The younger people have spent larger fractions of their lives and their attentions spans hearing the Republican/Fox lies about Medicare and Social Security being doomed, that they’ll never get it, etc. The older folks know better.
They aren’t doomed, but the trust funds don’t have enough money to pay promised benefits. That’s just a fact. Unless you think the Medicare and Social Security trustees are lying.
ANd older people don’t know better, unless you mean they know what their self interest is: hold out as long as possible so that their wages won’t be taxed more heavily and their benefits won’t be reduced.
Simple math says that barring privatization, benefits must go down, taxes must go up, or a combination of the two. Which is the reason young people find privatization attractive.
The only reason they’re “doomed” is GOP intransigence in performing the necessary maintenance. The adjustments required are pretty small, but ideology requires them to eliminate them entirely, and tell lies about the reasons.
If you never change the oil in your car, it’s “doomed”, too. If you take a hard stand against changing oil, and yell loudly about the car being inherently doomed, and your kids will never get to drive it because it will be dead in the junkyard by then, then that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can even get your kids to believe it; they don’t know any better and they’re actually listening to you. But it’s all bullshit nonetheless, and in exactly the same way.
Wow, a poll from june of 2011. That’s helpful!
Notice that even back then, it said that people hated Ryan’s plan when they actually heard about it.
There is no GOP intransigence on the issue because there’s been no legislative proposal drawn up since 1983. When they block a SS fix, then we can talk. On Medicare, Democrats have produced good proposals to bend the cost curve down, but there’s more hope than plan there, and already the cuts are being postponed, calling into question the integrity of the entire process. Entitlements remain on an unsustainable course.
The reason young people are not buying what the Democrats are selling here is because Democrats are portraying themselves as the party of the status quo on entitlements. Even when they’ve made good changes like many of those in the ACA, they deny that any real cuts have been made, which tells young people that nothing is really being done. And the youth are right. Any real cuts will always be postponed.
All the best polls on the Ryan plan were from 2011, nothing I can do about that. When better polls come out, those will be more authoritative.
Please. The fact that they refuse even to consider the problem does not constitute intransigence to you? :rolleyes:
Correction: The balance between entitlements and revenue is on a course that will eventually become unsustainable if the necessary maintenance is not performed. Maintenance *can *be performed on the revenue side, ya know. Why is that not on your list of responsible options?
Wrong. The Democrats are for maintaining the guarantees we have come to count upon, and that includes responsibly paying for them.
Because they haven’t been. Romney is lying.
To clarify that last point: ACA takes some cash out of provider reimbursements for Medicare, as one of multiple incentives it has for private providers and private insurance companies to cut bureaucratic bloat and improve efficiencies. It does not cut care availability for its subscribers. Romney’s ads, and current GOP rhetoric, do imply that, but that implication is a lie.
Yes, I’m sure you think the “best” polls were the ones done before people learned about what the plan actually was.
Wait a minute, you got kids, and they listen to you? Hey, fuck all this political talk, I want to know more about this! Fear? Bribery? Tell me, tell us all, and tell us now!
The only attempt to consider the problem was the 2005 attempt to privatize Social Security.
I’m not going to judge whether revenue increases are responsible for the purposes of this discussion. I’m just going to point out that both revenue increases and benefit cuts are a raw deal for young people. The previous generations got a lot more out of the programs than they put in. Today’s young people will get less than they put in. It’s simple math and there’s no way around it. The Baby Boom generation is just too big for it to work out any other way. The attraction of privatization is that it gives some young people a chance to do better.
The guarantee was that you would pay in X amount and get out X amount. If you raise the payment but leave the benefit the same, you haven’t actually kept the promise.
That is false.
roviders for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries). Simulations by the Office of the Actuary suggest that roughly 15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection period as a result of the productivity adjustments.
As much as Democrats try to obscure the issue, if you have a fee for service system, you cannot cut fees without also cutting services. Cut fees, less providers participate, seniors have less access.
There you go again.
Defining truth and then declaring disagreement with it a lie. As the link in my other post shows, 10-15% of providers would become unprofitable. It’s true that it’s not the Democrats INTENT to cut Medicare benefits, but any efficiency drive will result in a few providers failing to meet the standards and becoming unprofitable, and thus no longer serving Medicare patients.
As if their overhead and bloat were beyond their control! As if the least efficient companies should be subsidized by the taxpayers! Come on now. :rolleyes:
And that’s the only point you have chosen, or more likely been able, to rebut even partially. If you have a *substantive *argument, then stand and deliver. If not, then sit and think.
But isn’t it an article of conservative faith that the Free Market (Blessings and peace be upon it!) would generate more efficient services and providers? Since your figures suggest that the majority of such providers would continue at a profit (85% or better, according to you). Where is the stern insistence on creative destruction, winnowing out the inefficient laggards, to the greater benefit of all!
Well, they’re old enough to think for themselves, past the automatic-argument, I’ll-do-the-opposite-of-whatever-you-say stage. Unlike the current GOP leadership, that is.
Trust me, yours will outgrow it too, someday. They pay more attention to you than you realize.
No…For example, it has been pointed out by some Democrats that SS would be solvent out for some unGodly number of years (70? if we can believe such projections) if you just raised the cap on the earnings subject to SS tax from the current value (somewhere around 100K) to 250K.
So, no, you don’t have to kill the system in order to save it if your goal is really to save it and not to kill it.
Wrt to Medicare, working people can take a look at their paychecks and see that the tax for it is quite small. Even a few bucks a week more would translate to a hefty % increase. Talk about raising revenue doesn’t have to imply doing it to a collectivist degree- people still take home their pay.
Again, if it is cuts you are after, look at the military first. Americans’ lives depend on the continuation of Medicare and Social Security. Do Americans’ lives depend on the continuation of every active US military base in the world, for instance? I mean, as for the Nazis or the JIA, it really does appear from my humble and limited viewpoint that we got those guys and they are no longer a threat. Trim (more) bases in Europe and the Pacific. Let the ‘freed troops’ from those bases become a permanent reduction in the size of the active-duty force. Count the savings (unless your income depends on lobbying Congress to fund overseas projects using 3rd party contractors anchored by active-duty soldiers. If the contractor budget simply cannot be cut, transfer it to domestic projects, like infrastructure and oh gee I dunno, health care)
As for Medicare cuts, a recent article in the New Yorker makes the case that significant gains in efficiency can be made in the medical field through things like standardization of best practices. Better outcomes and smaller bills. Here’s the type of points he makes:
Warning: the author of the article wants the medical system to operate more like a Cheesecake Factory. Nonetheless it suggests there are more ways to skin this cat than the Republicans’ ridiculous monism involving tax cuts for the wealthy coupled with the elimination of entitlements. Capitalism works really well on a problem like Boomer health care: we’re going to have to mass-produce a predictable set of services. We can apply efficiency here in lieu of eliminating domestic programs.
Beneficiaries will be affected. THe administration knows it(which is why they keep delaying cuts), and the trustees know it(according to their reports).
But we’re supposed to believe that all this easy to fix fraud and waste was just allowed to sit there for 40 YEARS, until Democrats decided to use it to fund a new entitlement. Yeah, that’s credible.
Making it a bad deal for those making over $100,000. Fundamentally transforming the system into a welfare program.
And the capital gains rate is a bad deal for everyone who works for a living.
What’s your point? That government should right all the bad deals, or only those that pinch the wealthy?