I was recently reading this article (http://boortz.com/nuze/200412/12072004.html#aarp) and began to wonder what we can do to stop the AARP. Is anyone else worried about this?
Neal Boortz is a right-wing kook who doesn’t have his facts straight, and is just trying to pit young against old in order to flog Bush’s plan for privatization. The simple truth is that Social Security is not an investment plan, it is a social compact between the generations; you pay for my benefits now, and the next generation will pay for yours when you retire. Yes, it is flawed, and needs to be fixed; but the Boortz approach is to get today’s young employees all worked up so they will demand that money gets pulled out of the SS trust fund and into private accounts. What happens to the employee approaching retirement, who has paid into SS all his life, expecting to get the benefits he was promised all along? Privatization is a selfish grab from those who paid into the system all their lives, and will destroy SS sooner than later. But that is the purpose of the privatization; Bush and conservative whackjobs like Boortz want to drive a stake into SS so that all your retirement money will be exposed to future scams like Enron, Worldcom and the like. This is not about saving you money, it is about stealing it.
I think this is more GD material, since you’re clearly concerned about the privatization of Social Security.
Anybody who keeps us updated on the “nuze” seems to lack a drop or two of street cred, mmm’kay? :smack:
There’s a discrepancy there, but there’s also a fallacy. The reason why there’s a fallacy is because no one receives social security benefits for a negative number of years.
Let’s assume that black men do have a life expectancy of 68.8 years. That means that around 45% of them will have died by the time they are 67. At 67, the remaining 55% will have a life expectancy greater than 1.8 more years – I’d suspect that it will be around 10 years. That would mean that the average black man would expect to receive social security for 55% of 10 years, or 5.5 years. There’s still a discrepancy, but it’s not as big as Boortz suggests.
Cite?
Get organized and actually VOTE next time. :smack:
Well, I suppose we could start voting more.
How can you take someone seriously who thinks that the only way to relate to black males is to patronizingly use what he assumes to be the language of the “street?”
Don’t you have to do the same thing for white females? At 67, the remaining white females will have a longer life expectancy as well. Perhaps there’s a statistical argument that shows that simply comparing the averages is misleading, but you haven’t made it.
Of course the problem with the young voter block has always been that they tend to side more with the AARP people as they get older. Heck, they even end up joining the dang thing eventually! 
We have found the enemy and it is we. 
Sure you do… As I said, there’s a discrepancy, but it’s not as big as Boortz makes out, and the calculation is not as simple as he suggests. You also might want to put into the equation the different average incomes of black men and white women, since people earning less do relatively better out of social security. (It tends to redistribute from the rich to the poor).
VOTE! early and often. Don’t miss an election.
Get all the FACTS not fancies and obfuscations straight so that you completely understandt the problem and the solution. Let your voice be heard far and wide.
Make you stand known to your representatives in Wash. DC. 
AARP and congressmen have a vested interest in the status quo, not in correction of past mistakes. :rolleyes:
Groups that die young do tend to get less of the retirement portion of Social Security. On the other hand, the families do get more value from the survivor portion. If a man dies at 40, he gets no retirement benefits but his wife and kids collect benefits until the kids are no longer minors. They even get the benefits if he has not fully vested in the retirement benefits. This has a value that the OP cite is not considering when discussing life expectancy.
One (factual) question: How do SS Disability benefits figure into the whole scheme? What portion are they of the whole of SS payouts, and what demographic collects the most?
This one seems more like it’s Great Debates material.
Moved.
samclem GQ moderator.
I don’t know this boortz character but I’ll bet that with all the hard negative talk he/she files for SS when 65 and joins the AARP.
The article is nonsense. Just a distortion of facts. AARP has never and will never be for stealing the money needed by their members to survive in their declining years.
trunx you need to understand the problem. Social security is meant as a pad for older or handicapped Americans.
It will cost you more to pay my SS. Just as it cost me more to pay your daddys SS.
FWIW
At age 58 I could have drawn SS 4 years ago and drawn at a higher rate than if I am able to work until I am 65. I did not take my doctors advice because I have no other income.I feel I am still able to work and will probably have to until I am 72 which IIRC is manditory retirement .
Life is seldom as simple as it seems when you are young.
There is no mandatory retirement.
Just as an aside.
I have read that you are better off in the long run to take early retirement. You don’t draw as much per month but you draw more in the long run.
You replied to this thread while it was still in GQ and should know better than to 1) post something inflammatory like this in GQ and 2) post something without knowing anything about the man you are attacking.
You obviously know nothing of Mr. Boortz. He is Libertarian which is neither right or left wing, it is its own wing somewhere in the middle (economically conservative, socially liberal - basically anti-big government regulating any part of our lives. In his words “the federal government should build roads and fight wars and that’s about it, get out of our lives”). If you think he’s pro-Bush you’ve got another thing coming as well, Neal supports Bush in the war on terror but besides that he’s no Republican mouthpiece. He is against pitting groups against one another to gain votes as you mentioned (old vs. young, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, gay vs. straight) and he’s rich enough to not need to steal your SS money. I recommend his book,The Terrible Truth About Liberals, you just might learn something.
Well, despite his best efforts to lie about anything and everything, this Boortz guy is right about one central fact. The younger generation will get screwed if the social security system isn’t modified some how. His statistics may be bogus and his column filled with semi-hilarious attempts to change the subject, but that one fact is still true.
What to do? Not much, really. There’s one problem with private accounts: we don’t have any money to pay for them. If you want to use your Social Security savings to invest in, say, Dow Jones index funds, you have to give a broker some actual money. Now where, pray tell, will that money come from? If we just run up a few trillion of federal deficit on top of what we’re running now, it would wreck the economy. Ronald Reagan would have raised taxes, but today’s Republicans aren’t Ronald Reagan.
So in short what can we do? Sit around and watch ourselves get screwed, pretty much.
The AARP is now compromised. It was once a lobbying group, twisting congresspeople’s arms to help old folks. Now, it’s an insurance company.
So, should young working people organize to fight the AARP? Lessee, organized working people…why, that’s…a union! I’ve heard of them. :smack:
Boortz is a libertarian right winger, his opinions should be viewed as the views of a man wearing rose colored glasses who puts politics before pragmatism and what is the best idea for everyone involved.
And we already have a ton of private retirement plans like Roth IRAs, 401ks, pension funds, and whatever else you want to invest personally. Boortz doesn’t want ‘privatization’ (we already have that and trillions are invested in private retirement accounts) he wants to tip the scales from a half/half public private to an all/mostly private system. It just bugs me that he says ‘privatization’ is the cure when we already have over a trillion (I assume) invested in private retirement plans. What good is another $1000 a year taken out of SS going to do when people already have matched 401ks, Roth IRAs with a 3k limit and mutual funds?
I have read that SS is not at risk until 2037 or later, so Boortz predictions of 15-18 year collapse do not really strike me as trustworthy.