Don’t proclaim that kind of ignorance. It is solid for 30 years and then will pay 80 percent after that. t.It requires a little tinkering to make it a 100 percent paying basis for a long time to come. Yes you will see it, unless people like you succeed in getting it privatized. Them you will be royally screwed.
Turn off Fox and read something informational.
That mantra that SS won;t be there is false. Read a little.
I cut all the defense budget, and all of the Iraq and Iran appropriations. Since I cut more, I guess I am more conservative than you!
Not enough. We need more revenue. I think tax cuts for the rich and for businesses since Reagan has had enough time to prove how it can destroy the economy and bankrupt the country. It has to be ended and reasonable tax rates have to be levied, loopholes have to be closed. That lesson should be clear to even the most right of right wingers by now.,
Libertarians would never admit that. They want to go back to a time that never was, in a country that never existed .
How is SS funded?
It comes out of the paychecks of workers.
SS is run at 1.5 percent of the money. So it is not being wasted nor going into the pockets of millionaire managers.
What happens to the money?"
It is used to buy Tbills. As solid an investment as there ever has been.
What happens when it can not keep up with payments/
It has to cut back the payments. It can not hit the treasury to make up for shortages.
So how is it possible for it not to be there when you retire? Does it evaporate even though workers continue to put into the fund every paycheck. Think about it. Don’t listen to Fox and Rush. Not being there makes absolutely no sense. That is unless the Tbills become worthless. But then we are in a bigger problem than just Social Security. We won’t even be thinking about it at that time.
We aren’t going to have nuclear weapons? Our Navy isn’t going to be nuclear powered anymore?
If we keep running it the way we are, it will be a truth.
I love how you think I’m a Republican based on what I said. Who listens to talking points? 
SS is falsely thought of as some thing that people have when they get old. Sure, if you didn’t work independently or if you made xyz dollars for pdq amount of time.
We pay into SS. That money goes to the current retirees. The next group pays for the next group. That works until people start LIVING TEN OR TWENTY YEARS LONGER than before. It works until you have a baby boomer generation about to retire. What do you think will happen when my generation is old enough to collect SS? Cripes, I may have to be 90 years old by then. :smack:
I haven’t heard this being talked about since 2003ish. SS isn’t going to work in the long term if it stays as is now.
Republicans just figure if they wreck systems they don’t like (welfare, social security, public schools, medicaid) then they will just collapse.
It’s 2012. Where do you think I will be in 2040? 2050? Social Security would have already faced massive cuts (at minimum). I’ll be working or starving…while I’m being sent IOUs held by the Treasury Dept. :o (Since there is no Trust Fund – it’s just IOUs.)
sheesh, here’s to hoping my son is successful in life.
:eek:
Another thread asked if the Dems were going in the wrong direction. Clearly the answer to that is a resounding yes.
People like you shouldn’t be allowed to talk on behalf of the Democratic Party.
SS is 40 per cent of the nation’s income.
It’s also 20 per cent of it’s budget.
If all factors remaining constant, that would be fine. But they won’t.
And thus we find a conservative who isn’t serious about what he’s debating and why Democrats can’t trust Republicans and their budgeting.
Sam, for God’s sake, I suggested a realistic approach and you go for a wish list. It is simply not politically possible to cut both DoE and DoEd and you should be grown up enough to know this. Hell, getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction is pretty much guaranteed to put someone out of office. I dropped that by 10% on the reasoning that placing a cap on mortgage interest could be sold to the electorate but that was it.
I also took $$$ off SS and Medicare through an assumption of means-testing on the reasoning that such could be trimmed for those with a continuing high level of income. That might be feasible but might not.
But go ahead and dream, Sam.
Oh, can it with the ‘you should be grown up enough’ nonsense. I misunderstood what you were looking for - I didn’t realize it it was supposed to be an attempt at politically feasible cutting but more a matter of, “Oh, you think you can cut the budget? Go ahead and take out what you think shouldn’t be there, and see if you can balance it” kind of thing.
If you want a set of ‘politically feasible’ cuts, then what’s the point? We already know the answer to that: there are almost NO politically feasible cuts. The Ryan budget was declared DOA by the Democrats, despite the fact that it doesn’t even balance the budget for 30 years.
That’s not because there are programs that are so necessary they can’t be cut - it’s because the political culture in Washington is completely broken, and because the population has been told for so long that its entitlements are untouchable that you’ll get riots in the streets if you go near them.
And you really think nuclear weapons and a nuclear powered navy shouldn’t be there?
No, of course not. I would retain those functions of the DOE.
My guess is that if you actually looked at what the Department of Education does, you’d have the same insight that you just gained with the Department of Energy – that is, you’d realize that the majority of what they do is uncontroversial and you wouldn’t want to cut it.
Maybe you want to bite the bullet and kill Pell grants, even though it will probably hurt our economy overall. But actually abolishing the Department of Education would also mean getting rid of enforcement of Title IX and the ADA, for example (which is about a quarter of their budget). You may not believe in federal protection of civil rights, but cutting enforcement of those programs as your money-saving measure is not only outside political feasibility, it is also a bizarre set of priorities.
Oh, I’d kill those in a heartbeat. The federal government has no business sticking its nose into any of this.
I’d also kill Pell Grants and federal student loans, which I believe are distorting the higher education market and damaging it.
Did you forget that I’m a libertarian? I’d kill the ADA entirely. And Title IX. I’d turn the FDA into an advisory-only agency, scrap the Dept of Homeland Security, and take a hacksaw to most federal agencies.
That would hardly help the budget or the economy, which is rather the point of this discussion. For one thing, most of the planet would probably ban drug and food imports from America as being of untrustworthy quality and potentially contaminated. And having waves of disease and poisonings wouldn’t help the economy much. Nor would having the pharma industry collapse because no one dares take their potentially lethal products unless they are absolutely desperate. You know; just like the good old pre-regulation days you want to return us to, when “medicine” and food were at least as likely to be worthless or contain things like cyanide or tapeworms as they were to be safe.
I expect your program would complete America’s collapse into a Third World style nation.
Not all libertarians oppose federal enforcement of civil rights, or, say, complying with our treaties with American Indian tribes (which is another portion of Dept. of Ed. budget).
In any case, if your point is you can cut a lot of stuff that is supported by 95% of Americans and reduce the budget deficit, well…of course you can. The easiest way to do that is to just kill Medicare, which presumably you would going by the above arguments.
So why not just kill Medicare? Presumably, because you were doing some kind of internal balancing of priorities, or an implicit analysis of the feasibility, yes?
So long as it happens before the 2012 election, it is all going according to plan.
Hey, didn’t the budget have a surplus a few years ago?
True but it probably could be run more effectively if their were an overall Department of Civil Rights under DOJ, Student and Home loans under Treasury as investments, Energy under the Interior Department. Veteran Affairs under Defense like it used to be. I estimate at least 1/3 of current departments could be eliminated with duties giving to other federal departments or the States.
This is exemplary of why S&P is considering the downgrade. Not that there are a host of debate topics on that, but consider.
There are a lot of well-intentioned posters on both sides who could actually hammer out a solution to budget issues. But they can’t get elected.
Unfortunately, the current political landscape is strongly driving by a fuck-the-other-side mentality. General distrust aside, getting out the vote seems to depend in large part to undermining and criticizing the opposing party’s suggestion irrespective of its inherent workability (which leads to distrust, etc.).