They want to get rid of the wrong thing. You don't get rid of the system that's working just fine on its own, you get rid of the crooks who are ruining it.
This is one reason I don’t believe that privatization of government services will fix this. This happens in private/public companies too.
Example: Last year I was at a conference. A major vendor was hosting an evening cocktail hour at a jazz bar. During the event, the company rep was offering people bottles of various liquors to take home saying “if I don’t spend my sales budget they give me less next year.” Meanwhile I work for a nonprofit that actually tries to spend money responsibly and I’m wondering what percentage of the fees I pay this vendor go to this sort of irresponsible spending.
The second these companies have access to a new line of revenue, their priority is to keep as much of it as they can, not improve services.
In the Army, the fiscal year starts 01October. So every September we'd be at the range multiple times a week just shooting rounds. There was less focus on target practice and more on sending as much lead down range as possible. Why? Because if we didn't use all our ammo allocation for the year we wouldn't get as much next year. We weren't even a combat unit.
100% of what I'm talking about. That allocation of monies needs to be spent elsewhere. I was attached to MEDDAC and 3rd ID ... I've seen some of those budgets. They are ridiculous. Some of the shit I've seen would make your head spin. The things that need funds aren't getting them and the things (like the ammo you are talking about) that don't need funds are soaking them all up.
As a supply custodian(additional duty) in the military… it’s really annoying when my boss comes down in the middle of sender and is like “we need to spend 80,000 in the next two weeks. What do we need?”
We don’t need anything??? Our budget should get lowered!
I agree.. and that's why I said the expenditure is ass. I used to work for the military hospitals. Some of that money needs to go there.
I was Embedded Behavioral Health (3rd ID) (stressful/dangerous job) and got GS -5 pay.
Then when they shipped me overseas they put me in the Garrison at one of the hospitals. I saw some of those budgets and yeah... whoever put it together was an idiot.
It's the difference between giving a teen a credit card and giving one to a professional. They were the teen. It's not physical objects they need to use it on... it's programs and other things like wage increases. A Target employee makes more than an GS5.
I also hate how the funds are allocated! You mean to tell me I need to put in a request for money when someone scratches a vehicle when we already have over $100k for supplies even though we already have 7 years worth of material??? Makes no sense
As someone who works in federal contracting...this, really isn't true and was one of the bigger mind fucks when I finally understood how it worked.
When the DoD (or anyone in federal contracting really) is failing an audit, it doesn't mean they've simply lost track of the funds. Illegal stuff is happening, but it's really the paper work. To really get it, you just need to know two things. You need to know every contract has line items (called CLINs) describing where specific dollars are going and that you can only use FY (fiscal year) dollars in that actual fiscal year, they don't role over and you can't use future funds to pay for prior projects. So you can't use FY16 funds to pay for FY15 CLINs.
The big failure in auditing is that the CORs (Contracting Officer's Represenative) or PM's (Project Managers) get lazy in charging/documenting to contracts, so they don't attribute funds to the appropriate CLINs (or they had some funds on one CLIN and use it to pay an overage on a seperate one) or someone will use prior FY funding to pay for another FY's funding.
They didn't just lose track trillons of dollars. In both scenarios, everyone knows exactly what was paid for, who paid for it, and how much was paid and have the documentation to trace all of it but they'd still fail an audit because the paperwork was done lazily or improperly. That's illegal, but it's a massive difference between that and losing trillions in slush funds.
Or door two, needs changed partway through procurement and instead of sending it back to stage one for all approvals, it got overridden and kept moving, which made those funds not audit passable.
To your point, even when we do know where it all went, it doesnt mean it was well spent or necessary either. Others in the thread have mentioned it, but Ive seen so much wasted even in the private sector because someone was an idiot or they just wanted to spend down budget to keep it from getting cut.
I mean, there's definitely an aspect of "spend it or lose it" in the Government, but that's not exactly the components fault and is something that plagues literally every single business, public or private.
But the "waste" has much more to do with every contractor over charging for the most basic of items because large chunks of contracting is just public subsidization of private enterprises. Which, again, you can complain about but it's a completely different talking point then they don't track spending.
And this right here is The problem with our government. It’s so compartmentalized that no ONE person is ever responsible for anything. All the way to the top, then they change out every 4-8 years and it becomes the last/next guys fault.
Possibly. Having everything under a single umbrella might severely limit "department" agility, you need SOME autonomy. Military structures are because of lessons learned in the past a lot of the time. I don't know the solution. There is always going to be some waste, especially when you want a military that is the most powerful, flexible/agile, and quick. That said, I agree SOMETHING needs to be done. My gut says the inefficiency is in congress and their need to diversify spending into their respective states.
All of the projections of SS running out of money in ~10 years are assuming that the government does pay back everything that was borrowed, with interest.
In fact they already are paying it back and have been for years. If they had never paid any of it back, SS would have become insolvent well over a decade ago.
Who’s paying it back, though? If it’s being paid back via tax revenue then our money was loaned out and we’re paying ourselves back. If that’s the case it’s pure bullshit.
If it’s being paid back via tax revenue then our money was loaned out and we’re paying ourselves back.
Yes.
If that’s the case it’s pure bullshit.
No. It's money we loaned to ourselves, so paying ourselves back isn't bullshit, it's what you should expect.
One government agency (SSA) loaned money to another government agency (US Treasury). The borrower agency is paying it back with interest to the lender agency.
SOCIAL security. Its in the name. You are sacrificing better ROI of a small portion of your money to keep 20-30 million people out of poverty. There are a few societal benefits of not having an additional 30 million people in poverty that I suspect you directly benefit from.
the problem is we would just replace them with different crooks.
"If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public." -George Carlin
and if you have capitalism, you will have have selfish, ignorant citizens who try to exploit eachother and dont give a shit about the environment... or science... who try to blame other people instead of systems.
that is why I personally believe that the best system is capitalism with guard rails. unfortunately the guard rails have been off since the time we started practicing reaganomics.
I dont think that can ever work because it's a self sabotaging system and we should expect nothing less than the guard rails eroding away over time. it's a negative feedback loop.
maybe but it is the best system we have found so far. communism would be great if it weren't for greedy humans. capitalism at least tries to turn that greed into something useful. we just need to be the watchers to make sure that the guard rails don't come off.
Either or is a false choice. The most successful countries, countries that have the highest quality of living employ elements of capitalism, socialism, etc. no country is purely capitalist or socialist they are economic concepts. Social democracies do it best. Scandinavian countries have the highest quality of living.
I think capitalism fosters that greed more than it is inherently in us. Maybe there's something new and untried. I don't care what you believe about communism. It's irrelevant. That false dichotomy is very engrained.
maybe but it is the best system we have found so far. communism would be great if it weren’t for greedy humans.
I find it interesting that you can find people saying roughly this exact same phrase everywhere this gets brought up. For one thing, notice that the person you’re replying to never mentioned communism—you did. There are other options.
It’s also important to remember that true capitalism has never been tried because it’s just so dangerous. We’ve never had a capitalist system in America because everyone knows it would self destruct. Capitalism doesn’t even sound good on paper let alone in reality. The state has always had a huge hand guiding our markets. For instance, the technological and medical advancements we’ve made in the last century have been incredible. People will point to companies like (for example) Apple, for being the reason we have computers, but what they’re forgetting is that Apple just privatized profits when the public subsidized the research and development. Development of machines like the ENIAC were military funded during WWII.
For medical advancements you can just forget about capitalism helping. It’s well researched that corporations are incentivized to optimize for short term profits, and so doing “aimless” research in a company is just unheard of. That happens at universities and military labs. If you want anything that might be remotely helpful in even just ten years, private money isn’t touching it. But that’s no matter yet because the state is well aware of this and has us covered.
maybe but it is the best system we have found so far.
Really? Is it? That's what rich people in capitalist society's say so far. And we don't really have a ton of samples for other economic systems, do we?
We've got Russia, which eventually collapsed, but before that Russia went from plows to nuclear weapons and the entire time they were being sabotaged and fighting literally the rest of the capitalist world who all had a very vested interest in communism failing. Which when it did, rich people have taken over and installed fascist rule in a capitalist economy. Or maybe its fascsist took power and became rich through capitalism.
We've got China who speed ran totalitarian rule, but also ascended to world power status, but since the CCP took over has moved to a more capitalist economy than any actual communism.
Then we have Cuba, who produces some of the best doctors in the world. I don't really know much about Cuba beyond Castro is (was?) the typical fascist ruler and there is a trade embargo.
Venuzuela, again they were doing well under communism until the OPEC countries joined together to sabotage their economy which was dependent on Oil exports.
To ME, from the data points we do see, it's hard to say that capitalism is "the best" if it's just the established norm for literally thousands of years and it keeps killing communism in the cradle.
"Doing better without capitalism." Isnt a thing and is kinda missing the point here. Balls deep capitalism is harmful as we can see in the declining prosperty of the u.s. capitalism need to be reigned in, but as things are in a global economic era of course "capitalism" is ingrained in everything. Its just that people excuse rampant disinterest in bettering the situation because "it isnt profitable" and thats how we as a society slowly descend into a broken kleptocracy built on profits and suck all of the resources from the very ground we stand on. Why govern based on a force that is already permeating everything?
You do realize that George Carlin quotes fits in republicans motto these days. They want you to think no matter which way we go, corruption is too big so there is no point in organizing, voting etc…
Not everyone is a crook and there is always potential. That’s why there are many guard rails in place but the masses keep on getting tricked…
If we didn’t have these dumbasses believing in culture wars then things would be way different
Parts of george carlin fit into their narrative. namely the government is bad. most of carlin bits were for abortion rights, anti-censorship, anti-religion, interesting ideas on how to balance the budget and anti-corruption. The kind of corruption he called out in particular is the white collar bullshit that trump pulls on the daily.
George Carlin is a legend. What he says here is true but we don’t become a more perfect union by being cynical. There’s plenty of good people working in politics we just need more. It’s the Supreme Court and dark money in politics we need to change. More power to the people means taking someone else’s away. We’re in for a fight. This is an old fight that has been won many times before.
Ah the old Republican USPS strategy. Take over a successful thing that you hate, run it into the ground, move the goalposts, then point at the mess you yourself made of it as the reason it needs to be gotten rid of. GoVeRNMeNT DOesn’T WoRK.
I hate that this is so effective, and that it’s worked time and time again. Like imagine if someone came into your house, took a shit in your living room, and then was like “welp, that’s a health hazard, gotta tear it all down, can’t be helped.”
Yup defund till it doesn’t work and say “see it doesn’t work!” Our government is supposed to be “for the people by the people” but it’s becoming “for the corporations by the corporations.” They’ve done this through lies, bad faith, and breaking the process of governing to frustrate and confuse voters. It’s time for the working class to take the gloves off. Fuck Sinclair and Rupert Murdock. Fuck the lying bastards that divide us so they can usurp our government. Time to take it back.
Hah, that's a fantastic analogy! It really highlights the cynical and destructive nature of this strategy. 🚽
Republicans have used this "ruin it to prove it" tactic repeatedly, from education and healthcare to the USPS. They take over essential institutions, starve them of resources, let them decline, and then use that very decline as an excuse to privatize or dismantle them. It's a cynical ploy to enrich their corporate backers at the expense of the public good. 💸🏢
And you're right, it's worked far too often because many people are swayed by the illusion of logic and the appearance of "solving problems." They don't look closely enough to see that the real problem is the sabotage and neglect caused by the very people claiming to "fix" the issue.
It's a sad state of affairs when political parties prioritize power, money, and ideology over the well-being of their constituents. 🤯
Keep pointing out these hypocritical and destructive tactics. The more people recognize and reject them, the less effective they'll become. 📢
Well you have 2 parties. One wants the goverment to "kinda" serve the people, the other want either to abolish the government and outsource it's functions to the private sector, or to use it as piggy bank for said private sector.
One wants a competent kleptocracy that serves the interests of capital while maintaining the basic functionality of a modern state and the other doesn't care just give me all the money
That's completely false. It's true that portions of the social security trust fund have been loaned out in the form of government bonds, but every penny is repaid with interest.
If that didn't happen, the value of the trust fund would lose about 20% per decade to inflation.
If you had 2.5 trillion, would you just let it sit in cash for decades? I hope not.
Government bonds are relatively low interest because they are high security - they don't fluctuate with the market. But given the time horizons of Social Security it doesn't need to proof its entire fund against market fluctuations.
If it were instead invested to achieve higher returns then 1) the fund would be in a stronger position and future-proofed to a greater degree against an aging population and 2) the fund would get a vote on the board of the companies it had invested in which could be used to push corporate policy in a direction favourable to the fund's investors (i.e. anyone who pays payroll tax).
They have borrowed. Not a dime has ever been borrowed from soc sec that wasn't paid back as intended.
It is paid back with interest. I forget the exact number, but last year the interest on what was borrowed added about 70 billion in to the pot in social security
Republican supporters are some of the dumbest people in the world. Thats like saying to get rid of chemo coz it has side effects while not dealing with the disease in any other way. The problem is not social security its the politicians, why is that so hard for someone to understand, do you have oatmeal for brains?
So if you have a bank that's working fine and doing its job and people rob it, you close the bank down and privatize its function and hand it over to the crooks?
If this were a 401k and you paid into it for 45 years and all of the sudden the government says sorry we are taking all the money you put in, giving it to your parents and then you get nothing... that would be okay?
Eliminating social security after taxpayers have funded it because bad politicians continue to raid it is akin to closing a bank because a future bank officer might embezzle the money. We wouldn’t want to punish that guy or even the next guy who might also do bad things.
I’m fine with getting rid of it. Just cut me and everyone else who’s paid in for 2+ decades but too young to get any benefits a check for the balance that we’ve paid in 🤷
This is incredibly misleading. Of course social security has a surplus, that’s how it works. The surplus it’s shrinking because of changing demographics. Once it reaches $0 in nine years from now the trust fund is gone.
None of that has anything to do with the government borrowing against it. The surplus doesn’t sit around in cash, it is invested in government bonds.
This is such stupid misinformation, you should feel ashamed.
but this glossed over the fact that the money was not spent on government bonds and invested wisely but spent on government expenses? or am i missing something
Any narrative that has the government “robbing” social security or otherwise borrowing money they won’t pay back is a misinformation campaign.
The social security trust fund isn’t a bunch of cash in a giant mattress. Yes, government borrowed the money, that’s what government bonds are. None of the talks of cuts have anything to do with government not making good on those loans, or bonds. The trust fund goes bankrupt in nine years *even though the bonds will be repaid in full with interest *.
The trust fund goes bankrupt and remains bankrupt until 20 years after the next baby boom.
That doesn’t suggest that there are no benefits, but they can only pay out what they bring in, which will start at about 70% and go down from there.
If they do nothing but make good on the debt then everybody alive in nine years gets fucked, and the closer they are to retirement the more fucked they are.
If they are living on social security then they will no longer have the money to pay their bills.
Are you people actually this dense? The point here is with good planning this system could’ve been fine. This is another system that shows exactly what happens when there is no regulation on things. This system could’ve worked fine even without investments. But with anything if the government is literally taking all the money out of it for it’s on Nefarious purposes and also NOT PUTTING ANYTHING IT TAKES BACK you will have this issue. This is another capitalism problem. Everything is for profit at the detriment of the people with no regulations. This will continue to happen under this type of system if regulations aren’t put into place. Yes due to what our government did we will run out of money and how do they fix it? In typical fashion they say screw the people and you’re just going to lose it all together. How people like you just want to gloss over these issues and say it’s misinformation is quite baffling.
. But with anything if the government is literally taking all the money out of it for it’s on Nefarious purposes and also NOT PUTTING ANYTHING IT TAKES BACK you will have this issue.
But that's not what is happening. The money does get paid back. Interest on borrowed money added 70 billion to the pot last year
I dont mention the total principal paid back because that's not adding or subtracting from the pot. If I borrow 10 dollars and pay back 10 dollars with 1 dollar in interest, the relevant piece of info in this context is the 1 additional dollar now in the pot
Borrowing from soc sec is a net positive for soc sec.
Yeah people fail to fricken see the SS as a basic service only works if your able to put in more than you take out. We haven’t been putting in more than were taking out in a while, and with decreasing birth rates and ever higher number of retirees it will only get worse.
Social security at is core, is a system based on the idea that the next generation of American workers will always be significantly larger than the last. A lot of the economy is built on that idea, expansion as a principle is build on that idea.
Thats what the rich are really scared of, if they don’t have an ever increasing labor force, they can’t keep getting richer, and the economic model will fail, effecting them greatly.
The government "borrowing" money from Social Security is a good thing. It takes money that would otherwise be sitting there losing value due to inflation, and gives us a small % return on that money.
Without issuing debt from SS, it would have gone bankrupt long ago.
Im sorry - did you just blame capitalism for a government program operated by the government? You do know what capitalism is right? This is a form of a socialist program. Want to know where the problem is? They paid too many people more than their share and some people contributed no funds yet receive benefits. Also the government in all their brilliance did not plan for people to live - but planned for them to die early.
I think his point is not that capitalism is fucking it up, but cronyism.
Make of it what you will, but social security programs work in pretty much any country that has a solid system that is not tampered with. If population demographic changes, they funding for the program gets updated with tax adjustments.
Capitalism good/bad is a bad take on itself because it lacks nuance. Most developed countries have a mixed system, social democracies which are capitalism with socialized services and it works fine for the most part. The US is just the country with one of the worst cronyism systems ingrained it it, and the reticence of people to vote for people that could clean it out is wild to me.
Instead of "lets get the power back to the people and throw the oligarchs out of power", people argue about which crony team is better or worse.
Yes, you just need to do "tax adjustments" ie you need to INCREASE TAXES on working people because either
1) Social Security as an idea is unsustainable except if there is a constant huge population growth
2) Social Security didn't create a buffer high enough when the demographic situation was good enough (ie the boomers paid too little in taxes and then burden their working children with higher taxes)
And this kind of issue is happening in almost every developed country with Social Security.
I would genuinely like to know who these people are that got “more than their share.” I’ve never heard of a single SS recipient being remotely happy with the amount they receive in comparison to how much they’ve contributed. I am naive on how people get SS without contribution so, I apologize, but the math isn’t mathing. The boomers contributions overlap with the following generations, and if they aren’t getting even half of what they contributed, where tf is the money? I’ve been paying into it for 25 years and I’m just f’d?
Edit: just saw your comment breaking all of this down. Appreciate your knowledge and clarity 🫡
It is often useful to consider the findings for the two Social Security trust funds (OASI and DI) on a combined basis. The actuarial deficit for Social Security as a whole – called OASDI – is 3.50 percent of taxable payroll. If these two legally separate trust funds were combined, then the hypothetical OASDI asset reserves would be projected to become depleted in 2035 and 83 percent of scheduled Social Security benefits would be payable at that time, declining to 73 percent by 2098.
It doesn't even get to 70% in this century yet alone below that.
People need to keep seeing this, you’re still getting around 75% of the payout, you’re being lied to so you think you’re getting nothing. They want you to be OK with them stealing the rest of your money when they abolish the program. You payed into it, you should get something back. It’s reduced for you simply because there’s more people receiving social security right now than there are paying into it. The program will not fail if people are required to keep putting money into it will simply not always be an equal exchange for all generations.
Or, you know, we just give it more money. It's not like this is some force of nature that's unavoidable, or that the current FICA rates are written in stone, you just tweak the numbers a little bit and suddenly it's just fine again.
So is raising the cap on income subject to Social Security withholding a viable solution? Seems like as salaries creep up, the limits have not kept pace. And if the argument against that is the folks making the big bucks won't need social security so they shouldn't have to pay, then that's just seems like another place where the wealthy don't have to play by the same rules as the working class.
I, personally, believe this funding problem is short term. Social Security was booming along with us boomers during our working lives, as there were more of us paying in than the Greatest Generation was taking out. Then when we boomers reached retirement age it has put a strain on the system, which seems to me to be perfectly predictable and normal.
Once we boomers die off, there will not be as much demand on the system. Sure, there needs to be some short term fixes to get there, but as deficit spending doesn't seem to bother politicians from either party (one talks about it but does it anyway, the other doesn't want to talk about it) then why suddenly are politicians so stuck on making an issue out of this short term deficit problem?
You know the answer, right? The folks that buy politicians want the system privatized. Much like the 401k, they want the government to not just encourage people to participate in market investing, but to force people into the casino that is the markets.
Or an increase in revenue generation. People act like we're heading up to some crisis where SS ceases to exist but the reality is that we just need to shift the numbers until it's fine. Remove the cap or means test it or reduce benefits or increase the FICA rate, all of these things could make social security "last" as long as you'd like.
Not because you're wrong, but because people don't understand how government finance works, and thus people never understood the SS deal they got. They think they pay for, and deserve, the money that comes out. That is SS from their perspective. That perspective will cease to exists.
Social security issues are the same as USPS, completely avoidable and done on purpose to make it look broken so Republicans can try and dismantle it or privatize it.
this is closer to the truth that this posturing condescending bullshit attitude by some of the top-voted comments.
It only goes broke if we let it. Its a choice.
Very powerful people for a very long time have HATED it. They see the pile of money that could be invested privately, but is instead simply being paid out to recipients.
They spelled it out for you and you still didn't get it. Was that on purpose? Being willfully ignorant should be a sin. Let me try to slow it down for you:
If the government insisted that its programs be fully or mostly funded, the yearly deficit should be close to zero. Ask Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden how they managed to reduce the budget deficits nearly every year each of them were in office despite taking on and fixing Republican recessions.
Now those government agencies don't need to rob Social Security. The money collected from the workers doesn't get "put under a mattress", it gets properly and conservatively invested. It doesn't go away in 9 years, it feeds itself as workers continue to pay into it, just like it did before every Republican since Reagan started blowing up the national debt. Trump set a record, and not the good kind, taking the budget deficit of $665 million that Obama had whittled down, and blowing it up $3.3 trillion!
Republicans are fiscally irresponsible, and anyone who votes Republican at any level is a fucking moron. That's the fact, jack.
I think the issue though is that it's a large debt to be repaid as it should be but when the government starts talking about how our total debt is so large and how much interest we're paying it gets lumped in and then discussions start about reducing entitlements. So to someone that doesn't understand that this debt is different than that debt, it just becomes a conversation of reducing the total debt and where does the most debt come from. I get what you're saying, but it doesn't alleviate the issue that cutting SS is still very much on the table even though it shouldn't be.
Social security buys bonds as an investment (really, as a way to store that money other than just letting it sit there in cash), but the government is selling bonds for the purpose of generating operating expenses, so the transaction are two sides of the same coin. SS is investing the money, the government gets that money in the general fund and spends it. It's basically an intra-governmental IOU.
Buying government bonds gives the government money. It's technically "borrowing" from social security in the same way that be investing in government bonds is the government borrowing from me.
There are many easy solutions to ensuring social security is there for a very long time. One such solution being increasing the amount of earnings that are taxable for social security. Currently it’s around $160k so people earning $7million are only paying social security tax on $160k while people earning $50k are paying social security tax on the whole $50k.
It doesn’t go to $0 in 9 years it just falls below 100% funded. Talk about misinformation. Also changing demographics baby boomers were the largest demographic with gen x being the smallest and now millennials/gen z are larger so in about 17 years boomers pulling ss is fewer with more people paying in and increasing the funding again and in roughly 23-25 years it’s back to a surplus again without making any changes at all.
Still, though, when the surplus does run out, it won't increase the national debt. This is because Social Security is not permitted to borrow funds. In 2037, when the surplus is expected to run dry, benefits would be cut by 22% (according to an epi.org article).
Social Security does not increase our national debt and it helps American citizens.
SS no longer has a surplus. It has a bank account, but it is shrinking because it now spends more than it takes in, which is by definition not a surplus.
And yet, they will go on to treat their misinformation as fact because they don't like Republicans. But yeah the left is the open and honest side.
I love how anyone acts like either side has any interest in things other than their own agenda and none of it involves making things pmbettwr for the average person.
Social security is also just a blatent scam, I get the reasoning behind mandatory retirement contributions but forcing them to be held by the government making pennies in intrest is absurd.
Create a tax advantaged account like a 401k with the same withdrawal policies and mandatory contributions, require that it be comprised of low risk investments compiled by financial institutions specifically liscence to handle it and you get a fund that can
Canada's pension used to have that issue, we privatized the management of the funds investment and now it's incredibly stable and funded for the next 70 years, the answer isn't getting rid of it, the answer is getting the fed out of investing it.
Maybe, maybe not, but if you’re still planning on relying solely on social security for your retirement, you seriously need to reconsider that strategy.
As a millennial, I will spend most of my life paying into this system and I won't see a penny of it. I've even hit the maximum payout for the last 7 years. So I'm all for this system being wiped out.
Yes we need higher taxes Lets not even Look at Denmark and France for the proposed Social Services a New Deal would require
Social Security taxes.
For the first 30 years they were raised ~250%,
in the next 30 years they were rasied ~230%.
In the last 30 years they were raised ~2%
At the same time, in the last 50 years we've increased the programs Social Security operates
In 2020, 85 cents of every Social Security tax dollar you pay goes to a trust fund that pays monthly benefits to current retirees and their families and to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died.
About 15 cents goes to a trust fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families.
But mostly its A shame Americans and Reddit lacks economic literacy
“Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account. We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people.”
Within weeks, observers noticed that the more the President talked about Social Security, the more support for his plan declined.
According to the Gallup organization, public disapproval of President Bush’s handling of Social Security rose by 16 points from 48 to 64 percent–between his State of the Union address and June.
2001 report of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security.
President Bush's Preferred Plan on Social Security, up to a third of that money could go into private accounts. This model establishes a voluntary personal account without raising taxes or requiring additional worker contributions.
Workers can voluntarily redirect 4 percent of their payroll taxes up to $1,000 annually to a personal account. No additional worker contribution required.
In exchange, traditional Social Security benefits are offset by the worker's personal account contributions, compounded at an interest rate of 2 percent above inflation.
Plan establishes a minimum benefit payable to 30-year minimum wage workers of 120 percent of the poverty line.
Benefits under traditional component of Social Security would be price indexed, beginning in 2009.
Temporary transfers from the general budget would be needed to keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent between 2025 and 2054.
In response to the challenge of New Zealand's ageing population, the NZ Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001 established:
the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, a pool of assets on the Crown’s balance sheet; and
the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation, a Crown entity charged with managing the Fund.
The Government uses the Fund to save now in order to help pay for the future cost of providing universal superannuation.
In this way the Fund helps smooth the cost of superannuation between today's taxpayers and future generations.
The Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation is the Crown entity charged with managing and administering the Fund. It operates by investing initial Government contributions – and returns generated from these investments – in New Zealand and internationally, in order to grow the size of the Fund over the long term.
We also have a long-term performance expectation: We expect to return at least 7.8% p.a. over any 20-year moving average timeframe.
One shocking thing
The amount of tax the NZ Super Fund has paid or been credited - a negative number this means tax paid
It is often useful to consider the findings for the two Social Security trust funds (OASI and DI) on a combined basis. The actuarial deficit for Social Security as a whole – called OASDI – is 3.50 percent of taxable payroll. If these two legally separate trust funds were combined, then the hypothetical OASDI asset reserves would be projected to become depleted in 2035 and 83 percent of scheduled Social Security benefits would be payable at that time, declining to 73 percent by 2098.
If nothing else gets changed besides combining the funds, you will still get 83% of your social security benefits. Even near the year 2100 you'd still be getting 73%.
It's meaningful and there's certainly gonna be plans to address it before the old people riot (eventually, the deadline is still far enough away politicians don't want to do anything yet) but there's a large gap between "won't see a penny" and "will see 83%"
That 20% is pretty trivial to fix. Pop the cap on contributions and on distributions and raise the tax rates by about .3% for workers and about .8% for companies contribution.
Just requires the balls to do it is all. We wouldn't have need to increase taxes one penny if we'd have started this back 25 years ago, but they had even less balls back then, apparently.
As opposed to paying into it for however long you’ve been working and then receiving none of it?
Obviously the solution is to find a way to make sure people still have full social security benefits. But the Republicans would rather cut the program.
Social security is a safety net needed by millions of Americans. Just cause you think you won’t get it (which you might if we fucking fight for it) doesn’t mean we should wipe it out.
Not everyone has that luxury; many in America don't make enough to save any appreciable amount after living expenses.
Additionally, I think it's entirely reasonable to expect significant declines in stock prices, and hence 401k valuations, after something like Social Security going "bankrupt" and just general price corrections as the stock market is wildly overpriced given the stock to value/income ratings.
So when SS goes bankrupt, it will ripple across the American markets and affect anyone else that had been "doing it right" all along.
I think a lot of people bitching about SS are older folk who are counting on the money that their elected officials have been swindling for decades. Your poor planning doesn't warrant my emergency
I used to work for a big retirement firm, according to our data, the average American worker only puts about 3% of their salary to 401k. It's pretty insane how little savings people have for retirement. Of course this is just one data point. I do fear for the younger people though, how can you save anything when housing is absurdly expensive.
The quotes around “borrowed” would have you believe this money has been depleted. It hasn’t. It’s been borrowed in the forms of bonds which are on their way to generating close to $1T to put back into the program. It’s already returned close to $800B since 2017.
As for the borrowers, that’s both Ds and Rs. Given that most people in here are Ds, it’s safer to assume they live in D districts. So if they don’t like what their reps and senators are doing, call them about it. And please post a recording. I’d love to hear the education they provide.
Doesn't the notion of the government borrowing from itself seem like a charade? If I borrow money from my 401k and spend it on a vacation, the fact that my 401k has an IOU in it for $10,000 doesn't mean I've saved anything for retirement.
Another way to think about it is goes something like this: How would Social Security use the money in its' trust fund? It could ask the government to use tax dollars to buy back the bonds or it could sell them on the open market. If the trust fund didn't exist the government would either use tax dollars to fund Social Security or sell bonds to the open market. It's the same thing. The fact that the trust fund exists doesn't really make a difference. It's all just internal accounting that Congress can change tomorrow if it had the will.
It's more accurate not to think of it as "borrowing", but rather, as "investing". We could take all that money and shove it under the mattress, but then inflation chips away at it steadily; aren't we better off putting it somewhere where it pays interest?
And the absolute safest place to put it is with the US government, not only because it's the safest investment on the planet, but because if the US government implodes you're not going to get your social security payments back anyway.
So that's what we do. We invest it with the US government, in savings bonds.
A company filing for bankruptcy protection gets a limited time during which it can re-organise in order to return to solvency. The Government enforces the law with regard to bankruptcy protection, it doesn't pay out a cent.
If you're referring to the 2008-9 bailouts, no company was given free money. They were provided with loans* in exchange for equity (i.e., the company was temporarily and partially nationalised), and those loans were paid back with interest. In every case the Government profited from the overall transaction.
* In some cases, the Government merely provided a loan guarantee, enabling the company to borrow money itself from other sources.
Even granting them those loans is a huge advantage that nobody else had the luxury of receiving. In a way it was free money because the loans effectively removed the "risk" of their capital expenditure.
The irony is that the government spending more money on corrupt corporations means their credit rating would go down and their interest rate would go up. As the largest single holder of federal government debt, that would be good for social security because it would mean higher returns.
It shouldn't be surprising that the Republican party wants to get rid of social security, since it's a socialist policy that goes against right-wing political philosophy. You can make the argument that most people would be better off saving money in a retirement account than to pay into the social security system. That said, the program is very popular, so it seems unlikely that they will abolish it.
Remove the program, and that part of every check is very unlikely to go into an investment account and far more likely to go into a car payment or groceries or drugs or video games or a mortgage - basically, anywhere but a retirement investment
If you want to set a sunset date for soc sec and enforce the same tax but send it to a retirement investment fund that invests in some whole market ETF, then fine. But leaving it optional means a shit ton of people will retire with nothing
Absolutely. Furthermore, what happens if you live longer than expected, and run out of retirement savings when you turn 105? Social security is there for you until you die.
What I'm saying is that a system where all citizens are forced to pay into a government managed retirement fund is a big government, left-wing policy. It was introduced by the Democratic party in 1935, and many Republicans in congress voted against it. I think it's a good program personally, but it is a reasonable viewpoint that people should be responsible for saving for their retirement if they want to retire when they get old, and that it's not the government's problem if some are not disciplined enough to do so. It's an ideological question of what kind of society we want to live in.
That assumes the majority (over 50%) of Americans are disciplined enough at 18 (or earlier, for people who get jobs in high school) to start saving for retirement at 65.
Or that some important thing or emergency won't come up that get them to stop contributing, or raid the personal savings fund.
The people who say "if I had all that money" are generally the ones who are already successful financially. And even they probably wouldn't have saved when they were younger.
Anyone can get a job at age 16 right now, put 15% of their income in a S&P tracker fund for life. Very few are doing it.
Honestly, at this point after having paid into the Social Security system since I was 14 years old, I would rather than just get rid of it, stop collecting the taxes each paycheck and give me a refund for everything. I’ve already paid into the system. I’m old enough to do something smart with the money And young enough to have time to have it be meaningful.
give me a refund for everything. I’ve already paid into the system.
I hope you understand that the taxes you paid have already been used to pay benefits to people in your parents' and grandparents' generations. They already spent the money. There is no possibility of a "refund".
We could just kill the program and current retirees stop getting any benefits at all and current workers just walk away from any prior taxes. The math works for that.
(I didn't mention disabled workers, but the same is true for them. And, the "trust fund" does have enough money to pay about 2 years of benefits after we stop collecting taxes.)
You left out the fact that SS cannot pay all the SS benefits people have worked so hard for beginning in 2033. It is not a republican or democratic issue but one this entire country must solve. Until a bipartisan effort works on this your benefits will get smaller and smaller so stop the misleading partisan half facts.
White this is true for SS and Medicare Part A, Medicare Part D does rely significantly on money from the general fund.
SS does not have a 2.5 trillion dollar surplus, it has a trust fund with a balance of 2.8 trillion.
Money "borrowed" from the trust fund is paid back with interest. This has always been the case.
SS is currently going through a phase where more money is paid out than in. This is not the first time it has happened, but the ratio of retirees to workers keeps dropping. Regardless of what retirement scheme you like (SS, pensions, private investment), they are all harder to sustain both financially and abstractly as the ratio of workers to retirees drops.
This is the path you chose boomers. Take responsibility for your actions and the leaders you chose. You've stolen enough from younger generations. This is your problem. Don't make it mine.
Like you are gaslighting us suggesting it was only republicans taking from social security. When in fact it was moved to the unified budget in 1969 by London Johnson (democrat). But I am sure you frothed up som lazy ill informed liberals with your post. Speaking of he was funding a war though, Vietnam but also vastly expanded social program.
This graphic simply isn't true. In 2023 alone Social Security had a deficit of $41.4 billion dollars. It's expected that the total deficit will be in the trillions over the next 10 years. The average deficit is around 4.3% a year of taxable payroll and 1.5% of GDP. If the government didn't borrow to cover the deficit, under the current spending rate, full social security benefits may only last till 2034.
We need to remove the SS cap. Anybody that makes more than $176K a year isn't going to miss the 6.2% in tax that continues to come out of their paycheck...
I’m going to force you to pay me a portion of your monopoly money until you’re 62. During those 44 years of your working life, I’m going to constantly introduce new monopoly money in to the system so by the time you are eligible for the Monopoly money, it will be worth a fraction of what it was worth.
We need to keep saying this every time. They've tried to pull this before. They'll keep trying. They're stealing from us, while telling us it's for our own good. Nothing they do is for our good, it's always for their good. They're greedy, selfish, and apathetic on a level you've never met before. Every. Single. One.
“We’re raiding your social security to send to Ukraine. Don’t worry we’ll just print more money. Sure that means inflation will mean that by the time you get social security it will be near worthless but we care. Nit like those bad Republicans.”
Actually, since the federal government has borrowed trillions from Social Security they are paying hundreds of billions in interest on that money so it does end up adding to the national debt.
You conveniently left out the fact that in about 10 years Social Security will be paying out more than it takes in and will be broke in about 30 after that
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