bwahahahahahaha
This:
Oh, I see! John, that was sarcasm! All the cool kids are doing it this year, probably why you didn’t hear about it.
See, I don’t for one second believe that nonsense, I don’t really believe Boehner does either. I think they are looking for some rationale, however thin. Something that they can say with a straight face, if at all possible. And its not for me anyway, they are not reaching around the aisle to burnish my good opinion of them. They are simply hoping for something that presents the appearance of reason, rhinestones and costume jewelry.
Dems aimed for a Christmas present for the employed and the unemployed. The Pubbies dyed themselves green and played Grinch. They not only screwed the pooch, they tried to bill the pooch for the procto exam. In my mind’s ear, I hear Julie Andrews singing “Schadenfruede!” to the tune of Eidelweiss, eidelweiss from the Sound of Music. (Yeah, I’m big on show tunes…)
Or maybe L’il Abner, with all of Dogpatch singing that song to the statue of General Jubilation T. Cornpone, of Cornpone’s Defeat, Cornpone’s Rout, and Cornpone’s Utter Humiliation.
What will they try next? I’m betting they are going to try to cleave off the employed but nervous from the unemployed and desperate. They are going to start in with “Well, you know, things would be better for you honest, hard-working Americans if we weren’t giving all this money to those lazy, unemployed drug addicts”. If I had extra money and no conscience, I would likely invest in drug-testing companies, they are looking for a banner year.
(Shit, they used to say if you smoked pot, you didn’t want a job, now they say if you do, you can’t have one. Then they order another drink…)
You keep thinking, there, 'luc. That’s what you’re good at. 
I like to say I think outside the box, but truth be known, I don’t even know where the box is, anymore.
Have you looked under the tree?
I also think that some Pubbies really only are in favor of tax cuts for the rich. The payroll tax is somwhat regressive (in fact, my solution to fixing Soc Sec is to have the payroll tax have no upper limit, no matter how much you earn, you keep paying).
Yeah, that’s probably true. Whether you agree or not, though, it’s probably because they think “the rich” already pay too much income tax. I doubt that if we had something like a flat tax, you’d find any Pubbies who wanted to give only rich people a tax cut, though. That is to say, it’s not like they think the rich should pay less tax than the rest of the country.
I think that it’s largely a timing thing. The Republicans, especially the House Republicans, all of whom are up this year, wanted a year long extension because they didn’t want this issue hanging over their head for the elections, so with a 1 year extension paired with spending cuts, which is what the House wanted, the Republicans could say “See, we’ve cut spending.” As it is, with just the 2 month extension, this will come up again in February, the President and the Democrats can continue to look good with “The President is fighting the Republicans to keep the tax cuts and extend unemployment insurance”, and the dance will go on.
Soc Sec is supposed to be like a pension. Why should you pay more into it than you could possibly ever get back? The benefits are capped, why shouldn’t the payments be capped?
Honest question: Is it not possible now to pay more into it than you could possibly get back?
Yes. If you die early enough, it is possible. It is also possible to get more back as it stands now. If they removed the cap, they would remove even the possibility of getting more back for some people.
Yeah, but that would be true no matter how it was set up.
My question is, can you put more into the system now than you could possibly ever get back in benefits? Obviously, you could always get back more by living long enough, but if you have to live until you’re 150 to get back what you put in, I think that counts as “impossible”.
Ah, I see what you mean now. I don’t know. I haven’t done the math. You’d have to know what the cap was for every year over the time you are calculating. I bet someone has done it.
If you take someone like my Dad who is still working more than full time at 75 and will continue to do so for as long as he is alive, you probably will never make the money back. That’s not a fair example though. You’d have to select someone who actually retires.
IIRC, on average, most people get back about what they pay into Social Security.
Social Security also supports people with special needs from the age of 18 who have never paid into the system. As a parent of an autistic child, I think that’s a great thing.
What gives you the idea that the money you get is the money you paid in? It’s a transfer-payment system. The money you paid in when to people who were retired when you paid it in. The money you’ll get will be paid by people who are still working then. Why would you think the two are connected?
If it was set up in a way where you would have a personal, named, account into which the money was deposited and grew with that account’s contents being disbursed as part of your estate should you die early, that wouldn’t be true.
Let’s see. Maximum SS contribution in 2011 was ~$11K - more than half from employer if you’re employed, all of it from you if you’re your own boss.
If you start working at 20 and earn enough to max out the contribution every year (which means you’re earning more than $106K/year every year), by 65, if interest on the savings is 2% (and let’s leave the inflation out of it) your contribution, compounded, would be $806K. Current maximum SS benefit is $2,366 monthly. If that money continues to earn that 2%, it would take about 43 years for you to exhaust that pool of money. That would be by the age of 108.
I am not criticizing you because that is an excellent first cut. We would still have to take into account that the max amount goes up from time to time as does the monthly benefit.
I just did the static analysis. Since we don’t know what will happen in the future, that’s the best you can do. I also didn’t take inflation into account, presuming that it evens out in the end.
IIRC, I saw somewhere the analysis that showed that most people who received the SS benefits throughout its history got WAY more money back than they contributed. Again, IIRC the same analysis claimed that in the future, if the trends continue, most people will get less.