Just explaining why young people like privatization. It’s the only possible way to get around either raising taxes or cutting benefits. Young people rightly believe that both solutions will fall exclusively on them. And they are right. We’ve had 30 years to hit the Baby Boomers in the pocket book to fund their own retirements. Now that they are retiring, it’s like, “Oh wait, not enough money, we’ll have to raise payroll taxes!”
If you’re going to raise the payroll cap, we might as well just means test.
How does the cap being at 100,000 NOT make it not fundamentally a welfare program but the cap being at 250k magically make it so? Secondly, No it would not “FUNDAMENTALLY” change a damn thing, it would change the cap…that’s it.
My view is that it would change the nature of the program and that makes me dishonest? Get out of your bubble and see the world as the other side sees it.
Anyway, Social Security as it is now, is a system where what you pay in directly correlates with what you get out. That is a major part of the political viability of the program. Even if you’re rich, you get out based on what you pay in. Sever that relationship and that changes the nature of the program. Now rich people pay in many times more than they get out, and we’re defining rich not as the top 1%, but more like the top 10%.
Now, what happens to Social Security politically when it’s a bad deal for the top 10%?
Who cares? The rich are ALREADY trying to naysay the viability of SS and are salivating at the thought of all that money sitting there they can steal, er, I mean “privatize”. If they are already doing whatever they can to steal, raising the cap is no added disincentive to the rich, and SS will be even more viable. Win-win for democrats if they grow a pair and defend social security as they should.
If you’re going to claim that service cuts are, then yes, you do have to. :dubious: The underlying subject here is responsibility. If you’re conceding that point, then you’re conceding a whole fucking lot else too.
True, the ratio of working persons to retired persons is reducing. That’s all the more reason the system needs to be rebalanced. There are countless ways to do that, with raising or eliminating caps, graduating the rates, adding means testing, and so forth, all of them difficult to argue against on any but the most selfish grounds.
:p:p:p:p:p As we say around here, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” We already have IRA’s and 401K’s and such for anyone interested in having a private supplement for SS. But SS represents a guarantee, by design, and private investment doesn’t.
Wrong, if you mean X=X. There is not and never has been such a thing as an SS or MC “account”. They have always been transfer payment systems, clearinghouses if you like, with a permanent fund to buffer cash flow variations. Where the fuck do you get the idea that it’s been anything other than what you call a “welfare program”? Where?
What happened to the worst 15% improving their operations to the level of the 85%? How is that not responsible or even possible?
Yes, it’s credible to believe a party hasn’t found it advantageous to support a tax increase or a service cut before the actual crisis arrives. Yes, it’s credible to believe the Democrats are a political party. Are you shocked?
Bullshit. Never has been, isn’t now. Bullshit. Again, where the fucking hell did you get that idea?
Which will alienate the young, because even a tax increase on just those making above the cap will hit a pretty significant portion of them. 10-15% of workers make over the cap. Great way to tell the young that if they make it to merely well off, the government will be there to take a larger portion away compared to what previous generations did.
However, Democrats aren’t actually suggesting eliminating the cap. The only proposals I’ve heard would create a huge donut hole between the cap and $250,000. do that, and you don’t raise enough revenue and have to cut benefits or raise the payroll tax on all workers.
Your benefits are based on an average of your best 20 years of earnings, right? There is a direct correlation between what you pay in and what you get out.
Eliminating the cap creates a different social contract.
Cite that raising the cap amounts to a 'bad deal for the top 10%" please.
I don’t see why things have to be drastic- the fund is scheduled to run dry decades from now. We have the ability to instate incremental changes that extend the viability of Social Security indefinitely. Say the cap rises (with inflation + .3%) per year for 20 years. Say benefits increase (with inflation - .3%) per year for 20 years. I bet that’d help plenty without anyone experiencing much suffering. It’s a display example; with all the data one could devise a more accurate proposal.
Except for the part where people with incomes higher than the cap are likely to be financially secure, whereas the people who need Social Security the very most are at risk if it is taken away. Maybe the whole concept overall is too ‘socialist’ for you, but the people aid the poor and old through government subsidies (and by no means to a collectivist degree either). Circumstances change the math, I am only suggesting adapting to it.
You can get the same result by means testing, except when you means test, the fact that the program’s nature has changed is more apparent.
So whereas Warren Buffet got his full benefits, future workers making more than $150,000 or so will simply have to do with less. And you wonder why young people think they are getting the shaft here.
One quarter of voters in 2008 made more than $100,000. That’s not a group you want to alienate:
Which is why democrats don’t actually support just eliminating the cap. They want a donut hole instead, where between the current cap and $250,000 would be exempt from tax.
I see. A sort of political compromise, and maybe it would work.
I want a solution where the numbers add up- it doesn’t have to be my personal idea. There is trouble with the trust fund long-term, but nothing that can’t be fixed if we make some simple adjustments now. Incremental changes where nobody ‘gets the shaft’. We just don’t have to do anything drastic to solve the problem AFAICT.
The Ryan plan OTOH seems to want to end all entitlements based on a forced misunderstanding of the situation in a way that benefits the wealthy, at a time when we are already being taken advantage of by the wealthy. What happens when 97% of the population puts all their labor into the system and gets nothing out? You get something like the French Revolution where the remaining 3% get strung up with piano wire, that’s what. I would find that outcome unsatisfactory and believe incremental adjustments to the paperwork would be infinitely less painful.
Anyway I am not so poor that I can’t take a vacation. I’m off to climb some mountains and forget about all this stuff for awhile. Please don’t think I am stomping away, I am just not going to be online for a few days. Ciao!
I don’t think that shows what you think it shows. The reported income is probably household income. Social security tax is based on the individual employee’s (earned) income. My household is making over $100 K but neither of us is even particularly close to that.
I don’t think the argument can be dismissed so simply (I know I referred to the individuals as callow, but I’ll post my reasoning). One way of looking at it is that the prefrontal cortex of individuals is still developing up to around age 25. One of the roles of the prefrontal cortex is balancing short-term rewards with long term goals (in other words, hyperbolic discounting). It may be the case that these individuals would support legislation while younger that’d lower this tax burden giving them more disposable income and they feel they are rational actors capable of weighing actuary costs of not investing in retirement. However, as they get older, they realise they were not as rational as they had assumed and seek to impose the same stringent tax requirements on the other whelps that think they know best. Hell, it could be pure avarice: they wanted to spend as much as possible, realised they didn’t put enough away for retirement and then if Social Security is cut, they’d be out on their butts. In these cases, the generational shift towards supporting Social Security remains constant. In the case you mentioned, support for Social Security will eventually phase out once the older generation dies off, in much the same way the US will probably never view racial miscegenation as a serious threat (and it’d be trite to blame this consciousness shift on Star Trek or the liberal media).
Always worth pointing out the low administrative costs of the SSA when compared to charities. There are a few differences in homology to take into account: marginal utility, in that there will probably be a greater outlay on administrative costs when dealing with smaller funding in the first place and also the subsumption of some costs into the IRS, but another major factor is that executive remuneration is not as large in the public as it is in the private sector (or secretarial pay, if you wish).
I can guarantee you young people are not by and large wanting to opt out of SS because they want more money to party. I absolutely guarantee you if you polled young people who would opt out of SS if they could, that well over the majority want to opt out, because they don’t want to pay for old people NOW who are robbing my generation with their unpaid wars etc.
I am as liberal as they come, and if I could opt out of SS I probably would…not because I don’t believe in the program, but because I don’t trust Democrats to actually fight back against the evil republicans who can’t STAND any social safety nets. I literally don’t believe in 38 years when I turn 65 that SS will be worth a damn because Democrats are willing to even negotiate SS benefits, which should be completely off of the table.
You old are all robbing from your children and grandchildren and should be ashamed of yourselves, you’re selfish and short sighted.
Chill, Rog. In the long run, I think we will prevail–whether they like or not (not), the Republicans are declining, demographically and every which way–over the long run, we just get more and more socially aware (which is what they’re bitching about) and they bitch loudest when their backs are up against the wall, as now. Notice you rarely hear actual opposition to social welfare items like Medicare and Social Security nowadays. When I was your age, in the 60s and 70s, I actually heard pols like Goldwater and Reagan express their mistrust for the very concept of assisting the elderly and the sick, they wanted it all to be done by churches, local charities, families. Now that’s pure wingnut-talk, and I believe it’s fading out. You still hear it, true, but it’s only talk–they don’t actually believe it, they just say it to get the wingnut vote, but even conservative Republicans know that SS and Medicare are here to stay.
Of course, it affects you materially in a way it doesn’t affect me, so I get how you’re pissed.