Social Security disability on verge of insolvency

Post Reply New Topic

If you look at the AUTHORITATIVE sources they provide, NO indication is made of investment, or admin costs. It indicates that only about 10% is taxed. OK...

Average Salary 33,000 Keep in mind that this is HIGH, because some make OVER the limit, and the taxes are far lower

TAXES 10%=3300 SO, since only about 50% work that is $1650 per person per year!
SAVINGS assuming one starts working at 20 and retires at 65 74250
YEARLY PAYMENT at retirement assuming they live 16 years 4640.625

BTW apparently the current payment is closer to $12,000/year. I wonder how they work THAT!

BUT, the US credit rating has dropped, inflation has started, and will likely accelerate. So EVEN if you got paid $100,000 a year, it may not be enough to survive! I love(sarcastic) how people think the US can just keep printing money.
If they double the amount of money, it amounts to worldwide THEFT of anyone holding dollars. And each dollar would have half its value. Oh well, I opened up a little foreign currency account. IT lost value! Yet it STILL made 40% over the dollar. It actually declined in tangible value, and generally won't go up, so the 40% increase shows a DECREASE in the dollar. Compare the dollar against nearly any other currency, and the SAME is true. The canadian dollar used to be about 70% of the american. TODAY, it is OVER 1 USD! 70*1.4=98, so that is an increase of almost 43%! A dollar used to buy OVER 100 yen! Today, it won't even buy 77! about 42%!

A coke used to cost about a dollar, NOW it is over 1.5. And what of gas?

There is a bill requesting that people younger than 55 now should not collect social security. They LAUGH when you say it is a trustfund, but it is subsistance at best anyway!

And let's say that what they said were TRUE! If the US were about to default, do you REALLY think social security would be safe? What would YOU rather do? 1. Take money from social security to pay the debts and MAYBE save the countries credit. OR 2. NOT pay it, thus causing a default, and making all the currency worthless, thus wiping out social security. If you saved a rainy day fund to fix your house, wouldn't you use it if you used credit cards and might lose your home if you didn't?

They're not breaking down, though. They're sustainable, it's that there's a political agenda involved.

I don't know exactly, but it is safe to assume it is within the last year, as evidenced by the sources listed at the bottom of the page.

True, only those deemed deserving of help get it, and you wouldn't believe how biased NTs are.

Nah, that's just an excuse. People want to keep what they have, it's a survival "hoarding" instinct, especially if it's money.

There's always a bowl full of chronic givers, won't be enough to meet the demand and even they will get fatigued and start resenting the people who consume their resources, eventually.

Not having any social programs means the poor will be worse off and this is bad timing.

True, but I think it's given that most people aren't givers to begin with, and many of those who are givers are selective of those they give to.

As far as "the bad timing", the bad economy pretty much ensured both that high unemployment and the cutting of social programs would happen nearly simultaneously. So, the effects of the bad economy are spreading everywhere.

They are selective about who they give to because few have the resources to give to all which is why government is the only entity that can, at the least, put a dent in it. Another problem is too much fraud which drive costs up, especially in healthcare. I have a liberal definition of fraud. To me, hospitals overcharging for little things like gauze and q-tips constitutes fraud yet they are allowed to get away with it all the time and it becomes fraud on a grand scale.

Ever charity has it's chronic givers but as people get poorer there will be less of it which means charities will not be able to handle the load. They will be lobbying the government for help.

What everyone needs to keep in mind is these are real people with real sufferings, not cold statistics or lazy people.

I'm not surprised this is happening, and just like Social Security, the Baby Boomers are probably to blame for this development.

Filings for SSI are at record numbers. Key applicants? Baby Boomers WHO CAN'T GET JOBS trying to qualify for SSI so they don't have to work but will get a check until Social Security and Medicare kicks in. These are people who are able to and were working, but now they want government to support them as they can't find jobs.

Disability was never intended for people doing this. These people think they are entitled to be state supported because nobody is hiring them (join the club...a lot of younger people who can work can't find jobs either), and they are willing to do whatever it takes to scam some money from the government rather than find a way to earn a buck and leave disability for those who legitimately cannot work or would NEVER be employed no matter how much they wanted to work.

It's not that easy to get disability. As people age, they are more likely to experience disability, so they apply. Might not have anything to do with finding work and everything to do with aging.

It seems like a large amount because the baby boomer population is ginormous but keep in mind, these baby boomers have been paying their social security taxes for years.

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 22 Aug 2011, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

If you take the politics into account, though, there's no guarantee they wouldn't start dumping people they considered still capable of working--like people with "mental illness".

If that happened, we would have to start getting our charity efforts more organized. It can really cause a lot of confusion. I was working at a food pantry during the worst parts of the recession, and the new influx of people needing emergency food was really huge. We went from thirty families a day to over seventy on most days. The whole place should have been re-organized, but the volunteers were so used to doing it one way, and most of them just came in once or twice a month (I came in twice a week)... It would have been really hard to re-train them all. And so the clients sat in the hallway half the day, waiting for food that could've been delivered more quickly...

I could have reorganized it. But I was a newbie. Some of these people had been volunteering once a month for years. So, I just didn't have the social authority to make any changes. It was pretty annoying. Not as annoying as it would have been to sit at home and not been able to help out the people in my town, but still annoying.

if disability goes away, I'll be screwed. however, that said, I don't think it is going anywhere.

True, but aging does not = disability. While you might be likely to have any number of conditions that impair being able to work, this would be less of an issue if more and more older people didn't choose to remain in the workforce rather than retire. For those who have no choice but to continue working (as is becoming the case for people who lost their retirement savings or younger generations who likely will never be able to retire), it is a complex issue. Perhaps we'll need a tiered support structure for elderly who are not able to go on Social Security/Medicare yet but need help. To let these people go on disability and all the stuff that opens up for them to have would be an undue strain on the system and probably would encourage people to strive to get on the dole as soon as they can find a situation they can exploit to "qualify."

The disabled can not work or nobody will hire them because of their disability. That you've reached an age where nobody wants to hire you doesn't entitle you to be supported by everyone else. To uphold that is to say that the inability to get a job is an entitlement to have society support you, and that's going way too far.

I wonder if it would be possible to help each other so that people who couldn't get disability wouldn't be screwed. There have to be a lot of people like me--people who are on disability, can't work, but can volunteer. Lots of things are run on volunteer work. I wonder if it would be possible to get lots of disabled people together--both those who get disability payments and those who don't--and have everybody pitch in to make sure disabled people didn't get the short end of the stick. If you don't force somebody to do work in their area of weakness, they'll be a perfectly decent worker, usually, and volunteer work can be really light duty, like two hours a month, if it needs to be.

Often times it's NTs--often retired ones--who do the volunteer stuff. But why couldn't disabled people get together to help each other? It works all the time with single moms forming groups and sharing child care...

I don't think it would work with just autistics. There aren't enough social specialists to do all the social stuff related to running an organization like that. But if you got people with all kinds of disabilities, you could just stick everybody in their specialty.

I've often thought it would be great if people helped others more but many of them don't want to. People expect to get paid thousands of dollars for delivering a pencil to an adjacent room.

Sure, they volunteer some when they have time and it suits them but there's no way the amount volunteering will ever fill the gap left by government. People want too much money.

I've seen a place profiled on the news where the guy pretty much staffs everything with handicapped people...mostly mental disabilities. I agree this would help, but what will hinder it is if we keep doing the failed policies of rewarding employers for outsourcing/offshoring jobs. I think there are ways to put older people to work in ways they can do so that they can maintain their independence, but if you make it so that the end result is that any such enterprise would have to be not-for-profit, you are going to hamstring such enterprises opening in the first place.

I have actually been planning for this for a while. Back in 2004 I realized that SSI would likely fail, so I tried looking for a job (I have an AS in Office Management). When I realized that my degree was worthless, I went and got trained as a computer repairman. I still couldn't find work in my specialty, in 2006, so I went to work as a teacher's aide for a school district (my mom worked in HR and got me the job). I quit after a year, couldn't stand it.

I tried to start a website that would for a fee evaluate social networking pages for problems, but I financed it on credit cards, and when it failed I filed bankruptcy. Tried working as a freelance computer repairman, only to realize that my education was inadequate. So I shut down the business and got more skills. Then in November 2010 my car broke down and I couldn't afford to fix it, so I sold it.

So that's where I am now. No car, so not able to work as a computer repairman. My mom may add me to her car insurance to solve that problem. Getting a job is not easy. And with all the people looking (my city is flooded with freelance computer repairmen), it's even harder. I wish I would have bought more survival food, now that it looks like the wheels are finally coming off the safety net.