“Since he’s now broke, he gets a nice, whopping Social Security check.”
Ask an elderly person if $1,000/month after taxes is “whopping”? :rolleyes:
Lagomorph: You’re complaining about this but not of the other, far more wrong, inequities of the Social Security (SS) system?
For example, women are punished for being housewives. Under the current rules, a married woman is not entitled to her benefits if her husbands scheduled SS benefits (or overall salary average, I can’t remember which) is at least 2X hers. For example, if I were to receive $800/mo. from SS and my wife were to receive $350, we would only receive $800. Then, if I die, under the current system my wife would not get my $800 but would then start collecting on her $350.
Frankly, it is truly nothing but a transfer program that benefits middle and upper class white women the most, very likely the class of people less needy of SS. In short, it is a pension plan for the middle class/rich and of the white. Do you realize that the avg. lifespan of a black male in the US did not even reach 65 until the late 1980’s? Of what benefit is SS to the black community if over 50% of the principle wage earners (and therefore the bigger SS checks) die before they can start collecting? How much SS money is a black female, who has worked for cash the majority of her working life (and there are a lot of people like that out there, trust me), going to collect?
Plus, the SS tax is severly regressive, possibly the most regressive tax in the country. It is a terrible burden upon the poor and middle class, taking over 12% of their income (with medicare taxes adding another 4-odd% on top of that). There is a cap on the wages that are subject to the cap, somewhere around $75-80,000. Anything above and beyond that is not taxed for SS purposes. This means that George Lucas (who made over $100 million a year over the last two years) paid off his social security taxes around 12:22am, January 1st.
SS is an increasingly bad investment as time passes, and we have actually passed the point where children born today will actually gain a negative rate of return on their SS money!! I cranked out the numbers a few years ago, and the ROR on SS has taken a big dive since about 1981. Back in 1997, I remember that a child born then would get back 101.7% of the money they paid in - if you paid in $100,000, you will get back $101,700 over the course of your retirement (and back then I assumed that the retirement age would be 65, which is wrong today, and which skews the numbers even more in favor of the government and against the taxpayer).
What most people don’t understand is this: SS is a TAX, and the payments are an ENTITLEMENT. It is not an INVESTMENT, nor is the money GUARANTEED. So, so many people don’t get that the only reason they get money is because Congress votes the money to them. There is nothing that is preventing Congress from stopping payments whilst continuing with the taxes other than fear of public riots.
The Supreme Court ruled as such in a famous 1960s case (Nestor vs. Fleming, here’s the ruling if you want to read it) where a Bulgarian Communist sued the SS Administration (SSA) for his funds. The court ruled that there is no property rights in regards to SS, and that it is an entitlement, not something that is owned. They even went so far as to make the government stop selling SS as a pension/insurance-type plan, and to stop referring to the tax as a contribution.
So, honestly, complaining that Jack Welch gets what is rightfully his, both by law and by public sentiment, kind of ignores the real problems with SS.