private sector Ponzi schemes are also vulnerable to collapse because they cannot compel new entrants..."

So, the author's implicit claim is that the real difference between SS and a Ponzi scheme is WORSE. In essence, SS is a Ponzi scheme we are forced to pay into. But that hardly means it won't collapse.

I will have to give you credit for trying. But what you posted in no way refutes any contention I have made.

Regardless of glitches in Obamacare, millions of people will have healthcare coverage who did not before. And that includes an expansion of Medicaid to the poorest of us who otherwise wouldn't be able to pay for any program. I fail to see how that could possibly be a bad thing.
And I think it's self evident that when the right claims the government is making a power grab when it's attempting to help people, it's the right that's in fact displaying their heartlessness.
And as far as social security being a "Ponzi scheme" is concerned - just what is supposed to be done? Are people on social security for age or disability supposed to be just cast adrift to die? Because that's exactly what would happen.

Bill, good to hear from you. A couple of thoughts:

Just like SS, if Obamacare is such a good deal, why is participation mandatory? The fact of the matter is that we now have a health care system we cannot afford. And taking money from people by force to pay for it amounts to a forced bill collection for doctors, and does nothing to improve the situation. Yes, people who never had health care before will have it, but at the cost of taking food out of the mouths of other Americans. Remember, just as is the case with SS, the burden falls on the young, who are the least able to afford the huge and mandatory premium hikes they will experience.

As far as SS goes, leaving people adrift to die is exactly what will happen to younger people, as even the estimates supplied to counter my expample have to concede it will be broke in twenty years. My suggestion would be to means-test SS for starters. Then, when jobs are brought back, I would make it mandatory for older people who are capable of working do so, leaving SS only for the poor and indigent. Look at it this way: If things continue on their current trajectory, it won't be available for any young people--those who are getting hit hardest by Obamacare.

I can remember back when I was in junior high, and people thought there would be no more social security in the future for them. It's still here. The right has exaggerated the so called hole the social safety net is allegedly digging us into from the very beginning.
As for taking money by force to pay for someone else' benefits - that's exactly what the government does for everything from national defense to fire and police protection. The unavoidable fact is, life in a civilized country requires tax payers to fork up cash, even for those who can't afford to pay.
As for taking money and resources away from the young and able bodied - well, someday those young and able bodied people aren't going to be in such great condition forever. That's why they pay into it now, so they can have those benefits later.
It ought to be remembered, history doesn't just judge a country by it's military and industrial strength, but by how it cares for it's most vulnerable citizens. When we think of Industrial Age Great Britain, more often than not, we think of how vast numbers of people were left in miserable poverty at the expense of the few.