Oh please. I wasn’t junior-modding, merely commenting that I wasn’t going to continue to follow up on this “doctors would be paid like lawnmowers if only there were more of them” discussion here, since it has almost nothing to do with Social Security reforms.
If you want to discuss the various reasons why your description is ridiculous, feel free to start a thread.
They’re defining “solvency” as “paying 100% of projected benefits.” Lets’s define it as paying 75% of projected benefits. SS is no longer insolvent. And because wages go up faster than prices, and because SS is indexed to wages, 75% of projected benefits in 2037 will pay for a better standard of living than 100% of 2010 benefits pay for in 2010.
Another way of looking at the problem.
If SS can meet 3/4 of promised benefits with the existing tax, it could meet 4/4 of promised benefits with a 33% tax increase.
The current SS tax level is 6.2% of payroll. 33% of 6.2 is 2.0something, let’s say 2%. So a 2% raise in the payroll tax would enable SS to meet all promised benefits.
Current average income is 700 dollars per week. 2% of 700 is 14 dollars. For a low wage worker, the tax increase would be about 7 dollars per week.
Projected average income in 2040 is 1000 dollars per week in 2010 dollars. 2% of 1000 is 20 dollars per week.
So Social Security can be “saved” by a 20 dollar increase in tax in 2040 on an income that has increased by 300 dollars in real terms by the time the raise is needed. The reason the raise will be needed is to pay for the six extra years of life expectancy those future tax payers will have compared to us. The 20 dollar raise will preserve their benefits at current replacement value and allow them to retire at the normal age with a benefit indexed to a 2040 standard of living.
SS isn’t really a problem for the forseeable future. The problem is healthcare :
Medicare Gets New Lease On Life; Social Security Remains Healthy | HuffPost Latest News This article by actuators who are trying to give it a check ,see both pretty solvent . It is more right wing noise. The new health care bill extends Medicare solvency until 2029. Social security is good until 2037…
[rant] It never ceases to annoy me that there are a significant number of folks who apparently think that the kind of government programs that Jas09 listed were the misguided attempts of folks who’s actual intent was simply to increase the power and role of government in our lives. It wasn’t. There were real problems that the available solutions weren’t addressing. You worked until you died, if you were lucky.
That some would scrap the current solutions to these social problems and not replace them with more effective solutions but instead return us to the Gilded Age boggles the mind. It didn’t work then, and the problems were fewer (if only because of the advancements we’ve made since. E.G. the CAT scan shows that those headaches are because you have a brain tumor but some radiation therapy and a round of chemo will fix ya right up).
If we really want to experiment with letting the [del]working poor[/del] middle class figure out how to provide for their own retirements and letting charity solve the problems of the [del]poor poor[/del] lower classes, fine. But we damned well better have a ready to implement back-up plan [del]if[/del] when it all goes to shit.
Unless you really don’t think starving old people and poor folks that realize that prison is the only guaranteed retirement plan they’ve got is going to be a real problem.
Just one thing about the “creating incentives for people to seek out certain types of professions”.
Seems to me that the choice between;
a doctor who gets into medicine for the money,
and
a doctor who gets into medicine 'cause it’s cool and they like the idea of helping people … and getting well paid in the process is a really great job perk,
should be a no-brainer. [/rant]
CMC fnord!
So in the post above, you’ve identified 2 groups of people who (you think) are apparently incapable of taking care of themselves, using their own resources.
In which group would you classify yourself? Do you think you are incapable of taking care of yourself?
I consider myself to be ‘middle class’. Is your assertion that I am incapable of taking care of myself, if I am allowed to keep my own money?
Is your position that only the government’s forcible transfer of wealth from (1-middle_class-poor) is the only thing standing between you/me and being destitute?
Let’s play a thought experiment. You are middle class and you come down with a medical condition whose treatment exceeds the lifetime limit of your health insurance. You are dead. Please do not post any more because it freaks me out to hear from dead people.
[quote=“IdahoMauleMan, post:38, topic:549193”]
Would you feel better if the social security trust fund held Canadian bonds instead of US bonds? :rolleyes:
No offense to Canadians, it just boggles my mind that some people don’t think that US bonds are assets and don’t realize that pretty much all the money raised by US bonds has in fact been spent.
If you’re unlucky, sure. If you have enough resources that you can weather, say, an unexpected medical emergency without going bankrupt, then you’re not middle-class any more.
The poor, meanwhile, are incapable of taking care of themselves using their own resources, even when they’re lucky, because they have no resources. That’s what makes them poor!
If congress says fuck you, we’re not paying social security, their balance sheet improves quite a bit.
Or how about this one: you are middle class and have a good job with stock options and an IRA. The stock options go under water, you lose your job, the stock market plummets 50%, your son is diagnosed with a serious condition not covered by your health insurance and you pay $100k to treat it. Since the market is down 50%, this is actually $200K in terms of what you put aside, your house which you put a conservative 30% down on drops in value so you are underwater in that as well. To pay for your health insurance you have to draw from your 401K and pay a 10% penalty in addition to taxes.
Of course this could never happen to you.
There are very few programs that transfer so much money from those who have a lot of money to those who don’t. That makes social security evil. Its practically socialism (they call it SOCIAL security for a reason).
So that must be what Social Security is for, then. Correct? SS is there to take care of the middle class who suffer misfortune, or the poor who would otherwise be destitute.
Is that your assertion?
Nope, its wealth redistribution.
It distributes wealth from those who are working on a regressive basis (the cap makes it regressive) to those who are retired on an even more regressive basis (the rich get the highest social security payments).
But over the course of a person’s lifetime, the amount paid in relative to the amount paid out is fairly progressive assuming the retirement age doesn’t keep creeping up.
It’s clear that you have no concept of how economics work. Wages are just the price setting mechanism for labor. Labor pricing is determined just like any other product in the economy. It’s a function of supply and demand. If demand is greater than supply, then the pricing goes up. If supply is greater than demand then pricing (wages) go down.
To think that compensation is not determined by supply and demand of the services people bring, I find to be stilted, convoluted and off-base.
Not junior modding…right! :rolleyes:
The real question is, why were so many lower and middle class people in the 1930s such stupid idiots that they couldn’t take care of themselves? Those lazy liberals (approximately 20% of the population) were so lazy they wouldn’t even go to work! How lazy is that?
Nothing bad EVER happens to responsible people. If something bad happens and you become poor, then it is your own damn fault. Like shifty farmers in Oklahoma, or yokels who thought it’d be a good idea to live in the South, or even weaklings who get sick in old age. They’re all incapable of caring for themselves!
But me, I’m so smart that I invest my money well, plus I’m immune from economic disasters, natural disasters, and disease. That’s why the government should never do anything but invade other countries and get hooligan teenagers off my lawn.
Yeah but what you said was that a profession would deliberately raise it’s prices in order to incentivize more people to join that profession,
and I think that is wrong. WRONG. No one sets prices for that reason. Go find me a cite from a lawyer who wrote “I charge $500 an hour in the hope that it will encourage more people to want to be lawyers, not because that’s what I think my services are worth to my clients.” and I’ll believe you that it CAN happen the way you said.
So, as I said before, unless you have some cites, you don’t have to bother trying to defend what you wrote. In other words, unless you have a cite, you have nothing.
So, are you claiming that if wages of computer scientists or lawyers increase because of a shortage there will be an immediate new supply of computer scientists and lawyers? Or that company raises wages now so that they might get a bigger supply in 3 years?
In computer science, anyway, there is a well known lag time as people choose majors and graduate four years later - often to be screwed when the demand has gone away.
I’ll also mention that all tech companies I’ve worked for subscribe to salary surveys and set new hire salaries (and raises to some extent) to a desired point in the distribution. None are stupid enough to try to bid for new hires, except perhaps in very exceptional circumstances.
No it doesn’t. It’s true that the Federal Government would lose X trillion amount of liabilities, but they would also lose X trillion assets. It is a wash, and the net effect is bupkis.
What are these assets that they have lost? Bonds that they issued to themselves? These are not assets.
The government takes cold hard cash from SS payers, spends it, and replaces it with a promise that it will pay the benefits later.
Let us say you give me $100 to go out and buy groceries tomorrow. I spend the $100 on the traditional hookers and blow and write a note promising to buy the groceries. Is that note an asset to me? Of course not. I am $100 in the hole (still talking about the hookers?) and need to get the money by borrowing it or earning it elsewhere (the analogy fails here - the government doesn’t earn - it just taxes and borrows).
Is the note an asset to the SS-receivers? Yes, but the government has merely promised to make payments, i.e. it has borrowed the money. Where is the money going to come from to pay the coupon and the note? I suppose the government could just print it, but few would be happy with that solution.
Someone else wrote that there is nothing wrong with the government buying bonds. Oh yes there is - you cannot buy things from yourself and claim you have created an asset, especially when the government then spends the money used to “buy” the bonds.
Having said all that, I don’t believe that SS has a major problem - it needs little in the way of extra payments and/or reduced benefits to get past the demographics hump.