Did Biden Lie About Social Security or is Washington Post’s Fact Checker a Liar?
“Did Biden Lie About Social Security or is Washington Post’s Fact Checker a Damned Liar?“
Dale Coberly:
Well. you won’t find out from me. I only read about it third hand, and because the “fact checker” …Glenn Kessler….is behind a paywall you are going to have to find it for yourself.
So, I don’t know but I been told that Kessler gave Biden “Four Pinocchios” for saying that the Republicans want to destroy Social Security…just as the Democrats have lied about the Republicans wanting to destroy Social Security every election for as long as man can remember.
I checked on Biden’s speech. I can’t find any lies about Republicans wanting to destroy Social Security. Biden did read from a pamphlet that Republican Senator Ron Scott wrote calling for every law including Social Security to be sunsetted after five years. Biden also said that 158 Republican Congressmen had signed on to the plan. And he pointed out that “sunsetting” Social Security would mean you would not get the benefits you have been paying for all your life. And he did point out that with Social Security on the chopping block every five years the chances of it being chopped were anywhere from high to certain.The Republicans would only need to win one election. Biden also pointed out that “security” was what people who paid into Social Security were paying for.
Now it turns out that a lot of Republicans have distanced themselves from the plan. It is my opinion…you can fact check that…that the R’s are not so much against the Scott plan as they are against talking about it before an election. That might hurt their chances of winning. And of course they can’t kill Social Security if they can’t win the election.
Kessler went on to say that the Dems have been lying “Mediscaring the voters” every election…for as long as man can remember (Kessler didn’t actually say “as long as man can remember”: I said that to translate the way he said it. Of course, you need to ask how long what man can remember: fact checking is a tricky business. The Republicans have been trying to kill Social Security for as long as I can remember, and I have been paying close attention since 1992. But of course they always say they are trying to “strengthen and preserve” Social Security, which means cut it until they can drown it in the bathtub.
Kessler seems to think that since the Republicans have failed to destroy Social Security so far that proves they have not been trying to destroy it.
Well, if you have not been paying attention, you might believe that.
The above comment has not been fact-checked. there may be some minor errors.
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Fact-Checker, posted a tweet about 2 years ago lambasting Biden for supposedly lying about the GOP’s attempts to ‘sunset’ or otherwise reduce Social Security benefits. Biden was focusing on efforts by FL senator Scott to do so. Last week, Kessler evidently lambasted Washington state’s Sen Patty Murray for doing likewise. His pieces in the Washington Post are behind a paywall these days so effectively hidden from view by readers of this board. I have posted a lot on these ‘fact checks’ over in the most recent Open post on this board. The only ‘open’ reference to Kessler’s latest is a summary published by Fox News, which notes the attack is on Patty Murray.
Over in my Open Issues post, I linked to Rick Scott’s truly horrible 12 point plan (which aims to fix about everything the GOP thinks is wrong with Dem-style federal governing) that Kessler does not seem to be doing any fact-checking on. That evidently is what Biden was criticizing, justly no doubt.
Patty Murray was simply pointing out that the GOP is out to do various things that will not serve her state well, nor the rest of the county either. And even if they back off somewhat from time to time, as Mitch McConnell has, they will come back with similar measures all too soon.
After all, if the Dems lose their Senate majority in next month’s election, with a net loss of even one seat (hers, perhaps), then all hell will break loose.
Read it and weep, or takes steps to see it never happens.
Rick Scott’s 12 Point Plan
There was a piece from Kessler on this apparently
“The false claim that Senate Republicans ‘plan to end Social Security and Medicare’”
false claim that Senate Republicans ‘plan to end Social Security
Scott’s proposal to sunset Soc Sec & Medicare was in his 11-point plan which was withdrawn, but not in his 12-point version. Perhaps such sunsetting did not go over well in Florida, Scott’s home base, with lots & lots of ‘recipients’.
someone tweeted the response:
“I blocked Fox News at my Mom’s house using parental controls. Now she keeps calling me saying she can’t watch the news. This is how we save America.”
In his original 11 point plan Scott proposes “requiring” Congress to “report every year what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.” Kessler did not fact check this.
Of course it is not a “fact” or even an alleged fact; it is merely a proposal. It is also a damned lie. Its intent is to repeat the claim that Social Security is going bankrupt, which the Republicans do every chance they get. The fact is that Social Security can’t go bankrupt. It does not borrow money. In fact it LENDS money to the government. Or it did. Now the government needs to pay it back. This is what the Republicans call “adding to the budget deficit,” because, after all, if you have to pay back the money you borrowed yesterday, that adds to your deficit today. This is the way Congress does accounting.
Actually, Social Security is facing an “actuarial deficit” of its own. Because we are going to be living longer, we will need more money to see us through our retirement. The amount of “more” money we will need amounts to saving an extra dollar per week each year out of our paycheck.
Saving an extra dollar per week out of your paycheck and putting it in a very safe place where it will earn interest so you will have enough money to retire is what Republicans call an “immoral tax.” Every “plan to save and strengthen Social Security” is offered by a “special committee” who are told “everything is on the table except increasing taxes.”
Nobody ever ‘fact checks” this.
i do wish to get notice of comments on this.
An extra dollar per week each year will add up to an extra twenty dollars per week over twenty years BUT at the same time real wages will be going up about ten dollars per week per year. So after twenty years your paycheck will be two hundred dollars more than it is today, out of which you will need to save an extra twenty dollars for your retirement, leaving you with an extra one hundred and eighty dollars more in your “after the tax increase” pocket.
This is too hard for most people to understand, which is why Social Security needs to be “mandatory”if we are not to have have half the people over 65 living on the street and eating out of dumpsters. But this of course violates their pFreedom.
The p is silent.
I suggest it would be best to stop chastising Scott for his now-defunct 11-point plan.
Focus on the horrible 12-point plan that replaced it. Which will perhaps get enacted next year if the GOP wins Congress next month.
Which is every bit as bad as the withdrawn plan.
Scott is still determined to have more people paying income tax, while making Trump tax cuts permanent.
There is no mention of ‘sunsetting’ anything in the 12-point plan.
Perhaps Mitch McConnell saw to that.
Dobbs
I looked at Scott’s Twelve Step plan (sic). The Left has enough problem with attention span—rushing from one side of the boat to the other with every new lie.
Feel free to comment on his 12 step. For now, I need to keep my focus on the 11 step: the one that sunsets Social Security without ever mentioning Social Security so Glenn Kessler can’t guess what he is up to.
I did notice he put on a hat for his new plan. Less likely to cause miscarriages.
I don’t believe there is any mention of ‘sunsetting’ in the 12-step plan, which is mostly about fixing America to be how way the GOP wants it. Their leadership seems to be fearful about voter reaction to ‘sunsetting’ programs that benefit their base.
Once they’ve done the 12=step plan, they might indeed go back and do as they like to end those ‘socialistical’ programs that remain. If voters accept that, those who are still permitted to vote that is. I hope not.
This needs to be commented on:
In his original 11 point plan, Scott calls for “requiring” Congress to report every year what it plans to do when Social Security goes bankrupt.
He does not say if his “requirement” will sunset after five years.
but more important, the idea that one Congress can “require” a subsequent Congress to do anything is a little bit precious. For reasonable stabilty in government, if not in our daily lives, we need to have some expectation that laws enacted by Congress will not be repealed by the next Congress without a good reason. But there’s the rub. My good reason could be your “arbitrary and capricious.” So at the end of the day we have to rely on something like good sense and honesty in our law-makers. But that seems in short supply these days.
Scott wants to sunset laws he does not like, but make permanent laws he does like…such as the law to sunset.
There would be no point in calling him a liar. He is simply insane, as we might hope anyone who read his 11 points could see. But with half of the population “groomed” to accept insanity from the people they elect, our chances are slim.
While Scott was the most direct, Ton Johnson proposed putting social security and Medicare in the discretionary part of the budget and now that he has Willie Hortoned his opponent he is likely to continue as Wisconsin’s worst senator since tailgunner Joe. McConnell has been much more circumspect complaining about people not working because of all the transfer payments they get. Principal among those are social security. I know that Republicans have wanted to end social security since at least 1968 when my dad a staunch Republican told me I would never collect a dime from it. The real problem is people not taking Republicans at their word. Just ask women whether they thought the Republicans would take away their right to control their own bodies before Dobbs.
It is worth remembering that Social Security is not a transfer payment.
Unless you count transferring money from your young self to your old self. We used to call that “savings.”
You pay for your own Social Security benefits. Pay your money into Social Security, they give it back to you later when you will need it most, with interest. The interest comes from “the miracle of pay as you go” [something like what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the miracle of compound interest.” Like compound interest it comes from the growth in the economy.
The liars have made it look to their victims like a transfer payment by pointing out that someone else is putting money into Social Security at the same time you are taking it out….just like a bank. Or a stock market investment. That’s the way money works. Though from what they say you’d think the “non partisan experts” don’t understand that. Not to mention the philanthropist billionairs who establish a tax-free “educational” fund to inform people that Social Security is going broke and will be a crushing burden on the young. Of course old people are stealing the young people’s future, as they always have. You know, by feeding them and sending them to college while working nine to five making the country richer so the kids won’t have to work so hard when they get old enough to get a job.
And the kids eat this stuff up.
And bitch about “gerontocracy”…like Oedipus.
Oh, yes, there is a “transfer function” built in to Social Security’s benefit formula so that if over a lifetime of work you never made enough money to save enough for an indoor retirement, SS makes up the difference from the premiums of those who made more than enough over a life time. We used to call that “insurance.”
Those who made “more than enough” still get a fair return on their money…a positive interest rate which at least covers the cost of inflation, and earns a real return , which is not as much as they “might have” made on the stock market…but still, nice to have in case their higher earnings disappeared before they could retire.
It’s kind of like mandatory car insurance for good drivers. You know, the ones who are such good drivers they don’t need no steenking speed limits.
Dale,
Even though we agree on the best approach for the adjustments Congress is going to need to make in the next decade (and beyond), we do not agree on the best way to describe Social Security.
It is very much a transfer program. It needs 2.8 workers per beneficiary to be in balance with taxes in and benefits out. As the economy grows it will actually need only 2.6 or 2.7, but because lives are longer and children are fewer, the ratio will drop below that. Congress has the authority and responsibility to make the needed adjustments. Predicting what those adjustments need to be requires knowing that it depends on more than whether workers are saving enough for themselves.
We agree on more than we disagree – including that with the right adjustments it can go on forever. With the right adjustments most people do not need to understand it better than I put money in and later I get it back. Until advocates can get Congress to make those adjustments, those advocates need to understand it better.
rne:
As I wrote in one of these posts, replacement is ~1.7 per couple. We need immigration to make up the rest to get to the number needed. Immigration was ~1 million, the lowest it ever was. I will find that post and let you gnash on that for a while.
Some numerics here: https://angrybearblog.com/2022/08/immigration-population-replacement-politics-and-the-economy
Arne
you may agree with me more than you think:
what is the difference between ” most people do not need to understand it better than I put money in and later I get it back. ” and “it is not a transfer payment”?
Two things make it different.
1. I said “With the right adjustments”, and that has not happened yet.
2. The audience at Angry Bear is not most people.
Arne
I really don’t understand this. My point is that it’s not a transfer payment if you pay for your own benefits. Which you do. All that about population replacement rates and even different rates of growth in real income amounts to the same thing as changing interest rates or changes in the rate of growth of the stock market, which happens and no one feels cheated. the real reason “you” have to pay more is that you are going to live longer. those people paying more , even though their money is being used to pay for your benefits (hang in there, this is not a cntradicition in reality, it is just using the sae word to desribe two different things) thse people are paying for their own benefits which will in their turn be larger than yours….because they are going to be living longer than you.
i am sorry i can’t manage to say this any clearer in the time and space i have , but i am sure you canfigure it out if you start with what i say and try to think about what i mean.
actually i am pretty sure Arne already understands it. jsut getting hung up on the word “transfer payment” which i think leads to a serious misunderstanding.
Well, actually, those who are paying in now are securing benefits for those who paid in long ago. But you may consider this a quibble.
My feelings are tainted on this, because my late mother, who died just before her fiftieth birthday, was an early contributor to FICA, started working when it came to be during the New Deal. Became a stay-at-home mom after WW2. Did go back to work for few years prior to her death. Never received any benefits whatsoever.
Alas, maybe a death benefit.
Arne
there is hope here of coming to an understanding if not ageement
when i buy an insurance policy is that a transfer payment?
when i put money in the bank is that a transfer payment?
when i collect on my insurance policy is that a transfer payment?
when the bank pays me interest is that a tramsfer payment
when i sell my stock in microsoft is that a transfer payment?
Dobbs
it’s not a quibble. it is a fundamental necessity for understanding the problem.
your mother died without collecting benefits. so did my mother. so did my friend who had a pension from a private company.
life does not guarantee that you will always “get what you paid for.”
i know, i think, that you don’t like religion, so try to put this in secular terms: it is a moral error to expect, demand, that you always get what you are “owed,” your “fair share.” life doesn’t work that way, can never work that way.
you buy insurance but never have a fire. some other guy buys insurance, pays the same rate from the same company, and has a fire two days after he bought the insurance; is that “fair”? [assuming he did not start the fire himself.]
we try to be fair to each other. but “life is not fair.” Economics cannot be “fair”(…and I am not talking about capitalism or socialism.) going around demanding your “fair” share is what i would call “hell”…by which i don’t mean a place warmer than Miami..but a state of mind that destroys your own happiness.
Some people thing tht “fair” means the millionaire should pay more for his box of peanuts than they do. stop the line at the grocery store and demand the guy in the suit pay for the goceries of the man in work clothes. but the man in the suit thinks he earned is money, did well, and it’s only fair that he can buy more peanuts than the guy who works for an average wage. carried too far the rich guys view becomes greed and destroys a society. carried too far the radical “socialist” idea becomes greed (yes) and destroys a society. there needs to be a place where both of us stop demanding “our fair share.”…i almost said “needs to be a balance” but then the “balance” becomes an insane demand (whose “balance”) which destroys society.
at least in the old old days people were quite honest with themselves: we want what the other guy has, so we kill him and take what he has (had) for our own enjoyment. eventually some people realized that wasn’t working so well for them either.
Buying insurance is preeminently risk sharing.
Is that what Social Security is all about? I don’t think so.
OTOH, on a grander scale than buying property insurance that you never use (although Mrs Fred has had wrecked cars twice in crashes with other vehicles – not her fault, that insurance covered) we have had homeowner’s insurance for many, many years & never made a claim. This is risk sharing on a personal level.
It may be said that Social Security represents risk sharing on a societal level.
Dobbs
Social Security is risk sharing, whatever you choose to think.
I have no idea what your distinction between “personal level” and “society leve” could possibly mean.
but i suspect is something to do with the human brain’ sinability to let go of “categories” it has “learned” previously.
Social Security like everything else is what it does, whatever you call it.
I think understanding the “transfer payment” perspective improves understanding. I think telling someone they are wrong for looking at it that way is counter-productive.
Arne
you are a much nicer person than i am. you are probably right that my style of argument is counter-productive. but i yam what i yam.
thing is, though, if you are going to solve a serious problem it helps to frame it properly (this is physics framing not linguistic framing (i have forgotten the name of the ilnguistics professor who introduced “framing” to political discussion. but in physics or engineering as i am sure you know it is fatal to frame a problem in terms of old concepts or inadequate concepts. words blind us to “how things work.”
Dobbs
Try to think of it as the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
The risks associated with property insurance are not inevitable.
But I don’t care to discuss them or compare them with the risks associated with old age, except to note (unless one dies young), they are inevitable.
Is social security founded on the idea that most will die young?
Dobbs
no.
social secrity is founded on the idea that the government can protect the savings of working people, and provide insurance out of those workers own contributions out of the effective interest created by pay as you fo financing.
the risk SS insures you against is reaching old age without enough savings to retire. this is not “assuming most people will die young.”
the acturaries have a pertty accurate idea of how long “people” will live, how much it will cost them to live, how much money will be available for them if they save (via FICA) a certain percent of their income.
i cannot even imagine where you got “based on the idea that most people will die young.” possible from the lie that Social Security retirement age was set so that benefits would not be available . this is essentially Tucker Carlson reasoning.
This thread is getting too hard to manage.
Coberly:
I wonder how much Covid changed the funds as 1 million died early on.
Run
not much. we looked at this with the 2021 report.
have no doubt that the GOP wants to kill SS, and have as long as SS has been in existence. and thats because they get funding from wall street, who really want our money to help fund them. they dont really want to help anyone, that just not in their DNA. and all it would really take to fix SS is to remove the cap on earnings for decades. the odd thing i would note, is that those on SS, are some of the biggest supporters of the GOP. seems like that would be a big disincentive to kill SS
If you remove the cap without changing the bend points in the formula for calculating scheduled benefits, it DOES NOT fix the problem.
Arne
possible semantic problem
i am using “tranfer payment” to mean what i think other people mean when they think transfer payment: a government forced transfer of money from one person to another for no economic benefit tot he taxpayer. or something like that.
i think (don’t know) that the people who do national income accounting use transfer payment to mean a transfer of money from one part to the other which noes not represent an increase in “national product.” how they sort this our with buying and selling of stocks, putting money in and taking it out of banks, or insurance policies, or buying lottery tickets …I don’t know.
i will keep trying to explain to people what i mean because i think it is critical to understanding that social security is you saving your own money, at interest, so you can spend it later when you will need it. it causes a lot of trouble when people insist on…because they have been told…thinking of it as “the young paying for the old.”
thanks for your help in thinking about this. i don’t really understand your objection, unless you mean i should not confuse the people with facts, or attempts to explain the facts,
the welfare recipient does not produce anything for his payment.
the social security recipient produced whatever he got paid for when he was working. he sets the saside (forgoes consumption) until he needs it. this is “saving”. as Dean Baker says “saving is the same as buring the money.” i don’t know what Baker says when the saver “unsaved” his money and uses it to buy product..in evvect exchanging his contribution to national product (while he was working) for someone else contribution tp naional product while they are working but he cannot…unburning his money?
thinking about it this way makes the problem understandable. thinking about is as “the young paying for the old” introduces semantic coonfusion that makes the problem un-solvable. somewhat like Achilles never catching the tortoise..because we refuse to look at any pictures taken after he catches the tortise. (or tortoise, for people who like to play spelling games, and spell-check dictionaries happy to turn tortise into mortise but not tortoise
dw:
The Northwest Plan as created by Dale and Bruce would increase SS withholding 1 tenth of 1% for both companies and individuals each. In effect it is 1% for each after 10 years of small increases. This would solve the shortfall for 75(?) years. SS administration said the Northwest Plan would work. In effect it then still belongs to the workers which Dale is implying.
Run
small error. it doesn’t make any real difference, but it’s like when Krasting discovered the cost of fixing SS had risen from 80 cents per week to 90 cents per week, he said “aha! i told you it wouldn’t work.” actually it would work, what had happened was that over the ten years we had then been talking about it the average wage had risen from 40k to 45k per year. the formula was one tenth percent per year, still is. and it would take twenty years, worth of increases, but they would not need to happen every year, only in those years the Trustees reported short term financial inadequacy…which is now getting to be too long to explain in a few words , especially to people who don’t understand how SS works in the first place.
unfortunately i have found that even people who call themselves Joe The Economist don’t understand it and call me a liar when they realize the one tenth of one percent per year adds up over time…even though i told them it would, and told them that wages would rise one full percent per year every year while SS was rising one tenth of one percent in some years. seems they can’t follow a three part sentence, and when they finally understand it think you must have been lying to make them not understand it when you started to explain it. the experience still burns. and of course they absolutely cannot wrap their brains around the fact that the money isn’t being taken away from them, but saved with interest for them when they will need it most. they expect to be able to retire for free…someone else “should” pay for them… that’s on the Left. on the Right they hate Social Security because they think they are paying for someone else’s retirement.
Coberly:
Just a bit of a different twist to it. So, they recalculate each year to see if the need a boost. Ok
dw
don’t count on people being able to put two and two together. meanwhile raising the cap would turn SS into welfare. exactly what Roosevelt was careful to avoid “so no damn politician can take it away from them.”
i wish people could understand what i am trying to say.
Coberly,
Raising the cap on the FICA would be fine so long as the cap on benefits were also raised a commensurate amount, but then it would not fix anything regarding total benefits paid out because people were living longer on average unless the higher income group above the old FICA cap actually had shorter than average life expectancy, which is (I am sure) the opposite from the actual case. Apparently then, I am not people which I frequently seem to relearn.
The good news for SS is that Covid-19 mortality weighed most heavily against those either receiving SS benefits or about to begin to in the next decade or so. I call this the SS pandemic windfall savings. Logan’s Run presented a similar solution for fixing SS. Combined with Soylent Green this would also solve the world hunger problem.
The main attraction of Logan’s Run was that it solved the problem of reducing population in response to growing pollution and dwindling resources by reductions in the upper end age demographics rather than by having fewer children. Birth rate reductions have economic impacts particularly but not solely upon support for the aged. Elderly death rate increases work better, except for the elderly.
Led Zeppelin – Gallows Pole (Official Audio)
Jonathan Swift tackled the problem back in 1729. No one has topped him.
A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, predominantly Irish Catholic (i.e., “Papists”) as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.
In English writing, the phrase “a modest proposal” is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire. … (Wikipedia)
I looked up transfer payment on Wikipedia.
“a redistribution of income and wealth by means of the government making a payment, without goods or services being received in return”
Since the examples above do not involve government, I guess not. If government offered insurance? I think it requires being able to look at from multiple perspectives to have a meaningful conversation. FEMA giving out grants to people whose homes are destroyed in wildfires or hurricanes is not much different from paying out insurance benefits even though there are no defined premiums. I could accept the premise that insurance is a form of transfer payment.
I could also accept the premise that insurance is a service and therefore does not fit the definition of transfer payment. Since I do believe SS is insurance, it would then not be a transfer payment.
I could also accept the premise that insurance is an acceptable form of gambling.
I would have trouble telling someone they were wrong to accept an alternate premise.
Arne
I looked in my ancient Economics text and found “business transfer payments” so it’s not just “government.”
But more importantly we are discussing what people are thinking when they say or hear that SS is a transfer payment. I have absolutely no trouble asserting that I know more about this than either Wikipedia or any particular Economics text.
as it happens, my book counts private pensions as transfer payments because they do not represent current production. I have no idea how or if they resolve the accounting for this, but like to point out that even private pensions are paid for work done…it is part of the “contract” “I will produce this much product for you in return for a current cash payment of X dollars and a future payment of Y dollars. This arrangement benefits both the worker and the employer.
Thing is, at this point, it is only essential that we recognize that the worker gave up a certain amount of then-current consumption in return for a claim on future consumption. That is he paid for it. Once you start thinking of it as a gift (private pensions) or a “tax on the young for chaity for the old” you cannot think straight about what is actually happening. ..you could go back and start counting all savings as payments by the young to the old…but this would not be thinking straight, and make for very complicated accounting. as well as serious unhealthy thinking.
mu;tiple perspectives are necessary, but some perspectives are better than others.
I personally have no trouble telling people they are wrong. Got paid to do that for several years. I try not to make a habit of doing that socially, but with the well being of millions of people on the line, I am afraid I have to insist on right answers.
oh, hell. now Safari can’t establish a secure connection to angry bear. part of planned obsolescence. I wonder if that counts as paying for productive activity.
seems to have been fixed for now.
OK. You are wrong to equate transfer payment with not paid for. Even your book gives you the pertinent counter example.
Social Security is transfer payment program that provides insurance against running out of money during retirement. The payroll taxes you pay while working are equivalent to the premiums needed to make this risk sharing actually balance out. We depend on Congress to adjust the payments to keep it solvent and after being able to watch it do a fine job without being touched for 40 years Congress is afraid to touch it because too many people do not understand that making adjustments should be considered entirely normal. Having to pay for it yourself means paying more if you are likely to live longer – which you are.
I think my perspective is clearer, but that does not make yours wrong.
arne
well, i can’t say i find yours clearer. SS has to raise the premium because the costs are going to be greater. SS raised the premium to higher that what pay-go called for in order that the Boomers could pay enough for their own retirement, instead of waiting until the next smaller generation was paying the payroll tax and raising their tax to pay for the larger boomer generation.
it seems likely we are not going to agree about this. which makes me sorry. you are one of the few smart enough to see what SS is doing and why a dollar a week or so increase in the tax is both necessary and sufficient and fair. but you want to call it a transfer payment because on the day you collect your benefit, the marked bills they give you were marked by someone who paid his FICA that day….you can’t seem to make the connection between what the first worker paid in all those years ago and what he takes out today. be a hard world for bankers if we made depositers write a check to withdrawers so we could tell the depositers that they were paying for the withdrawers. but the highly paid non partisan experts would love it. make it easier for them to kill the bank.
From Investopedia: “A transfer payment is a one-way payment to a person or organization which has given or exchanged no goods or services for it.”
From some perspectives that could include income taxes.
an SS benefit is a payment to a person who has given a payment (his payroll tax) for it.
from some perspective income taxes pay for government services. magashats can’t understand that. don’t need no steenkin gummint services.
I guess the income tax post was me agreeing that there are perspectives that are wrong. Or at least make no sense.
Arne
i need to tell you that i learned a long time ago that dictionaries could be wrong.
Arne
Most perspectives make no sense, and most of the time it doesn’t matter.
Do you remember and old guy who used to write letters to the GT. He hated Social Security, It robbed him when he was working. And now he was humiliated to be collecting “welfare” (his SS check.) The SS enemies have got most of the “young” people in america they are being robbed by the greedy geezers whose social security they are paying for. they expect to never get old and be rich when they do. and love their work so they never have to retire, so of course no one will have to pay for their social security. This is the insanity that a wrong perspective can lead to.
as for my bad manners: sitting around a college dorm bull session, it doesn’t matter if someone is wrong; it does matter if you hurt their feelings, so you don’t tell them they are wrong.
if you are designing an airplane or building a bridge it does matter if someone is wrong, and it is morally reprehensible not to tell them they are wrong.