Hell, I have insurance on my house. Why the hell do I need a fire department? That’s gotta be worth a few bucks a year.
-Joe
:dubious:
:eek:
:smack:
Oh-hahahahahahahahhaha… And the asshole doesn’t have a clue how idiotic he is, does he?
Apart from food stamps and welfare (see my above, where when Craig T did it, it was “different”, I’m sure), isn’t bankruptcy a form of a bailout?
-Joe
Then do that, and don’t hide behind social security. Up income tax. I am on board with that. But your proposal is utter idiocy in what is does to incentives to save. This is behavior we are meant to be encouraging, not preventing.
If I am told that the moment my retirement savings hit $X, I am not eligible for any Social Security, do you really think my retirement savings are going to hit $X ever? If you want people at higher incomes to pay more to support people at lower incomes, why not do it in a fashion that actually works? Or is the posturing more important than the actual result?
Means testing benefits is a horrible policy generally - if you want to know why go and ask the generation that suffered most from it. There’s a reason that the UK Welfare State was set up on a non-means tested basis. Not only does your harebrained scheme destroy any incentives to save, it also destroys part of the benefit of a welfare state, which is the unifying process of universal systems, be they for health or retirement.
You claim to be looking out for those living from paycheck to paycheck. Your proposal will certainly not benefit them, and may in fact harm them. if it is limited to the ultra-rich (the Buffets and Gates of the world) then it is completely meaningless, as the moeny saved will be minimal. If it creeps down to the level of anyone who has to make a choice each month between spend or save, then it is incredibly destructive.
At the bare minimum it would push people into speculative investments. If I have money for a 401(k) plan, for instance, that at a rate of return of 7% will put me over your arbitrary limit for SS, then why put that in investments that average 7%? Hell no, that money is going into internet venture capital. After all, if I lose it, I am still going to be able to get SS, and to be worth keeping it I have to get a stonking rate of return.
So, just because saving isn’t an option for some, doesn’t make it sensible to undermine the entire basis on which Social Security was created. What it suggests is that we should better look after those for whom saving isn’t an option. But thinking of ways to do that is hard, so the grand (idiotic, counterproductive) gesture is much better.
It’s certainly using the government as a way to get out of one’s debts.
Bricker, esq: ". . . as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” - Matthew 25:40
I wonder how many of these people have government jobs? It’s always amazed me that the biggest right wing self-reliance supporters always seem to have government jobs. For the record, I have my own law practice as a business. The new law would make it a requirement that I buy health insurance, which I already do.
Bullshit. They damn well do earn it, whether you want to consider what they do “earning” or not. If earning large sums of money was so easy, everyone would be doing it. People who earn large amounts of money are doing so because in some way they are providing enough value to someone else to justify that pay. Popular actors and musicians don’t “earn” the money they make through physical labor either, but there is enough value in what they do in terms of making money for the people who pay them to justify their large incomes.
Well, the work they did appears not to have beenall that valuable if its value was only sufficient for a payday to payday existence. In other words, anybody could be hired to do it. Get an education and develop valuable skills and you’ll make more money because you’ve made yourself more valuable.
Sure there is. Society exists to keep us all from killing each other and to provide the resources to protect our borders and national interests. Contrary to the desires of the ilk, this country is not and has never been intended to be a giant ant hill where everyone works for the good of everyone else. That system has failed every single time it’s been tried and why you people keep trying to pound the square peg of reality through the round hole of communism/socialism is a mystery to me. The only reason I can think of is that you feel so hopelessly helpless and utterly unable to provide for yourselves that you think having the government play Robin Hood and taking things from the people who’ve earned it and giving them to you is the only way you’ll ever get anything.
Bricker might as well be that guy with the dollar bills. Angry, arrogant and utterly unthinking. Everyone who has less than him has worked less. Everyone who is in trouble is stupid and self destructive. He doesn’t realize that his life is dependent on socialistic programs every single day.
Take a good look at the douchebags at that protest. Those people are who these tea-party morons are. Anger, fear and willful ignorance are the pillars of their church.
That’s all? That seems awful simplistic. There are entire huge gigantic areas of law that we can just discard then. It’s just a matter “don’t kill us, kill those other guys”.
Actually, I’m probably one of those your “Robin Hood” would be taking from, as I’m upper middle class. I look at it as a kind of nobless oblige. Those with wealth, power, or position have certain obiligations to the society (and therefore the people) in return for this “privileged life”. It’s not new, it’s a very old concept.
Actually, I don’t see Bricker behaving so boorishly. I see him as having a tendency to keep his emotions in check, when people are watching. For some reason, he doesn’t strike me as the type to participate in public demonstrations (except for maybe showing up for a candlelight vigil on December 28).
Anyone with personal knowledge of Bricker is welcome to disabuse me of these notions if I am, in fact, mistaken.
Amen. And let’s not forget good old self interest here. We pay because we get lots of good things from society, and I out of control poverty threatens those benefits we receive.
No doubt that’s the only explanation that makes sense to you, but— and you may want to be sitting down when you read this — not everyone is motivated purely by blind self-interest. I make a decent living. Not rich by any means, but I have food and shelter and transportation and my wife and I are able to live a comfortable middle-class existence. There is probably little, if anything, in the currently-proposed health care bill that will provide direct benefit to me, at least initially.
So it’s a no-brainer that I should oppose it, right? Well, no, because I’m capable of looking outside the two-foot perimeter that surrounds me and seeing that it may benefit a *lot *of other people at virtually no impact to me, and with luck will help to prevent a clearly unsustainable system from complete collapse a few years down the road, which *will *impact me directly, when I may need it a lot more than I do now. (Or even sooner, if I lose my job tomorrow and become ill and my comfortable middle-class existence suddenly evaporates almost overnight.)
I’m sure it’s much easier for you to believe it’s only the lazy have-nots who want to steal from the hard-working, salt-of-the-Earth haves, but the reality is not quite that dumbed-down.
(On preview, I see the point has already been made, and more succinctly… oh well.)
Under my scenario, if you had enough money to be disqualified from SS benfits, you would already be set comfortably for life. I’m not talking about a very low cutoff. If you have $20M in the bank, are you going to turn down the chance to add another $5M or $10M because you know that Social Security caps at $20M?
I would cap it at a level where the people getting cut off would have no conceivable need or use for the money anyway.
That’s all well and good, but don’t you think that people dragging their sorry asses out of bed and going to work for the benefit of everyone else five months a year, wich is where we are now, is “noblesse oblige” enough?
No they don’t. Most of them just repa the labor others, or they inherit it, orthey get lucky.
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whether you want to consider what they do “earning” or not.
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It’s not.
Who said it was easy? It’s your side that propunds the lie that working hard will always lead to wealth. It seldom actually does. The poorest people tend to work tjhe hardest, and the riches work the least.
No, they’re just stealing it usually…or inheriting it, or scamming people.
Entertainers and athletes are people I would put in the exceptional category of people who “earn” it, even though they’re still grossly overpaid.
This is too stupid to merit a response. You obviously have never known anyone who had to work for a living, so you wouldn’t understand
What is the definition of a “national interest?”
How much money do you think it is going to save? Inevitably at the margin this will affect incentives, but that isn’t even the most important aspect of it. Means testing was something that was to be avoided when these schemes were set up, because part of their purpose was egalitarian and communitarian. In the UK, the benefit that was always touted as being the most successful in achieving its objectives was Child Benefit - a small payment per child made weekly to the mother, completely not means tested. There’s a reason means testing isn’t popular, and much of the opposition to it comes from those who would still receive the benefit. It’s a return to the demeaning concept of having to beg from the State.
Denying SS benefits to someone with $20 million in the bank would have no practical benefit whatsoever. It would, however, send a message that SS was a government benefit program to “help the poor” which would further erode the support for it.
Where we are now is a corporate feudalism where the many do all the work for the benfit of the very few. Even the paltry wages (which have stayed stagnant for decades in comparison with the larcenous incomes of the cororate execs) which the working classes receive mostly go right back into company store credit rackets. It’s all a scam. Your puppet mmasters on the radio tell you not to truse the governemnt, which you have control over, and even the ability to become part of, but you trust your coroprate overlords abjectly, even though they have no accountability at all, and which is (contrary to the “American Dream” mythos) pretty well closed to entre nous by the working class.
Sounds good to me.
But there’s one problem with your “argument.” People currently collecting social security or on Medicare have been promised for decades that those progerams would be available for them and have paid into the system. Therefore, taking those programs away is a lot different than just not passing this healthcare reform bill.
Although I want SS and M to go away, I believe that they would have to be phased out so that people were able to make decisions about their retirement with full knowledge that these programs were not available.
For those who claim that they could manage their retirement funds as well or better than Social Security…remember Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. He had a lot of people thinking that their retirement funds were safe and growing, until one day…