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Obama Expansion Of Social Security

One is health insurance that borders on welfare and the other is welfare.

Because they are provided by the government. :shrug: As is Social Security.

Medicare is not paid for like Social Security.

....yeah.... it's not like Medicare is a pay-go system designed to protect the elderly from impoverishment, paid for through payroll taxes.....

There is nothing in the dictionary about sudden or catastrophic in the definition of insurance. My annual doctors visit is neither sudden or catastrophic and it is covered.

Sure, and when it is so, then your insurance isn't acting as insurance, but rather as a socialized pre-payment program. The shift from "insurance" to socialized pre-payment is a major driver in skyrocketing health "insurance" rates, price rates, and providers being minimally responsive to patients. Third-party-payments are a major problem in our healthcare industry, not a boon.

Cancer may be catastrophic, but it can last 10 years which is not sudden.

It's also a risk that we each have, but which we cannot anticipate individually. Which is why we transfer that risk through insurance.

Turning 65 isn't a risk. It's not a catastrophic cost that can't be individually anticipated. It's not an insurable event.

Insurance is a hedge against the cost of the unknown. Turning 65 isn't really what Social Security is about. It is really about turning 90 or 95.

:shrug: if that were true, then payments would start at age 90 or 95, instead of 62, 65, or 67.

Social Security is suppose to provide a predictable stream of liquidity so that seniors can plan their retirement

It is supposed to provide them with protection against poverty.

Like any insurance, SS is not intended to pay the entirety of your retirement costs

Unless of course by circumstance outside your control, or unforeseeable, you arrive at that point with no savings. After all, that is what insurance does - it reimburses our costs and transfers risk.

However, if SS simply gives us a stream of revenue for the act of managing to age to 62..... well, then, it's not insurance, but something else. In this case it's a very, very, badly structured socialized retirement program intended to protect seniors from poverty, but which actually has the effect of helping to keep them in it.

The idea that we need to have people who are in poverty, subsidizing those to the tune of 125% above poverty, is a reason to say that SS isn't insurance.

If you are in the top half of income earners, and your benefit would be slowed, then you are not - by definition - in poverty.
 
Because they are provided by the government. :shrug: As is Social Security.



....yeah.... it's not like Medicare is a pay-go system designed to protect the elderly from impoverishment, paid for through payroll taxes.....



Sure, and when it is so, then your insurance isn't acting as insurance, but rather as a socialized pre-payment program. The shift from "insurance" to socialized pre-payment is a major driver in skyrocketing health "insurance" rates, price rates, and providers being minimally responsive to patients. Third-party-payments are a major problem in our healthcare industry, not a boon.



It's also a risk that we each have, but which we cannot anticipate individually. Which is why we transfer that risk through insurance.

Turning 65 isn't a risk. It's not a catastrophic cost that can't be individually anticipated. It's not an insurable event.



:shrug: if that were true, then payments would start at age 90 or 95, instead of 62, 65, or 67.



It is supposed to provide them with protection against poverty.



Unless of course by circumstance outside your control, or unforeseeable, you arrive at that point with no savings. After all, that is what insurance does - it reimburses our costs and transfers risk.

However, if SS simply gives us a stream of revenue for the act of managing to age to 62..... well, then, it's not insurance, but something else. In this case it's a very, very, badly structured socialized retirement program intended to protect seniors from poverty, but which actually has the effect of helping to keep them in it.



If you are in the top half of income earners, and your benefit would be slowed, then you are not - by definition - in poverty.

So you don't understand what "welfare" and "insurance" mean, further, you think social security and medicare are paid for the same way, and social security puts old people into poverty.

I don't know how anyone is supposed to debate with such blatant misinformation. You are asserting things that are trivially false.
 
Turning 65 isn't really what Social Security is about.

Retirement age plays a very important role in what Social Security is about. The original retirement age was 65 and the average lifespan for Americans at that time meant that most people who had contributed to the SS fund were dead before they reached the age of eligibility to start collecting and those who were still living were only around for another 12-14 years on average. These days, the average life expectancy is somewhere around 10-20 years older than it was when social security was originally designed and those who reach that age tend to live for another 15-20 years beyond that on average. Yet age of eligibility to start collecting was reduced to 62!

So, not only has its population liability been vastly expanded, the fund is also on the hook for making payouts for decades longer per individual than it was intended to do. That, in addition to tacking on additional liabilities such as disability payments, is why Social Security is jeopardy.
 
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Whether or not you like the term "insurance" - it's certainly not "just a tax" that they give to other people.

Well, it does not resemble insurance at all, but when you look at your paycheck, it sure does look like a tax.
 
Well, it does not resemble insurance at all, but when you look at your paycheck, it sure does look like a tax.

The fact that you don't see any value for your taxes, or don't recognize the value, doesn't change the fact that Social Security works like an insurance policy. If the program were privatized, you would still be setting up an automatic debit from a card or directly from your bank account to pay the fee every month, and it would still work like an insurance policy, at least until the criminals on Wall Street depleted it or screwed the pooch in the market and asked for another bailout anyway.

Then all bets are off.
 
Retirement age plays a very important role in what Social Security is about. The original retirement age was 65 and the average lifespan for Americans at that time meant that most people who had contributed to the SS fund were dead before they reached the age of eligibility to start collecting and those who were still living were only around for another 12-14 years on average. These days, the average life expectancy is somewhere around 10-20 years older than it was when social security was originally designed and those who reach that age tend to live for another 15-20 years beyond that on average. Yet age of eligibility to start collecting was reduced to 62!

So, not only has its population liability been vastly expanded, the fund is also on the hook for making payouts for decades longer per individual than it was intended to do. That, in addition to tacking on additional liabilities such as disability payments, is why Social Security is jeopardy.

And we pay now 10 times as much. So you are saying that an increase in life expectancy of 50% justifies a cost increase of 1000%, which is another 1500% if we actually want to get paid. Disability and OAS are separate problems. Both are heading for insolvency, but they are not the same thing.
 
No, it does nothing directly for current high-benefit receiving seniors. It directly helps current low-benefit receiving seniors, and helps high-benefit receiving seniors only indirectly through increasing the fiscal health of the program.
:doh

The data given to you was from the SSA. It simply took their figures and put them into an interactive tool.

CRFB took the data, they just changed the description so that it doesn't actually track with the data.

Here is the part you are missing. No one is telling current low-benefit receiving retirees "Hey, if your benefit is below 125% of the FPL, then it's going to increase to that point". They get nothing. Your PIA is set at 62.
 
Because they are provided by the government. :shrug: As is Social Security.

....yeah.... it's not like Medicare is a pay-go system designed to protect the elderly from impoverishment, paid for through payroll taxes.....

Medicare gets subsidies from the general fund, Social Security doesn't. The benefits correspond with what you paid for in SS, where they correspond with the fact that you did turn retirement age. One requires that you work. One requires that you turn 65. These aren't remotely the same thing.


It's also a risk that we each have, but which we cannot anticipate individually. Which is why we transfer that risk through insurance.

Turning 65 isn't a risk. It's not a catastrophic cost that can't be individually anticipated. It's not an insurable event. :shrug: if that were true, then payments would start at age 90 or 95, instead of 62, 65, or 67.

I have an article out today about the point of the debate being about the control of words. Published minutes ago: (The Dueling Myths of Social Security : FedSmith.com). You want insurance to imply sudden and catastrophic event. Where in the English language did that come from? You want to say that Social Security isn't insurance, and then invent a new definition for it. And turning 65 is a risk. 20 percent of the population doesn't make it.



It is supposed to provide them with protection against poverty.

If that were true, you would be able to tell me how $46,000 per year keeps Bernie Sanders out of poverty. Social Security has nothing to do with poverty. The system throws cash around, and yes some of it hits poor people, but it does not land on them because they are poor. At its inception, the poorest people were excluded from Social Security that required work in covered industries. We tell people it is about poverty. You may want it to be about poverty. Until working a long and successful career causes poverty, Social Security will not alleviate poverty.
 
And we pay now 10 times as much. So you are saying that an increase in life expectancy of 50% justifies a cost increase of 1000%, which is another 1500% if we actually want to get paid. Disability and OAS are separate problems. Both are heading for insolvency, but they are not the same thing.

No, I'm saying that Social Security should be re-structured to its original design in terms of age of eligibility. It's original design being that the age of eligibility to receive payments was several years higher than the average life expectancy so that more people would be paying into the fund than would ultimately receive payments. The tax rate obviously had to be increased as it was restructured over many years to account for the fact that it would cover vastly more people for significantly longer periods of time and with all sorts of other changes like spousal benefits.
 
And this at a time, when we should be downsizing SS, if not replacing it totally. It is a bad system and economists have known it to be so since I was a child. In the meantime our technology has improved so much that it is unbelievable, that we should still be trying to fix it instead of a total change.

SS is actually the most popular and successful of the "New Deal" policies. This is what our Republican President said about it when I was a child.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
Dwight Eisenhower
 
Social security is proof of what we can expect from a government program.
 
CRFB took the data, they just changed the description so that it doesn't actually track with the data.

Your argument is... that they had a different title.

Okay :roll: that totally obviates the point that they used SSA data, contrary to your claim.

Here is the part you are missing. No one is telling current low-benefit receiving retirees "Hey, if your benefit is below 125% of the FPL, then it's going to increase to that point"


Sure. We haven't reformed the system to make it better, I agree. But that isn't an argument that we couldn't. It's just the data point that we haven't.

. They get nothing. Your PIA is set at 62.

No it isn't. It's set at 65-67, whatever your normal retirement age is.


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Sure. We haven't reformed the system to make it better, I agree. But that isn't an argument that we couldn't. It's just the data point that we haven't.

The question isn't whether or not we can. It's whether or not we can without creating a massive poverty crisis because most of the baby boomers don't have the savings to retire above the poverty line.

No it isn't. It's set at 65-67, whatever your normal retirement age is.

It's 62.
 
Social security is proof of what we can expect from a government program.

It's what you can expect from the electorate. Would you vote for someone who says they'll either increase the number of years you'll have to wait for eligibility, reduce your payments, or deny you payment entirely? If not, you're part of the problem. At least 1 generation is going to have to take the bullet, but no one is volunteering.
 
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It's what you can expect from the electorate. Would you vote for someone who says they'll either increase the number of years you'll have to wait for eligibility, reduce your payments, or deny you payment entirely? If not, you're part of the problem. At least 1 generation is going to have to take the bullet, but no one is volunteering.

Social security was intended to be paid out to the folks who paid into it. Instead, the liberal politicians, from both parties, have used it as a kitty of free money to buy votes from the welfare class, by means of wealth redistribution..
 
Social security was intended to be paid out to the folks who paid into it. Instead, the liberal politicians, from both parties, have used it as a kitty of free money to buy votes from the welfare class, by means of wealth redistribution..

That doesn't answer my question. Would you vote for the candidate I described?
 
That doesn't answer my question. Would you vote for the candidate I described?

Would you vote for a candidate that would use Social Security for wealth redistribution?

I see your bait and raise you more bait.
 
No, I'm saying that Social Security should be re-structured to its original design in terms of age of eligibility. It's original design being that the age of eligibility to receive payments was several years higher than the average life expectancy so that more people would be paying into the fund than would ultimately receive payments. The tax rate obviously had to be increased as it was restructured over many years to account for the fact that it would cover vastly more people for significantly longer periods of time and with all sorts of other changes like spousal benefits.

The life expectancy of a baby is not meaningful to Social Security. You need to look at probability of reaching retirement and how long people live beyond retirement age. Here is an article on retirement age.

Why Politicians Want to Raise the Retirement Age for All the Wrong Reasons - IVN.us

The number 1 problem is probably the 1972 reforms which drove the system into insolvency within a decade.
 
Would you vote for a candidate that would use Social Security for wealth redistribution?

I see your bait and raise you more bait.

It isnt bait, but since you're avoiding the question I have to assume that you would not vote for a candidate if they supported an overhaul of social security that would negatively impact your prospects for a payout. In terms of your question, yes I would because that's what social security has always been. It was originally designed so that most of the people who paid into the fund would be dead before they could collect and there were no spousal benefits, so that money was ultimately distributed to someone else. It isn't as though the money anyone contributes to SS has ever been earmarked for that specific contributor and no one else.
 
It isnt bait, but since you're avoiding the question I have to assume that you would not vote for a candidate if thet supported an overhaul of social security that would negatively impact your prospects for a payout. In terms of your question, yes I would because that's what social security has always been. It was originally designed so that most of the people who paid into the fund would be dead before they could collect and there were no spousal benefits, so that money is ultimately distributed to someone else.

Social Security was never intended to be used for wealth redistribution.
 
Your argument is... that they had a different title.

Okay :roll: that totally obviates the point that they used SSA data, contrary to your claim.

Sure. We haven't reformed the system to make it better, I agree. But that isn't an argument that we couldn't. It's just the data point that we haven't.

No it isn't. It's set at 65-67, whatever your normal retirement age is.

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I recommended that you personally use SSA rather than think tanks. Here you are reading a label that is associated to data from the SSA that has nothing to do with that label. Yes CRFB is using data from SSA, but it is misleading you about its meaning.


"The PIA is the sum of three separate percentages of portions of average indexed monthly earnings. The portions depend on the year in which a worker attains age 62, becomes disabled before age 62, or dies before attaining age 62. "

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/piaformula.html
 
The fact that you don't see any value for your taxes, or don't recognize the value, doesn't change the fact that Social Security works like an insurance policy. If the program were privatized, you would still be setting up an automatic debit from a card or directly from your bank account to pay the fee every month, and it would still work like an insurance policy, at least until the criminals on Wall Street depleted it or screwed the pooch in the market and asked for another bailout anyway.

Then all bets are off.
Really, it's nothing like an insurance policy. In insurance, you pay premiums (not taxes) to protect you against a potential loss, that may or may not ever happen. You are spreading the risk among other policyholders.

Actually, SS has already been ruled to be a tax by the SC, so there really isn't any argument here.
 
The life expectancy of a baby is not meaningful to Social Security. You need to look at probability of reaching retirement and how long people live beyond retirement age. Here is an article on retirement age.

Why Politicians Want to Raise the Retirement Age for All the Wrong Reasons - IVN.us

The number 1 problem is probably the 1972 reforms which drove the system into insolvency within a decade.

I wasn't looking at life expectancy of infants. I was looking at life expectancy of people who had lived at least to the age of 21. In 1940 it was 53.9 for men and 60.6 women with life expectancy beyond 65 at an additional 12.7 years and 14.7 years respectively. Back then, you could only receive payments from the age of 65. Now the averages are 72.3 for men and 83.6 for women with 15.3 and 19.6 years beyond 65 and you can start drawing SS at 62. Adjusting the age of eligibility down instead of up as life expectancy increased is what has placed SS in peril.
 
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