Well, there probably won’t be any SS or Medicare for Gen X. We are next in line to retire (NOT Millenials), and if the current administration gets its way, it will be cancelled before we get there. Apparently no one will make a fuss about it either because Gen X doesn’t matter. For the Boomers, it’s considered horrible to talk about taking anything away from the elderly, but it’s just fine and hunky dory to take it from the middle aged.
Keep in mind, boomers actually vote, in large enough numbers to exert influence. Gen X and millenials, not so much really.
If you want anything to change, that’s gotta be the first thing! You have to get out the vote!
:rolleyes: This same sort of fact-free croaking has been going on for literally decades. Remember the “Third Millennium” PR campaign from nearly 25 years ago that more young people believe in UFOs than believe that Social Security will exist when they retire?
Those “young people” (i.e., us GenXers, aged 18-35 in 1994) are all over 40 now, some nearly 60, and there’s still no indication at all that SS is going away before our retirement.
Sure, if idiot conservatives/libertarians deliberately dismantle the Social Security system, that will have a negative effect. But remember that similar idiots tried that by way of “privatization” in the George W. Bush administration, and strong negative reaction from voters shut it down. The Trumpistas are a lot less trusted by voters in general than the Bushistas were, so it seems likely that pushback against similar measures on their part would be at least as strong.
The thing to remember about the perennial Chicken-Littling about Social Security is that if the public can be made sufficiently distrustful about SS’s future to tolerate attempts to privatize it, the privatizers stand to make a metric shit-ton of money. As this 1996 article remarked,
(The “Third Millennium” organization that talked up the “UFO survey”, btw, claimed to be a grassroots movement of “Generation X” but in fact was significantly funded by financial-industry players favoring privatization. I infer from your despondent attitude that some of their propaganda apparently stuck, though.)
My attitude does not come from the organizers of some UFO/SS study that I never heard of. It comes from the current administration. All three branches are run by Pubbies. The checks-and-balances brakes are (mostly) off. The head honcho cannot be trusted to keep his original promise that he didn’t want to mess with SS/Medicare benefits. Ryan has a hard-on for dismantling everything and creating a voucher system so the budget will balance and government will be smaller, which I guess means there will be a voucher for my cardboard box when the time comes.
As a late X-er, I can tell you, we are also suffering.
Noble perhaps.
But slowly but surely we are being infantalized by our governments.
What better control can a citizen have than self-control?
Yet Drug War rages on, despite the dominoes falling State to State on Uncle Sam’s War on Marijuana, which President Trump has promised to escalate.
The premise of Social Security is that we can’t attend to our own affairs, and thus our government must step in at the point of a gun, and inflict mandatory participation on us.
These are not examples of the way Thomas Jefferson imagined it.
The premise of Social Security is that we decided to all pitch in a portion of our earnings to alleviate the elderly from dying in poverty. Now maybe everyone didn’t or doesn’t go along with that “noble” goal but I’m not going to second guess what has turned out to be an effective system for its intentions and I suggest that you don’t either. Risk aversion is not the bad medicine some claim it can be and it can even be argued that a single payer health care system would stimulate entrepreneurism.
Horseshit. A universal insurance plan against illness, disability and old age isn’t “infantilizing” those who participate in it, any more than it’s “infantilizing” to have a national military and natural disaster management agency instead of just letting everybody cope with attacks and catastrophes individually.
On the contrary: it’s a sign of maturity when citizens realize that everyone’s better off when they all chip in to minimize the harmful impacts of statistically predictable misfortunes. It’s the libertarian “ant and grasshopper” ideal of letting devastation proceed unchecked as some kind of moral punishment for improvidence that’s the infantile fantasy.
[QUOTE=sear]
The premise of Social Security is that we can’t attend to our own affairs, and thus our government must step in at the point of a gun, and inflict mandatory participation on us.
[/quote]
This melodramatic libertarian blather conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of US voters strongly support Social Security. Even decades of very similar-sounding propaganda (ultimately sponsored by the financial industry) in favor of privatizing SS (which would of course be extremely profitable for the financial industry) has not succeeded in dissuading voters from their sensible support of this sensible social insurance system.
And we were victims of that success in the 1970s/1980s, in that the high wages and corresponding high prices of US manufactured goods drove us right out of the marketplace when significant competition arose. One of two things happened- automation or moving labor-intensive processes elsewhere.
That said, I thought the article linked in the OP was peculiar, to say the least. The main contention is that as a group boomers are uniquely sociopathic, and that’s the reason for today’s problems.
I don’t see it that way; you could just as easily pin a lot of this stuff on the “Greatest Generation” who eroded the public trust via Watergate, Vietnam, etc… Who set in motion non-discretionary spending programs such as SS and Medicare/Medicaid that compose roughly half of the entire Federal budget (ever wonder where all that NASA and infrastructure money used to come from?) Who engaged in a lot of Cold War brinksmanship that put the entire world on edge?
Boomers did a lot of good too; during Vietnam, they were typically either serving the nation in the armed forces, or protesting the war- both of which are noble in their own ways. They managed to end the Cold War eventually, they presided over an astounding technological expansion with home computing and the rise of the WWW, etc…
Today’s problems can hardly be pinned on the Baby Boomers alone. I’m sure they have some responsibility, but they share it with the other generations as well.
The premise of Social Security is that eventually you get old. And as you get up in years, you lose the ability to fully attend to your own affairs. Old people lose the stamina to work, the edge comes off their mental acuity and they’re more easily scammed, and so forth.
It’s one thing to ask an adult of sound mind and body to take responsibility for him/herself, but past a certain age (which obviously varies from one person to another), it makes no sense to ask that of someone of advanced age.
The next argument is, “well, they should have saved when they were younger.” But the reality of human existence has always been that most people have enough difficulty meeting the challenge of each day, let alone saving for the future. If your paychecks barely get you to the end of each month as it is, you’re not going to be stashing much in your 401(k).
Guess we should tell those people that once they get too decrepit to work anymore, they’d better get ready to die, huh?
Yeah, I was pissed when Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture too. But I don’t think we can blame all our problems on Harvey Weinstein.
FWIW, Gibney is on today’s WBUR show “Here and Now” on NPR.
- piffle -
I was offered ABSOLUTELY no choice in the matter WHATSOEVER !!!
Social Security is inflicted at gunpoint, PERIOD!!
It’s a pyramid scam, a ponzi scheme.
It’s not a question of whether this and other government entitlement scams will go bankrupt or not. It’s simply a question of when, or how drastically they’ll have to be slashed back, to save the government scam at the expense of the tax payer / citizen that “earned” them.
It is if it’s compulsory.
Adults make their own choices.
Infants have their world dictated to them.
Even if true, irrelevant.
Neither realization nor maturation plays any role in it. It’s compulsory.
And it’s quite possible to do better without the martially imposed “benefit”.
Truth is neither determined nor verified by majority opinion.
Even if it’s popular doesn’t make it right.
President Trump won the election. Does that make him right? His very first discriminatory immigration restriction plan has already been shot down by the courts. Trump isn’t fully two months into office, and he’s already on version #2 of discriminating against Muslim refugees.
Trump’s poll numbers among Republicans are wildly high.
Does that mean Trump is right?
Tell them any lie you like.
But your attempt at ridicule here has succeeded. The problem is, it is YOUR position you ridicule.
You imply my position is that instead of a compulsory government pyramid scam inflicted at gunpoint, the alternate I advocate is death.
That was never my position.
Instead, my position is; offer our countrymen a choice.
If they want the government scam, FINE !!
BUT !!
Being forced into the government scam when superior options are available is exploitative.
And the proof that it is so is that these revenues by law belong in a “lock box” but instead are dumped into the general treasury, in part to impart an economic fig leaf to MOC for our astronomical deficits.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Here’s a news flash for you boys & girls:
If we are ever to have a right to succeed, then we must also have a corresponding right to fail.
The failure-averse are more than welcome to arrange whatever level of assurance and or insurance is necessary to allay their anxiety.
What the %$#@ does that have to do with me ?!
So true, and rarely gets mentioned.
I’ll add:
By the time we were born (late 50’s), people were SICK of kids! We were just “in the way”. We weren’t coddled like later generations, or even respected. My wife has said that we were hated as kids, have been hated ever since, and now are still hated!
And those of us whose parents grew up during the Depression had Frugality drilled into us, and stuff was really expensive when we were trying to establish the home/family thing in the early 80’s.
Oh my. Even Bricker doesn’t fall for that nonsense. Ask him about the “Monopoly Free Parking Paradox.”
Oooh! We got oursel’es a gen-u-wine LIBERTARIAN extremist.
No, it is not and such a claim demonstrates a serious ignorance of how it was designed. People who make this claim tend to try to promote it as only a government pension program, demonstrating serious ignorance of its design.
Actually, there are a number of ways to keep the system solvent without resorting to drastic cuts. Get the Feds to pay back the funds they have “borrowed” to finance expeditions into Iraq, for example, and not capping withholding so that the richest people barely pay into the system.
This being a democratic republic, “we” did choose it, (unless one is a libertarian/anarcho/syndicalist extremist who actually believes that a society could survive on purely voluntary contributions to infrastructure and similar efforts with no government to organize efforts and outlays.
= = = =
[** Moderating** ]
Do not accuse (or imply) that other posters are lying in this forum.
[ /Moderating ]
So an unflattering label is permissible, but exposing a falsehood is not?
So you can expose a falsehood, but I can’t?
Very well.
YOU post a definition of:
- pyramid scheme, or
- Ponzi scam
Post any definition you like.
THEN check whether Social Security meets the criteria of the definition.
FYI
Current Social Security benefits $recipients aren’t receiving the $dollars they’ve been paying into the system for decades. Those $dollars are all long gone.
CURRENT benefits recipients are receiving $dollars from current victims; trapped in compulsory compliance, paying into the system, ostensibly for their own future benefit.
THE PROBLEM ?!
As Bernie Madoff proved;
such scams can appear to be working, as long as the ratio of contributors outpaces benefits recipients.
That trend has held since inception.
BUT !!
Economists and government bean counters have acknowledged;
such trends can’t continue.
It’s not a question of whether the system will crash. It’s a question of when.
Addressing this directly:
Your squabble is not with me sir or m’am. Your squabble is with the consensus of authorities that have investigated the details, including:
It’s like shooting pickles out of a barrel.
The baby boomers didn’t destroy “everything”.
It was their archliberal idol, Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton, with his big-government expanding, wife-cheating, deceptive lying self.
Bill Clinton could’ve been a great president. Instead, he abandoned his promise to be a moderate “New Democrat”, and for the most part governed as an ultra-liberal beholden to the most left-wing elements of his party. The only good things he did were the welfare reform bill, the Balanced Budget Act, and his cutting of the capital gains tax, and even then, principled, conservative Republicans were the ones who had to push him to do it.
For eight years, Bill Clinton coasted through prosperity (which for the most part, wasn’t thanks to him). The path of least resistance is always downhill. But America’s way is the rising road, and Clinton was too blind to see it.
Mr. Clinton embodied the potential of a generation. So many talents, so much charm, such great skill.
But in the end, to what end? So much promise, to not great purpose. 
Let me point out just one misconception here.
As you will see by examining any chart or graph of budget numbers, it was not the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 but rather the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993 which had by far the bigger effect on moving the budget toward balance.
How many votes did the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993 get from House Republicans, whether principled or not? ZERO. How many votes did the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993 get from Senate Republicans, whether principled or not? ZERO.
If you have evidence that a statement is incorrect, you are encouraged to post it.
What you are not permitted to do is claim that another poster is lying. From the rules to this forum posted at the top of the forum page:
Since the system was designed, from day one, to be a method to collect revenue from the general population to be used to provide supplemental income to limited numbers of the population with no claim by the authors that the funds were being held to be returned to the donors, there is no Ponzi scheme involved.
Op Ed pieces predicting doom that are based on the notion that there will be no changes to the methods of collection or distribution are simply polemics designed to have the system torn down or handed over to the private sector. We have already modified both the systems of collection and distribution, extending the forecast doomsday, and a rather modest change to the regressive tax limit in the cap along with means testing on payouts would push the doomsday scenario back for the foreseeable system.
One may certainly argue for a different system (or no system) of providing assistance to the elderly and those who have various impediments to obtaining financial support. Attacking the current system based on misunderstandings of its intentions and design are not helpful to that argument.
This has been true since the system was created. The first people collecting from the earliest payouts had contributed little to none of the payout funds. That was not the intention of the service and attempts to claim that it was are, at best, misguided.
Your facts and logic, like your similes, are broken.