No, I’ll cop to it.
That’s refreshing. You get the Snarky stamp of approval.
Frighteningly short sighted reasoning. What if you had it going fine when your kids were born and then hell broke loose? Plus, that’s a good argument for exterminating a large section of China’s population, Africa’s, and a lot of the third world. Swift’s satire applies quite perfectly here.
Buying prepared foods with food stamps: you can use food stamps to buy prepared foods as long as the food is not hot. The area I live in is very economically disadvantaged. I don’t know how many people around here get food stamps, but I’d bet it’s considerably higher than the national average. Anyway, here’s how the grocery store in my neighborhood handles it: their deli counter sells a small selection of hot prepared foods, as well as having a Hunt Bros. Pizza (fresh-baked pizza) right there. But most of what’s available hot at the deli is also available cold in a separate case, with a clear sign that “Foods in this case can be purchased with food stamps”, and for the pizza, they will sell you an unbaked pizza, which you can take to the cashier and pay for with food stamps, then take it back to the deli counter to be baked. Then, of course, there’s the freezer case, where one can find a huge variety of non-nutritive crap that is overpriced and can be purchased with food stamps.
Needless to say, this is not the best use of food stamps. The family of four who can’t get enough food on $700.00/mo is doing it wrong. They obviously have a decent kitchen. Instead of buying hot dogs, maybe she should be buying more nutritious, less expensive foods for her kids, like brown rice, dried beans, frozen fruits and veggies, etc.
I’m not trying to say that people should never use food stamps to buy these things. I am saying that, if you have a food budget (and most of us do, whether we get food stamps or not), and you consistently can’t meet that budget, maybe instead of saying “My budget isn’t big enough”, you need to ask yourself “What can I do to trim the cost of our food?”
I don’t know about your area or the entire U.S. but around here meat is the thing that is the most expensive. Ground beef is $3 a pound here for 20% fat. That’s just ridiculous. A turkey costs upwards of $20. A full ham is like $30. I get all of this from a local farmer for a fraction, but we’re friends.
Meat is expensive, and that’s why I limit my meat spending to a maximum of $4.00 per dinner for our family of five. Now, there are times I manage to do it with $2.00-$3.00 per meal, and that excess can be used to purchase more extravagant things. But this can be done, easily (and we’re carnivores, by golly; I think if I tried to serve a vegetarian dinner, my hubby might divorce me!) 
Anyway, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. One is buy on sale, and buy a lot. I can sometimes find boneless pork loin for $1.79/lb. A pound of pork feeds us pretty easily. I buy a lot of my meats in bulk at Sam’s Club. They usually have 5lb rolls of ground beef for $2.79/lb, and that’s the 85/15, which I tend to use, because it shrinks less, so if a recipe calls for a pound, I can use 2/3 of a pound and no one notices the difference. If I’m serving a more expensive meat, like ham, instead of giving everyone a slab o’ pork, I’ll make some au gratin potatoes, dice up 2/3 to 3/4lb of ham, and mix it all through.
But if I were on a really tight budget, you can bet we’d be eating more meals where meat was not our primary protein source. A big stir-fry with 4oz of thinly sliced meat running through it, served over brown rice, is perfectly nutritious. A meatless pasta sauce served over high-protein noodles (like Barilla Plus), likewise perfectly nutritious. Yes, the Barilla Plus is 3X as expensive as ‘plain’ pasta, but it’s still a much cheaper protein source than meat, and much healthier than plain pasta, too.
Anyway, you get the drift. Yeah, meat’s expensive. So figure out ways to find it cheaper, and use less of it.
I’d like to point out that brown rice is a minimum of three times the cost of white rice (I’ve seen it as high as five times the cost of white). After meat, fresh fruit is the most expensive item, especially in winter/out of season. Over the past few years, when money has gotten really tight we’ve wound up eating white rice and no fruit at all for weeks at a time. (Vegees, remember, I get from my garden.)
You can, of course, live on white rice and the bargain-bin vegees, but the highest quality foods are more expensive.
A technique I use is to “cut” it with legumes - mix beef and lentils, or chicken and chick peas.
Yes, food stamps (if you’re getting maximum allotment) are sufficient to eat a nutritious diet. However, as has been covered in prior threads, that is contingent on cooking from scratch, having adequate cooking facilities, and knowing how to cook from scratch. If you are missing any of the above it’s not going to work.
Social security is not an entitlement, it is an Insurance policy for a person’s retirement, it is based on how much a person paid in during his or her working years.
Our country is in the shape it is in because too many people lived beyond their means, and many still do. what you charge you can’t afford. It was easy credit and the huge interest rates that people paid to live beyond their means!
It used to be a person went with out until they could pay for it; now it was living like they could afford it; and now the piper wants to be paid. It is simple arithmetic If one spends even a dollar over what he earns, he will not get a head, one has to live under their earnings and save some of what they earn. High interest rates with low payments paid to a credit card company can fool a person into thinking they can get ahead, because they can buy things, but many have found themselves into as much as $40,000.00 in debt, lost their jobs and now can’t pay on top of house payments, etc.
That’s just propaganda. The average person gets a lot more out of social security than he or she paid into it.
(Snipped)
Yes, fresh fruits and veggies are very expensive, especially out of season. That’s why I mentioned frozen. When the fruits and veggies are out of season, you’re going to get better quality, taste, and nutrition from frozen, and considerably less expensively. Canned veggies aren’t as evil as painted, either. Yes, they are high in sodium. No, they are not as tasty as fresh. But they’re cheap (if you watch for sales), and they’re much more nutritious than things like frozen French fries or chips.
I think I mentioned something about beans, but yeah, you’re absolutely right. Eggs are also a very good source of inexpensive protein. You can cut a little bit of meat and some frozen (or home-grown veggies) into some eggs, and make a frittata, very nutritious (and tasty!) for much less than using meat as your main protein source.
No disagreement here. I started out initially addressing Lady Ashen’s post about those starving children in PA, who clearly have an adequate kitchen, and whose mother is currently unemployed, so she should have the time to make her kids something more nutritious than hot dogs for dinner.
I completely acknowledge and recognize that if you are working 10 hours a day, and coming home to an inadequate kitchen, it’s tough to put anything resembling a nutritious meal on the table. In fact, I’d be 100% in favor of allowing food stamps to be used to purchase very limited categories of cooking equipment. If you don’t have a working oven, well, a new oven (or even a used one) is expensive. But you can buy a slow cooker for $20.00. Of course, that doesn’t help if you don’t have $20.00, but if you could buy one with your food stamps. . .you could save much more than $20.00 on your grocery expenses the following month.
Truly, though, I think a lot of it boils down to knowledge. I know plenty of people who are on food stamps who simply don’t know how to shop economically, or how to prepare nutritious food from scratch. For more than a year, I had one tenant, with three young children, who got food stamps, and every month, the Schwann’s delivery truck was bringing her order. Holy cow, I looked at their website. The cost per serving of their food is astronomical.
:dubious: It might not be the case for anyone you know. For many millions of Americans, that is just exactly the case: Everyone they know is poor and stuck.
It isn’t just that we are poor and stuck, is it that we are surrounded by tons of people who aren’t. Lots of people in this society still have stable middle class careers, lots have good paying professional careers and a tiny majority are superwealthy. And for a lot of us we are having that shoved in our face everyday since we may never even obtain middle class security necessary to get good health care, prepare for retirement or raise a family.
As a non-benefit recieving temp worker I have to listen to some of my coworkers (who make about 3x more than I do in annual wages and benefits) complain that they only get 10 paid vacation days a year, or brag about their bonuses. It gets frustrating knowing you are so close and still a million miles away from stability, dignity and some sense of security.
I think obvious/transparent inequality is far worse for a society than one where everyone is poor. One where tons are struggling but others are doing great, and they all live side by side is probably much worse for the social fabric. I find myself becoming more and more angry, bitter and frustrated all the time at the plutocracy.
Really? Can you give me a cite for that? In Canada it’s certainly not the case unless you make insanely pessimistic assumptions regarding real rates of return on alternate private savings.
It’s not even true for the people who got in at the earliest time and who get the best deal. For young people today, it’s not even close. A 30 year old working person would do MUCH better if he could put his social security contribution and his employer’s contribution into a personal retirement account.
When the Canada Pension Plan was first introduced in Canada in 1965, the contribution rate was 1.8% of gross income. It very slowly increased to 6% by 1997. In 2003 it was increased to where it is today: 9.9%, including the employer’s contribution.
So people retiring today will have spent most of their working lives paying somewhere between 1.8% and 9.9% of their salaries for their retirement- an average of 5.7% Workers who entered the workforce in 2003 or later will spend 9.9% of everything they make on retirement - assuming the rate doesn’t go up more.
To give you an idea of how bad this deal is for most people, take someone who makes $40,000 per year, and put 10% of that into a fund that generated interest. Assume a real rate of return of about 5% in a private investment. That person would retire with $535,519 in the bank.
Assuming you took out a 20 year annuity at retirement, the 5% investment would give you an annual income of about $41,000. On the other hand, your investment in Canada Pension will get you a maximum of $11,500 per year. So a worker starting out today can expect to lose about $30,000 per year in retirement over what they could have had in a private plan.
So people paying in today who are middle class or above and not eligible for the low income supplements are getting royally screwed. Basically, they’re paying a tax for a retirement social program that provides good benefits to people who never made much money but need to be supported in retirement. It’s a wealth transfer, not a retirement program.
For the people who got in early, it’s a different story. For someone who made an equivalent of 40,000, but who started working in 1970 and who is retiring today, they would have paid an average of 5.7% of their income. If they earned 5% in a private account, they would have $234,768. An annuity of that amount over 20 years would pay $17,941.33 per year. CPP pays $11,500 per year. But there’s no risk, and there are some other benefits to CPP. For example, if you live past 85, you still get paid. All in all, not a horrible deal. It’s a good deal if your income is low enough to qualify you for supplemental income benefits.
The U.S. system seems like an even worse deal, since current employees pay 15.3% of their income into Social security, vs the 9.9% Canadians pay.
Summary: If you are retiring today, and you’re in the middle to upper middle class, Canada Pension Plan is a bad deal, but not horrific. If you’re poor and qualify for the various subsidies, it’s a better deal than a private retirement plan would have been, but not by much.
If you started work after the year 2000, your Canada Pension Plan ‘investment’ is a financial disaster compared to a private savings account. You’d even come out ahead of Canada Pension if you only earned 2% on your money over 40 years.
This all supports the conventional wisdom that current workers are subsidizing current retirees, not saving for their own retirements. Their government savings plan is mostly a wealth transfer away from them to the poor or to the people who got in early.
We pay 12.4 into SS with another 2.9% into medicare. As far as SS not being a good deal, SS pays in a progressive fashion and the more money you make the less return you get.
The first $800 or so a month in your adjusted monthly income that pays SS taxes sees a 90% return. The next 801-4000~ sees a 32% return and 4001-9000 a month sees a 15% return. Those are the rough numbers, I forget the calculation. So if you only made 800/month you get almost 700/month back.
But if you make 30k a year you will see about 30% of your income recieve a 90% return with the other 70% recieving a 32% return. Once your income goes into the 4000+/month range the rate of return drops dramatically down to 15%.
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v62n1/v62n1p47.pdf
There are benefits and drawbacks to a private plan. Benefits from higher income individuals do better (esp in the first few years of return). But those with dependents or middle/lower incomes do worse.
The best case scenario (high income single individual in their first year of returns) would get nearly 180% of what they’d get via the current SS system. But virtually every married couple would do worse. Single individuals do better at first then start doing worse than SS, if they collect for 20 years it seems the benefits may still be there but aren’t that great.
Plus SS privitization creates a 100-200 billion hole in the budget which has to be filled.
I’m not sure how social security ties into what you quoted.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I won’t argue that people have not been living beyond their means, or that credit card interest rates are ridiculously high. But the cause of the Great Recession was not defaulting on our credit card debt, it was caused by the failure of the real estate and financial sector, and the failure was caused by bad decisions motivated chiefly by greed by our bankers and real estate industry. The bankers go the Republicans to vote for a repeal of Glass-Steagal, a law created in the aftermath of the Great Depression which forbade banks from getting into high-risk investments … like derivatives. In fact, it was derivatives that made the whole house of cards’ collapse into the Great Recession, because they amplified the financial exposure of the big banks by a factor of hundreds:
The Great Recession has NOTHING to do with credit cards, though the practices in that industry are certainly dubious enough for any reasonable person. Wiki has a very good article on the topic.
Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. You are asuming the stock market won’t crash. Helloooooo. Everybody knows that’s not true.
When you say ‘Everybody knows’, you do realize that while this may include yourself and a few people you know, it doesn’t actually constitute ‘everybody’, right? I mean, I’m sure the stock market will have it’s ups and downs, and it might even ‘crash’ again like it did in the recent past (have you noticed that it’s mainly recovered from that little episode), but over all the trend is and has been upward…which means that what Sam was saying there is pretty accurate. Hell, it might even be a bit conservative as far as expected return.
-XT
No, he’s assuming that if you take a long-term approach, stock market crashes will be followed by recoveries. This is not a crazy stance to take.
The numbers you quote come from a study that compared SS to another government retirement program implemented by the county of Galveston, Texas. It also only covers the years from 1981 to 1999. So I don’t know whether this comparison is valid for today for private retirement in general. But I’ll leave it at that, because I don’t know enough about the U.S. retirement system to be able to really evaluate this without a lot of work.
I also used a real rate of return of 5%, which is very close to what the real rate of return has been for private retirement funds and the Social Security investments.