No, no, of course it doesn’t. But the facts that the top 1% of Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 95%; the top 60% own 500 times as much as the bottom 40%; and the bottom 40% own less than one fifth of one percent of the nation’s wealth – these facts, in and of themselves, do mean that there are problems in the American system that must be corrected. See http://www.worldrevolution.org/Projects/Features/Inequality/USInequality.htm; http://www.inequality.org/facts.html.
I fully support Bush (never thought I would be typing that) on the partial privatization of Social Security. Count me against the 80%. The perception that gambling and investing are equivalent is grounded in ignorance. If you want to make an argument against the idea you will have to come up with a better analogy than playing roulette.
Me too, and I imagine that the younger a poster is, the more likely he is to support it. I don’t think you’re making your 80% on this one.
… and any people who happen to be removed along with them…
It’s not supposed to be anything, it is what it is. I for one think that coercion and force should be minimized as much as possible. If you feel otherwise, then we will disagree on much.
I do not see these as problems of the American system, anymore than I see the fact that some people are more gifted athletes than I am.
See, I truly do not believe that 80% of the people at the SDMB would agree with your original proposition, that wealth inequality is a problem. I am one such example. Now I just need to find another 19%.
It appears that I’ve not been clear. My argument is that even if the vast majority of wealth is owned by a few individuals, I don’t see how it matters. So, so what? What does it hurt?
It may seem terribly unfair (to use an example from one of your cites) that Kobe Bryant makes $13.5 million per year, while a random hotel bellman makes “only” $11,000. But Kobe Bryant is one of the best athletes in the world, he’s handsome, he’s well-spoken, he’s at least reasonably intelligent, and the guy does things on the basketball floor that can suck the air out of an arena. The random hotel bellman probably doesn’t have much of an education, and he performs a job that almost any physically able person can perform. I’d be willing to bet that Kobe can be a hotel bellman, but I’d be willing to bet that the hotel bellman can’t post a triple double in an NBA playoff game.
And keep in mind that (if I remember correctly) Kobe came from a modest upbringing. So he kind of proves the point I was making. It’s not just about whether some people have assloads more money than others. It’s about whether or not the cream can rise to the top. And Kobe’s a good example showing that it can.
I think a really preferable solution would be to be able to opt-in or opt-out of specific parts of Social Security and go private in those areas.
Maybe opt-in, and pay the portion of the tax that is associated with say, the disability part of Social Security, but do my own retirement investing.
Because I honestly don’t see how the system as it stands can continue to survive. There’s no money being invested, there’s money being shuffled around. Payments made today go into the general fund and are spent immediately, and as larger and larger numbers of people reach retirement ages, as people live longer, and as the cost of living continues to rise, there’ll have to be an ever increasing number of people paying those people.
I’d love to see an a la carte system for Social Security programs.
Depends on the cause, which I doubt we know. The article you referenced postulated that it was an educational gap, which certainly makes sense. Anyway, it looks like BG started a thread on this subject, so it’s probably better to take the debate over there.
The problem with that is that is that it leaves the people who need the social security needing to fund the social security… if you think about that for long enough, it doesn’t turn out very well. Unless you’re rich.
WRT economic stratification; I don’t think it will matter much if the country maintains a solid middle class. I don’t think it’s as hard for poor people to accept that they’ll probably never own a bently as it is to accept that they’ll never own a car with less than 150,000 miles on it or their own home.
I think fixing education will go a long way to solidifying a middle class and thus resolving the economic disparity problem.
I have two of my own:
- We need to talk about race in the U. S. without discussions becoming explosive or it will get much worse before it gets better.
- The bureaucracy of the government has gotten too big and bloated and needs to be made more efficient.
fruitbat: The perception that gambling and investing are equivalent is grounded in ignorance.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, what a silly strawman. I wasn’t trying to argue that gambling and investing are equivalent. I was merely pointing out that exposing what is supposed to be a secure provision for retirement to the insecurities of individual earning potential and investment requires a lot of optimism that no serious bad stuff is ever going to happen to you or your money.
Face it, bad luck and bad judgement do affect a lot of people’s ability to accumulate savings—although everybody with a grain of sense realizes perfectly well that the amount of risk involved is less than that in casino gambling. If you want to create a social security system out of individual investment, you’ll have to come up with a way to guard against the inevitable bad consequences for what will be, at best, a significant minority of participants.
catsix: *Because I honestly don’t see how the [Social Security] system as it stands can continue to survive. *
The “Social-Security-crisis” propagandists have done their work well: there are a lot of credulous people out there thinking that Social Security simply can’t manage to survive, usually on the basis of gross factual distortions or misinformation. As it happens, though, there’s also a great deal of discussion going on right now about sensible ways to keep the system afloat without dismantling it or introducing major structural changes such as privatization. You can check out the current thread on the topic, or you can explore collections of published articles such as this one.
Bone: * I for one think that coercion and force should be minimized as much as possible.*
Well, government-free anarchies tend not to minimize coercion and force very well. Of course, if they don’t have any laws, then at least they don’t have any legal coercion, which must be a great comfort to all the people getting robbed and murdered: “Hey, at least I don’t have some darn government taxing me under the pretext of legality!”
It really doesn’t, since the Social Security funds that come in are put into the general fund, and the benefits are paid out of the general fund anyway.
So if, say, I opted-in on the Disability but not on the retirement part, those dollars will be available to pay current benefits. Dollars in the future, should I get disabled, would be paid for by other taxpayers.
But no financial adviser I know of would instruct someone to put ALL of their retirement savings into T-bills. Surely there is some happy medium between “put it all in T-bills” and “put it all in Google stock”. It seems sensible to allow people some level of flexibility to expand the earnings potential of their retirement savings. The more well off get to do this in 401(k)s, but it’s the folks at the bottom who have to depend more on SS.
Perhaps a good solution would be some sort of mandatory 401(k) that replaces SS and is phased in over a very long period of time, allowing SS to diminish (maybe disapear in a genertion or two) without forcing the older folks out of the current system.
Okay kids, if you really want to continue debating SS privatization, why not take it to the thread I linked to above? Lots of information there and room for more.
Not propoganda, actual logical mathematics. If more people are receiving benefits, and none of the money put into the ‘system’ is ever invested, merely shuffled from someone currently paying taxes to someone currently not paying taxes, we can’t continue to have this system forever.
If more people are receiving benefits, more will have to be paying into the ‘system’. It’s a redistribution scheme, not an investment plan, and because of that, it will eventually suffer the problems of all other redistribution schemes. Social Security is currently using the money I pay them to send checks to other people. None of that money is in any way being invested for my retirement. That cost would have to be placed on the shoulders of someone else’s kid in another fifty years. People live longer and longer, costs of living increase, more and more will be receiving the checks, which means more and more will have to supply the government with money to send out.
This can’t last forever, and it certainly won’t provide as well for me in retirement (if it does at all) as I can by smart investing of my own money.
catsix: *If more people are receiving benefits, and none of the money put into the ‘system’ is ever invested, merely shuffled from someone currently paying taxes to someone currently not paying taxes, we can’t continue to have this system forever. *
And it’s not going to go on forever with an ever-higher percentage of people receiving rather than providing benefits. As I discussed in the linked thread, if you could be arsed to look at it, even the most vocal privatization advocates, who are the most pessimistic about the future of SS as currently structured, predict that the worker-to-retiree (or payer-to-recipient in your terms) ratio is going to plateau at 2:1 in another few decades. (From 1960 to the present that ratio has already dropped from 5:1 to 3:1, and the present ratio is still generating a significant surplus.)
- is hard to dispute – except that a lot of people seem to think race relations will get better only if we don’t talk about them at all, because there is no way to keep the discussions from becoming explosive.
As for 2. – you won’t get 80% agreement on that. Yes, everybody who has to deal personally with a bureaucy will think it’s too bloated and inefficient. But as soon as we start talking about how to correct that, you’ll find some people want to trim a given bureaucracy to make it more efficient and effective, while others want to trim it in order to hobble it and prevent it from doing what it’s supposed to do. (Sometimes the former group might work side-by-side with the latter for some time before catching on that they’re not aiming at the same thing at all.)
Anyway, what countries have more efficient bureaucracies than America’s? Do any examples come to mind?
Oh hopefully not. It’s already a burden that’s costing me far more than it’ll be worth to me in fifty years.
Plateau? For how long? How large a percentage of their income will they be paying to give me money, all the while hoping that they can use the rest of their income to plan for their own retirements because a Social Security retirement is just not going to be enough money?
With a maximum benefit that’s currently under $2,000/month, how the hell would I afford to live relying solely on social security in the future? I couldn’t possibly live on that amount of money now, and I doubt I could live on its equivalent in the future.
I want to be able to plan for my own retirement so that I don’t have to.
Here’s one:
Things that eighty percent of Americans agree about don’t become political issues.
(See, divide folks into smart and stupid subcategories their explanations of why the hold their opinions will be very different. The actual proportions of what they support, and what they find unacceptable are pretty much the same.)
Being warm in winter is nice.
Children should be cared for by responsible adults, if possible their parents.
Eating when you are hungry is a good plan.
No one disagrees.
Folks are starving. Folks are abusing and even killing children. Some people are dying of exposure in their own homes.
No one has an answer that eighty percent of the smart people will agree on.
Politics is not about what the things we all agree on, it’s about the things that about half of us think are worth raising hell about. But first you have to raise hell about it alone, and count heads among the folks who are registered to vote to see if you have a chance.
Tris
“It was a woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her.” ~ W.C. Fields ~
catsix: Plateau [of the projected 2:1 worker-retiree ratio]? For how long?
Indefinitely, according even to these pessimistic privatization advocates. If you want the details, why not go check them out at the linked Social Security thread that I’ve mentioned about three or four times now?
catsix: *With a maximum benefit that’s currently under $2,000/month, how the hell would I afford to live relying solely on social security in the future? *
Nobody recommends, nor have they ever recommended, that anybody should plan to rely solely on Social Security benefits for a comfortable retirement. I’m rather shocked that you don’t seem to know even that most fundamental fact about Social Security. It is not intended to be a complete pension plan: rather, it’s a basic social insurance program that raises the economic floor for retirees to keep them out of absolute destitution and extreme poverty. No worker with any sense believes that they shouldn’t also have some personal retirement savings to make their retirement comfortable.
What’s more, the average worker would not obtain a comfortable retirement by diverting SS payroll taxes to private investment as proposed in current privatization plans, either. As this analysis shows, even if Social Security were left absolutely unchanged and went into full-blown “crisis” as predicted by the most pessimistic forecasters, it would still provide benefits GREATER than those projected from a “partially-privatized” plan, INCLUDING the returns on the private investment accounts.
The idea of private investment of retirement savings is immediately appealing to that vein of sparkling optimism I was talking about before: “Hey! Since stocks often provide a high return on investment, I’ll probably make more money!” However, nobody but an idiot would conclude that a privatization plan must be a good idea without taking a close look at the actual numbers projected to result from it.
I urge anybody who wants to be really informed about the realities of the issue, rather than just tossing around generalizations like “Too few workers can’t support too many retirees!” and “I can get bigger benefits if I control my own money!” to check out the current GD thread that I’ve mentioned here several times, Is there a fix for Social Security?