Did Scott Keyes Just Save the World ?
I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but I think that Rick Perry’s chances of being elected President just declined significantly
KEYES: But should states-rights supporters be worried that, as governor you said that Social Security is not something that falls in the purview of the federal government, but in your campaign, have backed off that?
PERRY: I haven’t backed off anything in my book. Read the book again, get it right. Next question.
Keyes explains
In Perry’s book, released just nine months ago, he writes on page 48 that Social Security is “by far the best example” of a program “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles.” On page 50, he goes on to say that we have Social Security “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government.”
Update: The next post at think progress
Asked by a woman in the crowd about Social Security being viewed as an entitlement program, Perry reiterated the suggestion in his anti-Washington book, Fed Up!, that the program amounts to a Ponzi scheme.
“It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people. The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie,” Perry said. “It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.”
I don’t make predictions, but i wonder when was the last time that someone who called Social Security a “monstrous lie” was elected President ?
Robert
I don’t think so. The people who will vote for him cannot hold a thought that complex in their minds .. well, at all; certainly not long enough to get to the election.
The other thing worth noting is that Rick Perry doesn’t have any idea at all what Social Security is. He think’s it’s welfare.
What’s tragic is that there are liberals not far away who don’t know what SS is either. They want to turn it into welfare.
Coberly,
They want to turn it into welfare.
It is welfare. If you look at this Urban Institute study of lifetime benefits vs. taxes http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/social-security-medicare-benefits-over-lifetime.pdf you find that a one earner couple making the average wage gets, upon retiring in 2010, on average, $803K in SS and Medicare benefits, after paying only $358K (compounded at inflation +2% to mimic hypothetical investment earnings).
Now you can make an argument that since the couple paid $358K for the previous generations’ retirement, they are obligated to have that repaid to them. OK. But where does the extra $450K come from?
What if you took the inflation adjustment out of the payments? If one looks at the factors the early wages of someone retiring now get indexed up for example 16,500 in 1977 becomes 68k in calculating the benefit.
BTW according to the San Antonio Express News Perry’s transition would look a lot like Ryans for Medicare, not immediatly affecting those over some age. How he would pay for the transition is unclear.
Lyle,
What if you took the inflation adjustment out of the payments?
Good point. The comparison would look a lot worse, as the reality is that the taxes were not invested in anything. So the tazpayers make up for that as well as the differential pointed out in the Urban Insitute.
Sammy
I haven’t got the slightest idea where you or urban institute get your numbers. but just to ease your heart… no money comes into Social Security except what the workers pay into it. If each generations gets about 3 times what a 5% compounded interest would earn on their money, why that’s the best return i ever heard of. what happened to all that talk about what a poor return on your money SS is?
you might want to check the arithmetic. off the top of my head the adjusted value of the contributions of an average earner at retirement today is about 200k. I would expect that earner to get… ignoring inflation about 16 thousand per year in benefits over an average life expectancy of about 15 years… or about 240k total, ignoring a lot of comlications.
sorry to say, but i think you have made an error or urban institute is trying to pull a fast one.
as for mimicking hypothetical earning investments… no need to mimic anything. SS earnings are wage adjusted for benefit calculations… the age adjustment is exactly “inflation plus average in crease in wages”.. that is, about 2% above inflation.
but you need to understand that that is only the start of the benefit calculation. very roughly, the retiree is given an initial benefit equal to 40% of the average of his adjusted wages. then that initial benefit is adjusted to match inflation as long as he lives.
i looked at this pretty carefully a year or so ago and satisfied myself, first, that “average” return on investment doesn’t mean anything in the context of SS which is insurance. and in the second place, that high end earners get about a 2% above inflation returen, middle earners about 5%, and low earners about 10%…. with lots and lots of variation depending on factors lie whether there is a spouse, whether the person dies with dependents or is disabled, or whether you count the “employers share” as “really the workers contribution.
that return on investment is exactly the same as “interest” but it is earned by the economy as a whole and shared among the workers as if they had been buying something like i bonds with their money… but as a group,not as individuals, in order to make the insurance work to provide “enough” for the low earners.
i realize it’s that last part you object to. thinking of it as welfare. but since you don’t know in advance if you are going to be a high earner or a low, it is in fact insurance.
Lyle
the transition that doesn’t affect those over some age is just a political ploy to hope to get the measure past the old folks who vote. fortunately the old folks are not so stupid and greedy they will say to hell with the kids, i got mine.
this perplexes the Petersons and Perrys who think everyone is as stupid and greedy as they are.
coberly,
off the top of my head ……i looked at this pretty carefully a year or so ago and satisfied myself…urban institute is trying to pull a fast one.
You are going to have to do better than this. The Urban Institute is extremely well respected, and non partisan.
Sammy, that “extra” $450,000 is just inflation and normal economic growth.
SS is a pretty simple program: We take 5% of current workers’ earnings, and give it to current retirees. We can do this forever, as long as we keep the “pay in” and “pay out” formulas close to 5% of GDP and each other. This will require tweaking as demographics shift. In the long run, the biggest challenges will occur around 2035-2040. After that, the demographics actually stabilize.
The real “return” on SS as a whole will track increases in real wages very closely. One problem with SS right now is that wages have been lagging GDP growth (you know, the whole rich getting richer thing), which has caused SS’s income to fall short of what was projected back in the 80s when the current formulas were set. Those formulas assumed a higher percentage of wages and GDP would be subject to FICA than is actually the case. A simple, and very fair, partial fix to SS’s long-run shortfall would be to raise the cap such that the same portion of wages was FICA taxed as the Republican God Reagan originally envisioned.
In the end, though, the idea that SS is a Ponzi scheme is simply false. SS is indefinitely sustainable, even in a no-growth or negative growth world. 5% in, 5% out. It’s that simple.
“i looked at this pretty carefully a year or so ago and satisfied myself, first, that “average” return on investment doesn’t mean anything in the context of SS which is insurance”
Agreed. By design, SS gives incredible rates of return to the very poor (10%+ real), and just inflationary matching to those who pay at or near the cap most of their adult lives. There is no private sector alternative which has this feature.
Most SS haters are too foolish to realize that if SS were abolished, they would have to take their precious tax cuts and put essentially all of the money (if not more) into private savings, supplemental unemployment insurance, and disability insurance in order to have a similar risk profile. Of course, most of them would be idiots and blow it on an expansion of their McMansion, and then stick the taxpayer with the bill when they are homeless and destitute thirty years from now.
sammy,
Non partisan is a synonym for different spceies of moths going to the same inducement.
Who respects them and why?
As to non or bi partisan…………….
That means there are a set of common interests usually well funded by PAC’s like the war profiteers which attract moths of many “parties” to the money.
The bi/non partisan concensus on war machinery is funded by PAC’s, war profits and welfare jobs in socilaized industry making all the scrap and rework I contend with in fielding the new high profit low utility super weapons.
The F-35 is flying with a patch to monitor the valve which almost burned up AF4. The fix is they hope it don’t lock at 40,000 feet, or the ejection seat gets a fast test, with no instruments other than if the pilot walks away.
Hey,
State’s right posh was adressed and concluded in 1865.
Greed for Wall St. Image all those trillions in SS and medicare going through the neo banking casinos in Manhattan.
That Peteson guy made his money on Wall St with the rest of the now Tea Party supporters, doing with the support of the central bank things the “founders” used to say there should be no central banks.
The massive con!
Their founders embraced slavery for Cain’s progeny, indenture and debtors’ prisons.
While they take that part they made their money in neo banking casino dealing.
State’s rights is code for neo fascism at the state level unimpeded by any appeal to authority, except some prophet’s claim to have word from god.
Hey, billion dollar bonuses on wall st for running cons which are bailed out by the taxpayer are what the founders wanted just ask Pete Peterson.
Imagine if the $20B in bonuses (way much better return than SS) at last year were invested in science?
No wonder they dispute global warming the bonuses are needed for investing in slave labor factories in Afghanistan.
The elect like Peterson deserve astronomical returns for gambling with other peoples’ money!
The rest are preordained for poverty, Hobbesian existence is reserved for the 99%.
So you want 4 more years of Obama vs. a random person? I’ll go with Perry over the current incompetance…
Islam will change
sammy
you are going to have to do better than that. i know the numbers. i don’t know urban institute, and i sure as hell don’t know what you are doing with what they said.
coberly,
Didn’t you notice how Sammy, and the Urban Institute, lumped SSI and Medicare together? It is the only way those numbers could possibly be “accurate.” I can’t wait for Gov. Perry to claim that Medicare is unconstitutional. Or, has he already?
buff
sorry to hear that. Perry is calling SS a ponzi scheme and a cruel lie to the young. such stupidity should not be allowed near the Presidency.
also, I think your 5% is more like 10% if you count “the employers share” and you should… as long as you can keep the Big Liars from turning around and using the “its really the employees money” as “proof” that the “return on investment” is “really” half of what it is if “the employers share” is “really” a “jobs killing tax.”
as for sammy, try to read his input carefully and you see it amounts to word salad. there is nothing there you can build any kind of understanding on, but if “understanding” is not your thing, it provides a nice basis for running in circles and screaming and shouting.
sammy
do you have the slightest idea that what you just said is garbage?
it’s just words that don’t mean anything.
do you realize that the urban institute, or your take on whatever they said, is claiming a huge return on investment to SS. something your friends deny out the other side of their mouths.
find some taxpayers who are paying for this “huge differential” and not getting their money back in their turn. a “ponzi shcheme” that can go on forever is not a ponzi scheme.
do you have any idea that if you put your money in a goddam bank, you take out more than you put in, and the “differential” is made up by the people who come after you and put their money in?
so are all banks ponzi schemes?
do you have any idea that if you put your money in a stock, the money you take out is more than the money you put in (if you are lucky) because the people who come after you put their money in?
sad to say, i already know what you will come back with. more garbage that sounds good to you and the other flies, but doesn’t mean anything in the real world.
sammy
it comes from the growth in the economy. so that … assuming your arithmetic, which is doubtful… the first payroll tax payer paid in 12% of their wages between 1970 and 2010, and it was 300k plus or minus by your arithmetic… and the second taxpayer (two of them actuallY) will pay in 12% of their much higher wages between 2010 and 2030… and that will about to about 800 k by your arithmetic.
what confuses the issue here is that you seem to be claiming that the 300 k is already “wage adjusted”. if so that makes the return on investment to SS huge… and if that were the case your side would have been lying all these years when they said it was way smaller than even “safe” investments. of course they were lying. but it doesn’t embarass them to lie out the other side of their mouths today and claim it’s “way higher.”
and you don’t notice the difference.
I was researching this question late last year and reached pretty much the same conclusions as Coberly and Chad. I’m satisfied that SS, although really insurance, provides a reasonable “return” if that’s what concerns you. (What prompted me last year: the blogs were full of people crying that SS is highway robbery and everybody out there could do better putting those contribuitons into the stock market; after all, everybody is or uses a broker who is nearly as smart at Buffett.) The hypothetical cases generally are misleading and sometimes intentionally so. Even the best studies that I found had to simplify, typically ignoring variables such as the much higher post-retirement life expectancy of high earners compared to low earners and the existance of career progression that backloads contributions to thereby increase real returns.
Sammy that is a very old trick. No one falls for it anymore. Coberly wrote something about Social Security pensions. Your replied noting a fact about SocialSecurityandMedicare. I don’t criticize your dishonesty. I merely note that your trick passed what Coberly would call its sell by date in 2005.
Being the nearby liberal who wants to turn social security into welfare I have two replies to Coberly
1) you bet. If social security were welfare then welfare would be untouchable. We have now a very secure social security program and record severe poverty and TANF which reaches 28% of the poor. It isn’t as if were social security welfare then the people who hate welfare would hate it.
2) Medicare is also touched only at the cost of a shellacking (and that was not Medicare benefits). It is partly funded by the Medicare tax, partly funded by premiums, and partly funded from general revenues and all three parts are equally mess with at your own equally extreme political peril (actually the part funded from general revenues is more untouchable than the part funded by the Medicare tax).
You claim that if social security were turned into welfare it would be vulnerable. The fate of Medicare plan B (absolutely untouched unlike plan A) proves that you are totally wrong. Most of those who demand no social security cuts refer to the funding mechanism, because it helps our case, but it is not necessary for their case, because we are the vast majority.
The funding does have an effect — it enables social security recipients to perceive that they benefit from no government program and to shamelessly demand that people under 65 be abandoned to the mercies of the market place.
Your description of programs is accurate. Your prediction about the political consequences of making social security more like TANF in undermined by all available evidence.
And you still haven’t answered my Medicare A B challenge (I have to check if you have responded to my challenge to fill in my statements which you coded “A” and “B” in your summary of what you alleged was my reasoning).
nanute & Robert,
The numbers for SS and Medicare are broken out separately. But they are the same issue: public care of the elderly. The separate funds are an artifice: let’s just make the Medicare tax 4.9% instead of 2.9%, while lowering the SS tax from 12.4% to 10.4%. We now have an entirely new set of comparisons SS vs. Medicare, but, in reality, it doesn’t change a thing.
Robert
lets you and me not argue in public. you are a good guy. it is possible i am wrong about the politics of “i paid for it myself.” but i don’t think i am and it is too hard to argue against your certainty.
as for sammy slumming in medicare (the parts not paid by the payroll tax) and claiming that therefore SS is welfare… i guess i fell for that old trick. glad you caught it. it is certainly a dishonest way of arguing.
for the record i argue that medicare ought to be fully paid for by the future beneficiaries, with a cap just like SS so it is a reasonable cost of insurance. i don’t mind if the “risk” of not being able to afford the premium is factored into the premium, so that high earners pick up a little bit of the tab for low earners… on the understanding that something could happen to them and they would become low earners..
but in general i don’t like welfare as a solution to normal life cycle situations. if the poor need to be paid more so they can afford insurance, we need to address that. if the poor need to have their insurance subisdized by welfare… we can do that, but we need to keep the idea of welfare and “i paid for it myself” separate.
i think i have stated my reasons for this a dozen thousand times or so. and they really are not affected by Robert’s amazing proof.
nanute
thanks. no i didn’t. getting a little old for this fight. i knew his numbers were wrong for SS. i didn’t bother to research where he got them from.
SAmmy
re “are the same issue.” one of the well know facts of human psychology is that failure to separate separable issues is a mark of the immature brain. very young babies spend a long time separating one finger from another. in your case you still have not learned the difference between your ass and your elbow.
in case there are any honest people out there… SS (OASDI) can pay for itself forever with a 40 cents per week increase in the tax each year until life expectancies stablilize. this will result in about a one percent extra deduction from your paycheck after forty years.
there is no reason that medicare can’t also pay for itself. costs are expected to increase at a much lower rate in absolute dollars than wages.
whether SS ever equals 80% of the budget or not, doesnt’ matter. we pay for what we want. it does NOT mean that you will be paying 80% of your income for SS. it does not mean that the federal budget will have to be cut by 80% in order to pay for SS. it is a completely bullshit statement that only the sammys of the world could love.
Thank you for saying what I would’ve said, only better!
I met Peteson once, and my impression is that he’s not evil, merely senile. Those who follow him may be eitehr.
sammy,
wall st has been on welfare since Nixon…………………………..
difference, with respect to Medicare and SS, is billions and billions of tax money for a few banksters.
coberly,
you are a damn fool. SS is not welfare. people pay for it themselves.
You can rant and rave and call people names all you want, but it does not change the fact that, upon retirement, large numbers of people become
dependent on the Federal Government for their income and healthcare
and, unlike a normal pension plan, the government cannot go to the safe and pull out securities or savings or accumulated interest to pay for this, but must instead
get the money from taxpayers.
If this doesn’t fit the definition of “welfare” I don’t know what would.
sammy
you don’t know much.
sory for the raving. you try my patience. you are either a liar or someone so dumb they swallow every lie they hear and for some reason feel a need to repeat it here, time after time.
i don’t have enough time to answer you in great deal every time you repeat your little parrot lies. and i get very sick of hearing them.
if you want to count that as a victory, be my guest.
it isn’t welfare when you pay for it yourself.
social security is not the parts of medicare that are not paid by the workers themselves.
and much as i may hate the idea of having the government involved myself, there is NO other way for workers to save for their own retirement, safe from inflation and market losses. we have a government whether we want one or not. better we should use it for our own good than to turn it over to your friends who will use it for their own good.
ALL government bonds… you,know, the ones Peterson buys and sells, are paid for by the government who goes to it’s little “safe”, called “the people”.
you are too dumb to understand that. but try to think of the taxpayers as paying for something they need… even if you are too stupid to understand that you need it. And even a bank depends on the work of the people who buy the bank’s product to put the money in the safe where you think they keep yours with your name on it, breeding interest in dark drawers.
sorry Sammy, but you are just too dumb to understand how money works. and the reason SS has to be mandatory is because there are a lot of people like you who would end up on welfare.
at least with SS you pay for your own benefits.
Old Man
you may be right about Peterson now, but he’s been at this a long time, and the people who work for him don’t have the excuse of senility.
I have a related theory. Humans in general can’t carry through on complex thoughts. That means most of us live most of the time on the basis of formulas we learned or fairly simple ideas that work for us.
SS is a simple idea and it works for us. But that doesn’t mean that Peterson would have understood that the first time he ran into it. It might have sounded like “socialism” to him, and he was raised to beleive socialism was “evil.” I think he was also raised to believe “idleness” was evil, so he can’t stand the thought of old people being “idle.” That is “retired” even if they paid for it themselves, even if they use the time for great good. He is like the Scrooge-ish businessman who can’t stand the idea that his workers might have a second or two where they are not “working.” Even if they have done heroic work for him right up to that moment. I think this very likely came from being yelled at as a child by a father very much like him.
So he never took the time to find out that Social Security is not socialism, or that workers are human beings with desires and needs beyond “working,” or that they pay for their own retirement… the thoughts just never entered his head. or like sammy they were refused admittance and never thought about, and forgotten immediately.
But the people who work for him tell very carefully constructed lies for money. they have fooled sammy… and smarter people than sammy. they are exactly what i call evil.
coberly,
The reason you are so frustrated is that you are trying to prove falsehoods. So you have to talk in circles, call people names, and pervert the definition of basic words like “save” “invest” and “pay.” Like a defense lawyer defending a guilty client (“it depends on the definition of “is” etc.”)
Like I said before, let’s just deal with Social Security for what it is, welfare. I have said on numerous occasions that I have no issue with paying for the poor elderly. I don’t even have a problem paying for it like a Ponzi scheme. We probably do not differ very much on the issue, with the exception of a means test.
I do, however, have a problem with your constant mischaracterizations and misrepresentations. They may fool some less informed people but it’s just not helpful, or honest.
coberly,
sammy does not talk to me anymore.
Social security is welfare because its accumulated bonds and interest raised cash or avoided paying interest on US G borrowing. The unscrupulous bonds (special treasuries) became war bonds and tax cuts for the wealthy.
US government only pays bonds’ principle and interest to private (rich) people, oil sheiks, and Asians. That is not welfare.
Bonds accumulated from FICA receipts and Medicare payroll receipts are not to be repaid, nor interest accumulated considered for repayment. The US government is for the few, not the many.
The only socialism that is important is the socialized war machine and wall st risk.
You cannot argue with a libertarian, they think Friedman was a researcher.
What he did was use screened statistics to fit his libertarian ideology.
You cannot argue dogma.
The post was about what Rick Perry stated. Little evidence of that in this thread. Of course, coberly’s first sentence in the first comment was hillbilly junk. The usual mindless bullshit that supposedly passes for fact here.
Robert appears to think that Perry serving as President of the United States of America would supposedly be a threat to the entire planet and populations. Too bad he didn’t expand on that point. Where is the leftist anti-Perry scare list at AB?
I wonder why Robert appears to think that Perry might be elected President.
So, is President Obama good for the world? I would like to see that list, too.
sammy,
Welfare is for billionaires!!
Billion dollar bonuses, and Peterson’s billions.
Go to the founding fathers’ old testament and you will find out that usury is sinful.
There are many things wrong in your dogma.
Every cent is usurous.
i see i neglected to say who pays for that part of Medicare that is not paid by the payroll tax.
you pay for it.
the economy adjusts itself so that if the rich guy pays more taxes for “welfare” he manages to charge his customers more or pay his help less. at the end of the day the “money” comes from you. but the rich person will never understand that.. all he sees is that nickle on the table and thinks “mine.”
the other end of the equation is what happens if you don’t pay for it. probably you die sooner than you would otherwise after a nastier illness than you would have had otherwise.
The poor dumb bastards that want to “cut Medicare” to save money, aren’t going to save anyone any money. Even if they cut “welfare” to save money, they aren’t going to save anyone any money… unless of course the people just get sick and die. But then who will pay the doctors?
MG – Sunday, 9:54:15 PM – “The post was about what Rick Perry stated. Little evidence of that in this thread. Of course, coberly’s first sentence in the first comment was hillbilly junk. The usual mindless bullshit that supposedly passes for fact here.”
coberly is clueless on the statement that I referred to as evidenced by his comments below on Monday, 11:45:38 PM Eastern, and 11:51:40 PM Eastern as of the time of this writing.
Here is coberly’s statement that I referenced in my post:
coberly – Saturday, 10:06:32 PM – “Robert I don’t think so. The people who will vote for him cannot hold a thought that complex in their minds .. well, at all; certainly not long enough to get to the election.”
Standard junk from coberly.
coberly,
Your assertions, insults and ad homs number in the hundreds on this thread alone, and your links and facts number in the zeros. I get that you are retired and so depend on taxes for SS and Medicare but you really need a new schtick.
LOL, another Republican adopting libertarian talking points. Have no fear guys the republicans don’t really mean it. It is like when Obama said he was against the patriot act or against war or for open government.
The plain vanilla Republican/Democrat consensus still holds and the Republicans are simply attempting to co-opt the minority of tea partiers who just won’t shut the hell up.
coberly,
Perry may call SS a ponzi scheme, but I doubt he would be able or would be willing to ‘fix’ it, if it wasn’t for our current Democrat President who is actively tryign to find a way to gut it.
Or did you miss the difference in outcome between Bush’s attempt at SS reform and Obama’s??? Did Bush even stop collecting SS taxes for even 1 minute? Yet Obama is planning on extending the current SS tax cut past December.
So tell me once again why I should prefer Obama over someone who has executive of his state presided over more job growth, more population growth, and more overall success than any other state? And did all that with the second largest illegal immagrant population in teh US. And also made Texas the #1 Green energy producer. Should I go on? The litany of Texas’s successes over Obama’s and blue states failures is getting very long.
But then again the Blue states are running out of other peoples money to maintain the bloated government. As are countries in Europe.
Islam will change
Wow! Looks like I missed another Waldman/Coberly fun fest. I’ve been trying to get electicity since Irene, and now that I have it find the AB SS/political blog world is unchanged. Fear and disappointment that the old liberal/Democratic ideas and ideals are failing (Waldman) and plain BS about SS (Coberly.)
Sammy quoted a piece of analysis, and instead of taking that piece apart, they attack the messenger. You know Sammy is correct and that MG’s sources are better than both Roberts’ and Coberly’s (nonexistent.)
careful readers will note that MG changed the terms from “surplus” to “current … cashflow surplus.”
MG is a proud member of the tribe that believes that money you put in the bank doesn’t count. the day, he says, you start drawing down your savings means you are broke.
and he thoughtfully provides tables of cashflow shortfall without telling us whether they are inflated dollars or real dollars, and completely ignores the fact that the projected cashflow shortfalls could be made up by increaseing the payroll tax one half of one tenth of one percent per year.
and because he can’t do arithmetic and gets confused by arithmetic series, he doesn’t understand that that amounts to forty cents per week in today’s terms each year.
and to be perfectly honest, i break it down to the forty cents per week “in today’s terms” because my experience with people who have no number sense is that if i tell them what it amounts to eighty years from now they will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the cost eighty years from now with their paycheck today. this will scare them stupid.
Scheiber and Shoven rely on this in their book, The Real Deal, in which they take a 2% increase in the payroll tax, and multiply it by a hundred and fifty million taxpayers over seventy five years and tell us it is five trillion dollars! and tell us to be scared, be really scared. but it’s still 2%.
buff
i would not tell you to prefer obama. i am sure that perry would try to kill SS even if obama wasn’t gutting it. not even because perry himself hates SS, but because he believes it will win him votes.
the fact that you go on from there to complain about blue states and other people’s money makes me worry about your thought processes. the two issues have nothing to do with each other.
but, since you ask, the “bloated government” seems to have been caused by cutting taxes and deregulating business until it collapsed of its own corruption. we are running out of “other people’s money” because the people don’t have jobs. not because they are taxed so hard they cannot stand.
sammy
you were being dishonest. you dragged SS… which is not welfare… into your little category of “SS plus Medicare”, with Medicare being sort of welfare… and then proceeded to talk about SS as if it were welfare. it is an example of the misdirection that you and MG practice here all the time, having learned it from the Big Liars.
The marketability of Special Treasuries does not alter the fact that they are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States… which is the only thing that makes any Government Bond marketable. Now if you are planning on running the country without Government Bonds, you should say so. and tell Mr Peterson. He has a lot of money invested in Government Bonds.
Thanks CoRev
for your thoughtful piece of… er, analysis.
this is a bit pathetic
but i would rely on the intelligent reader to compare my “analysis” to MG’s and decide whose is nonexistent.
sorry about not being able to discuss the Federal budget… not that MG ever does either, except to refer to it in ominous tones… but like the old hillbilly mechanic i am, if your car comes in and needs gas or a little air in the tire, i don’t insist upon completely disassembling it and discussing the philosophy of motor vehicles or the history of transportation.
Sammy
wow, so you have discovered that i get a million dollars a year from Social Security. Please don’t tell anyone, and i’ll cut you in on the deal.
In fact I paid for my SS, and I do not “depend” on it now. Seems I was one of the lucky ones who came out a winner in the stock market and the employment game. The reason I fight for SS is so your children won’t have to beg in the streets when they get old.
Now, another fact is that you don’t know what an ad hom is. If i told the audience that they can’t trust your argument because you are a pederast, that would be an ad hom. But if I just call you stupid,that is an insult. There is a difference in logic. If I just called your argument stupid, that would be a reasonably normal expression of opinion, or in my case, a factual diagnosis, if not a polite one.
See, an ad hom is an appeal to an irrelevant aspect of the person making an argument to prejudice the audience against it. But as for insults and complete lack of coherent argument… i’d say that you and MG probably have me surrounded on that score.
For those that think Social security is a scam.
Do the math on social security.
Imagine if social security didn’t exist, and that same worker had placed that FICA tax into a simple passbook savings account over a 50 year span.
For a current retiree, look at historical salaries for medium or minimum wage workers over the 1960 to 2010 span. Over that same time span, their monthly deposit to that savings account would increase in tandem as wages inflated.
It’s important to remember that they would add monthly to their passbook savings instead of paying the social security tax. All the while they would earn compound interest. .
It’s easy to forget what passbook accounts used to yield- take a look and get back me once you do the math.
Once you do the math, you will see that a social security isn’t a giveaway for someone that has contributed since 1960.
Hint after 45 years of compound interest, and interest rates above 6% you would be sitting on a pretty large sum.
It is true that some will live longer and collect more than what they put in using the passbook example above, but its also true that some will die before retirement age with zero dependents.