Well, this seems to be a big issue, and so far there has been no solution by the right or the left. Welfare money is being pored down the drain every year. Meanwhile, there has been no real attempt by the government to take care of the problem. With social security being the way it is now, by the time I retire, I will have no money for my retirement.
My solution to the problem would be to abolish social security altogether. This way, the government can help people open their own private retirement accounts, and it is all done on a personal level. That way, when I retire, I get everything that I have put in the bank over the years. If I die, my family will get that money, which isn't the case under social security. And best of all, I won't feel like I have wasted 10,000+ dollars over the years.
Your opinion?
YEAH, WOOOO PRIVATISE EVERYTHING! **** YEAH!
Cuz, ya know, its not like privatisation has been shown to cripple the economies of otherwise perfectly good nations or anything. I mean, certainly the WTO hasnt ****ed south america in the *** by forcing them to privatise or anything. NO WAY. And it CERTAINLY wont benefit the wealthy investors if suddenly theres a huge influx of cash into their stock market.
Spell check would be a good idea in the war board so that you at least sound like you know what you are arguing about.
Privatizing things probably won't work because people aren't responsible to take care of it themselves. They need the government do everything for them. However it is my opinion that privitzing social security would be the ideal situation.
There are large-scale financial market failures which cause the equity premium to be *way* too high: the stock market does a lousy job at mobilizing society's risk-bearing capacity as applied to investment. Privatizing Social Security and mandating that such accounts be invested in stocks rather than holding the public Social Security Trust Fund in Treasury bonds is a powerful way to try to repair this market failure by boosting demand for equities
Too many households are myopic: they do not save enough. Households resist increases in Social Security taxes--they see no link between the taxes and their future benefits. But if Social Security were privatized so that households saw their Social Security contributions as their own, in the future there would be much less objection to upping the contribution rate--and so creating a real and more effective forced saving program to raise the national savings rate.
We need to raise our national savings rate. But if we just raise Social Security taxes, Congress will treat these taxes as general revenue and spend them. Only by funneling Social Security contributions into some vehicle that Congressional representatives cannot interpret as a resource available to fund current spending can we raise the national savings rate. And private accounts are the best vehicle we can find to (a) accumulate contributions without (b) allowing Congressional representatives to seize them as resources available to fund current federal spending.
The social security system is deeply weird. Investing public benefit moneys in the stock market? What the HELL?
The long term shortfall is something like 1% of US GDP, hardly insurmountable (and much smaller than the defecits in the much larger and more complex mess that is Medicare). It's politically very difficult to let it fail, so in the end, either taxes will be raised a bit, or benefits cut a bit.
I don't get the privatise argument... it seems to run that "if it's privatised, the magic of the stock market and private investment can be used to make more money for everyone" which seems to me something like advocating taking the federal treasury to Vegas in order to wipe out the budget deficit. It's a very perverse interpretation of the "private industry is better" faith a lot of people have, when you consider that social security systems are about as far from profit-making competitive companies as you can possibly get without actually nationalising strategic industries.
Privatised or not, the underlying problem in American social security (and indeed in many western pension systems) is that benefits and taxes are presently set at levels that fit demographics decades ago but don't fit any longer. That won't change with privatisation.
With privatization you will not be taxed nearly as much because you will be investing the money into your own account.
I don't see why people can't simply accept the inevitability of death.
[quote=Mixman;545695]Spell check would be a good idea in the war board so that you at least sound like you know what you are arguing about.
He was being facetious if not sarcastic. :(
The entire concept of social security is one big government rip-off. My honest opinion is that the government has no right to tax its citizens in any way.
So I'd have to agree with Mixman on this one. It's entirely up to each private citizen as to how and when they should spend their savings. I greatly dislike the idea of the government "keeping tabs" on me and charging me for the power to do so. But of course, I gave up politics after listening to my own father's conservative rants day after day. Which probably explains my current political stance now... Anarchy. :) Or some form of it at least.
With every post, Mixman's proving himself as more and more of an intelligent member to me. I mean, first an avatar of Deadpool and now this? This is amazing!
I just think people should be responsible for themselves and not rely on the government to take care of them. If people could be responsible to put their own money aside instead of just asking the government to take care of it for them, everything would be better. This way, I don't have to give any more money to the government, who definitely has shown me that they do not know how to handle it, and I don't have to support some lazy person who is unwilling to get a job. Some people are just incompetent.
[quote=Mixman;545828]I just think people should be responsible for themselves and not rely on the government to take care of them. If people could be responsible to put their own money aside instead of just asking the government to take care of it for them, everything would be better. This way, I don't have to give any more money to the government, who definitely has shown me that they do not know how to handle it, and I don't have to support some lazy person who is unwilling to get a job. Some people are just incompetent.
No, I completely agree. I understand fully that people feel compassion and a sense of moral obligation to those around them who are worse off than they are, but I don't believe that there should be some constant force that consistantly helps the lazy. All that these extra liberal motions (I'm not going against liberals, just sayin') such as welfare etc. are nothing but an easy way out for the lazy, as you said.
Each person should be responsible for himself and those that he should be responsible for. If he's not then that person simply wastes space and contributes nothing to society. Such mindless trash doesn't deserve respect nor pity from anyone else as they'll simply abuse such benevolent feelings towards them and continue their loser streak. Simply "getting by," as they say, from one day to another.
Btw, I know it's Libertarian but for some reason I don't see myself as being one. I have differences with all 'official' political stances, no matter how popular or unpopular they may be. But yes, I suppose to classify me best I could be considered a Libertarian. So good call.
How the hell are retirement or disability payments (the vast bulk of Social Security in the US, or indeed, equivalent programs anywhere) all about "giving money to the lazy"? And actually, when you consider that the unemployment rate is always going to exist, what exactly is proposed to be done for the people who simply don't have jobs? Oh yay, charity, is the usual answer, but we kinda tried letting charity help the poor alone for several hundred years and, you know, the world sucked mightily for the poor back then. Hence government got necessarily bigger and tried to ensure civilised minimum standards.
At any rate, why is it that Libertarians only really exist on the internet?
I think this quote: "If people could be responsible to put their own money aside instead of just asking the government to take care of it for them, everything would be better" illustrates my big problem with the idea as a total philosophy. Well that and the way kooks on the internet act like b*tching about taxes is fighting for liberation.
The tendency for people to over-value the short-term over the long-term when assessing needs and risks is a basic, provable, demonstrable fact of human psychology that no amount of anarcho-capitalist wishful thinking will change. That's why pensions and programs forcing people to save for their retirement (or better yet, forcing companies to contribute to retirement funds) are considered a good idea. For actual people struggling in actual lives to make actual ends meet, it's really really difficult to be thinking about saving for 50 years in the future, or saving for the off chance that you get injured and can't work any more.
Any political idea which says "if only some basic aspect of human nature didn't exist, things would be great" must be approached with extreme caution. Denying humankind's collectivist, social, herd insticts in favour of radical individualism is unrealistic at best and put into practise would be massively regressive. That's why we have the concept of social contract with governments acting on our behalf, that's why every single country that can afford it has social support programs for the injured, elderly, jobless, and so forth. We've basically decided that it's better to try and use our collective organisational force to avoid a Dickensian or Hobbesian mess and prevent the sick and elderly from dying in the streets.
Don't get me wrong, libertrianism is a wonderful tool and as a mode of thought it's a great test for ensuring that governments aren't abusive and excessive, but when you have kooks holding it as a be-all and end-all, when "get rid of taxes and the government" becomes ends rather than means, it makes as little sense as any other simplistic cure-all.
I believe in the welfare of society. I don't mind forking money if it helps someone. I think something is really off about it, though. I never kept tabs on how it works, but something is up with the way it's being handled.
"The average American is stupid and they do not know how to properly invest their money." That really ain't an America thing, that's a human psychology thing, Americans are no stupider than the rest of us. And at any rate, America actually has a far more dog-eat-dog set-up than most of the developed world, a far less generous welfare system, less support for the poor, etc etc.
I do think the SS system is a bit stupid though. It strikes me as typical of the ***-backwards way governments in the US try to create collectivist social programs without actually admitting they're doing it because Oh Noes Communism. Your contention that SS is different to welfare is illustrative. Why not just have a proper pension and welfare system out of general revenue, instead of getting people to stick their own money in a fund which the government can dip into anyway? The f*ked thing about Social Security isn't that it's too government-controlled or monopolistic, it's that it's treated too much like a private fund for investing and stuff, rather than a system where people are taxed to pay for their pensions later on.
You see a similar thing with healthcare... in the quest to pretend there's free enterprise and a market or somesuch, the US healthcare system ends up with a peacemeal system of HMOs and stuff, and in total, Americans are actually paying a higher portion of GDP into healthcare than other developed countries with their dastadly universal healthcare systems, and still 40 million have no coverage at all.
I should also point out that what you're essentially advocating is a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia]Superannuation[/url] system. Which works fine, but must co-exist with a proper pension and welfare system, since it's no good for all the other things welfare covers (parental support, unemployment, student benefits, disabilities, people who don't earn much superannuation, etc).
"Like I said before, I am not against the government giving help to people that need it. But seriously, in a free society, it should not be my responsibility to take care of somebody else."
Are you even listening (reading) to what you're saying (typing, whatever)? you dont care if the government sets a minimum safety net, but WHOA NELLY you expect to be CHARGED for it? Guess what, things arent free. Granted, if humans werent such greedy and self possesed creatures everything could jsut be free to whoever needed it more. But I take it that you see the idiocy in making "but if humanity was x then y" statements now.
[QUOTE=Arwon;546339]"The average American is stupid and they do not know how to properly invest their money." That really ain't an America thing, that's a human psychology thing, Americans are no stupider than the rest of us. And at any rate, America actually has a far more dog-eat-dog set-up than most of the developed world, a far less generous welfare system, less support for the poor, etc etc.
Well, I never said that Americans are more stupid than the rest of the world. I simply stated that the majority of Americans are stupid when it comes to investing their money, which is true. I just happened to be referring to Americans in that post.
the older I get the wiser and more compassionate I get, and the wiser and more compassionate I get, the more socialism sounds like a decent idea. Do you know why privatizing everything won't work? Because people who have money are greedy and people who don't are terrible at budgeting (oh yeah, and poor). It's a fact of life.
Lord of Spam, I already explained that. Did you actually take the time to read all of my posts? No matter who you are, you are paying social security. Poor people, who have trouble saving up, can get on a government funded plan, to help them save the money that they would already be paying to social security, and putting it into a private account. The concept is not that hard to understand.
I am not conservative across the board, so I would appreciate it if you would not make assumptions about me. I am conservative when it comes to social economics; however, there are many things that I disagree with (war in Iraq).
In your post, you started to talk about social security and you went off to talk about welfare. I am not against welfare. All I said, is that it is being abused in this country.
oh hey guys someone pointed out how i was wrong but im just gotta nitpick a minor grammatical flaw and then not respond to the point being raised LOL
Hell, the ONLY reason that needs to be stated to show just how retarded this plan is is the fact that you're relying on the stock market. Last time I recall most of america trying to use the stock market was around the late 20s. huh, funny how that didnt turn out well.
Basically you are supporting a system that might maybe allow more individuality and gains, at the cost of adding in the "oh yeah by the way you might lose everything." So what happens when the market tanks and millions of americans are wiped out? Would you support some sort of FDIC like plan (in which case, if you're going to guarantee their money, why even bother with the market, not to mention that such a wide scale bailout would bankrupt the treasury at best, or just not be possible at worst.) Or do you just say "lol tough **** free market etc" as the people with decent financial training walk away with the life savings of america? If thats teh case, then theres no difference between continuing to provide decent coverage to people now, and just letting them think things are fine until they get brutalized.
The idea is poorly thought out at best, and massively hypocritical at worst.
Oh man I loves me some student welfare. Seriously. Everyone should get it.
I was going to burn him with the "well you receive the Hope scholarship, which is from the Georgia Lottery, which is about as anti-private whatever" as you get
Yeah my post didn't really have anything to do with anything, just pointing out that I get welfare payments for studying.
I know, major thread revive, but I didn't want to start a new topic when there's already an existing one.
So my friend and I were discussing why social security is depleting, I'm saying that the main reason it's running out is because advances in modern medicine are making it possible for people to stay alive longer, meaning that we have an exponentially increasing number of senior citizens that are sucking away our social security money.
He's arguing that the main reason it's running out is because of the increasing unemployment rate, less checks to take taxes out of or whatever.
VGC, YOUR THOUGHTS?
I don't think there's a main reason, but just a compilation of many things that keep it going. Cost of living, medicine, unemployment, etc.
Don't forget a government that's treating it like their private piggy bank even though that's expressly what it ISN'T.
If you look at population demographics for the earlier bits of the 1900s and now, we have WAY more geezers sittin about draining tax money.
shade wins.
We should take away their Life Alert. :mad: