She is a bitch and she’s venting at the wrong person, but she’s hardly the only one that works ridiculous hours each week to make ends meet. Fox News’ ‘hate the poor’ harangues can only do so much, the ire comes from a place that does exist, I don’t think it’s controversial to say the Middle Class is struggling for decent paying 40-hours-a-week jobs.
To your first point; that’s why Social Security currently has a surplus–it was built up in anticipation of an outsized retirement cohort.
To the second point; if the rate of population growth is higher than the inflation rate, then the payment will exceed contribution, on both a real and nominal basis. Note that it’s possible that population growth rate could be negative but the payment could be higher than contribution on a real basis.
Fine. So returning to my statement, does that mean that the framework is sustainable forever? Or does it eventually inevitably run in to some limiting factor?
The limiting factor is the rate of population growth. Since I’m not good at making predictions, especially about the future, I’ll leave it at that.
But… someone on the Internet is wrong!!! 
Anyway, it’s not just what he said, but that his kids were there. He could have handled it much worse, but it’s still not the type of example I’d want to be setting for my kids.
Is it not trivially easy to construct a situation in which this is true? Let’s say there are 100 people. 99 of them pay in a low amount, say 10 dollars. The other guy pays in 1000 dollars. They all receive the same amount, 19.9 dollars. The vast majority of them (99%) have received more from the program than they put in. As long as you have a gradient where a small amount of people put in more money than the majority of people, than the majority of people can indeed get out more money than they put in. Unless your just saying that this is unsustainable? Or is it not how the system works (not American, I have no idea)?
Only got half my stuff in the copy/paste. Sorry.
But even if everyone pays in the same amount, as long as the distribution isn’t normal you could still have a situation where the vast majority of people get more than they paid in. If 100 people pay 10 bucks, and only 99 get paid, those 99 still get out more.
“Won’t somebody please, think of the children!”
(Personally, I think him saying, “fuck you bitch” was far, far less disgusting than having to listen to her rant. Hell, I heard far worse language from my grandmother)
It’s not really any of your business.
Easy, short answer: Yes.
Alternatively: I’d teach the child “Son, that’s the type we reserve saying ‘fuck you, you massive cunt’ to, instead”.
former child support paying father here,
If you get divorced in MY state, the garnishment is automatically placed as part of the divorce proceedings. Idaho doesn’t even give you a chance to “get behind” and if you reach something like $1500 (for me anyway) they start yanking driving privileges and* then* they throw you in jail.
And yep, the state disperses those payments on the same card as the welfare card.
My point was, indeed, that this is not sustainable.
But in response to your illustration, the Social Security maximum contribution has a cap, so (under the current scheme) the top single guy kicking in $1000 and the rest only $10 is not possible.
It is really more medicare that is running a shortfall.
Medicare eliminated the cap in 1993 (thank you president Clinton) so that plays a role in how medicare works. Plus the PPACA raised the rates to 3.8% for some wealthy people. So medicare is a progressive program where some wealthy people pay far more, while the average middle class person gets 3x more out of medicare than they paid into it.
Don’t knock it til you try it.
It depends on how much you pay in, SS has a progressive payment plan where the less you earn, the more you get back.
Assume you earn 50k a year for 40 years. You pay 124k and your employer pays 124k. You retire at 65 and die at 85. With 50k a year in income you will get about 1347 a month in SS payments, over 20 years that is 323k. These are all adjusted amounts for simplicity.
If you earn 10k a year, you will get back more than you paid into SS. you’ll pay 50k in and get 123k out.
If you earn 100k and pay SS taxes for 40 years, you will have paid 496k and you will get 492k back over 20 years.
Population doesn’t even have to grow. Wealth per capita just needs to be generated and the money in the fund invested properly.
Unless I get another job after I retire, the little bit that went into social security when I was young will be turned over to others. I don’t quite have enough quarters to qualify because the city does CalPERS instead. SS is welcome to it.
I’m sure there are a few more people in that situation, but I don’t expect we’re statistically significant.
I will be qualifying for medicare, though. They pay into that.
Ok.
I was talking about Social Security. Medicare is indeed different – no cap, as you say, so that allows the model of a comparatively few wealthy people covering many middle class people. I agree that Medicare, for the average person, will pay out more than they paid in.
You’re comparing what was paid in to what gets paid out straight dollar for dollar.
But the present value of $100 is $100. The future value of that $100 is more than $100. So if I pay in $100 today and get it back in 25 years, that’s not an even exchange.
Yeah, I know. That’s the precise scenario I was responding to. You talked about modeling better conflict management techniques for his kid. I’m saying that’s exactly what he did. That’s not a woman who can be reasoned with. Telling her to fuck off and then walking away was the best way he could have handled that.
Well, if I was going to be nitpicky about it, I’m not in love with gendered insults, but “bitch” is pretty mild as far as that sort of thing goes.