I think we have to get real and look at things as they are not as they appear to be the average annual income for the bottom 90% of Americans is $31,244
this is not an accurate portrayal of American's income and again I would urge you to look at the
Census Data. Your number is only accurate
for non high-school graduates
You do under stand that 33.3% of our population controls 90% of the nations wealth,right?
yup. you realize that income =/= wealth, right? for example, all of my fellow E-5's make roughly the exact same income as myself, but I have much greater wealth than most of them because I
save and do not go into debt.
Your right and since any thing that effects wages effects SS this IS the right thread to be talking about jobs and annual wages, So first I see no reason that reducing the minimum wage would increase jobs I know that is what conseratives would like people to believe but I am not buying it
well it doesn't matter if you would buy it or not - the fact remains that it is true. by dropping the minimum wage (though we could probably get more bang for our buck at this point by reducing regulatory costs), we make the poorest of our poor who have the least job experience and the least job skills employable, whereas currently we have a small population of the structurally
unemployable. not structurally "unemployed".
unemployable.
reducing the minimum wage will just add to the transfer of wealth, reduce the amount that is paid into SS and reduce the payments to SS recipients and it will reduce the amount that people can save
this is incorrect as well - those who are making above minimum wage are doing so because their labor is worth more than minimum wage. in addition, the notion that you seem to be running with that large numbers of people make minimum wage their whole lives long is rather unrepresentative of reality. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the middle of a jobs recession (where higher earners are more willing to take whatever is available), only 6% of the workforce is making minimum wage (as of 2010). Fully half of them are workers ages 16-24 - generally either teenagers, or folks working a part-time job as they finish higher education. I was one of these workers when I was a waiter in college; and I was actually making pretty good money at the time (the BLS does not count tips in it's wage figures - so waiters and the like are part of that 6%). Among the remaining half, a large percentage appear to be women who were full time homemakers when the kids were pre-school age, now working a part time job to bring a second income into the home - their husbands' income is typically that which the household can be said to be "depending" or surviving on.
Is this comedy central? The FICA tax is that Joe's money?
yes. it is not, however, part of his "
take home pay". That was the point - it is possible if we reform Social Security, that Joe can save and invest for retirement, retire with financial independence, and do so without seeing a dimes' difference in his take home pay. Joe get's the exact same check every other week that he has always gotten, and he doesn't need to save a penny of that check to achieve this result.
Tell me that Joe did not earn the money he is or Josephine is paying into FICA, any thing that comes out of my paycheck is money that I earned, if Joe and Josephine are both working and combined make 50g to 60g a year it still may be difficult for them to save money at least with SS when they hit retirement age thay will have an income that should keep them from sleeping under bridges and eating out of garbage cans
<- Single income household, and I'm saving just fine on a lower income than that.
Believe it or not life is not predictable people do run into problems that require extra money especially those who are living close to the cuff and if they have it in a private account they can get at it and will
that is correct, and that is why people should have emergency funds of 3-6 months of living expenses.
and before you declare that to be impossible, I had one of
those as well, again as an E-3 with a family.
that's the power of living on a budget.
Really explain to me where all of these Wall Street players get thier huge salaries and bonuses from when you can do that get back to me okay? Sorry I just don't trust the Goldman Sachs bunch, average GS employee makes 622,000 per year thats 26,000 employees making 622,000.00 per year. I bet they would support your plan
probably they would, even though it would technically raise their taxes.
Here are 5 easy painless ways to ensure the solvency of SS for the next 75 years
1.Increase worker and employer contributions by 1.1%; estimates are that this change alone would eliminate the program deficit and create solvency for 75 years;
fascinating. will it do so enough to account for the job losses that will occur as the result of this? however, this, too, does nothing to alter the fact that SS recipients are seeing an annual return of 1-2% on their money; which
remains abysmal.
2.Increase worker and employer contributions by 1% in 2022, and by an additional 1% in 2052; the 75-year shortfall is projected to be eliminated with this recommendation;
:lol: oooooh,
I see what you are doing! you are pretending that the General Fund is going to be able to pay out increasing amounts into the Trust Fund!
unfortunately, Medicare is destroying the General fund in 2022, so this isn't really what you call "possible".
3.Increase worker and employer contributions 1/20% annually for 20 years; this recommendation makes the change very gradual for both workers and employers, and has a significant effect in reducing the 75-year shortfall;
4.Raise rates based on the trustees’ most current intermediate assumptions of the tax rate needed to balance revenues and outlays. In effect, this recommendation increases Social Security contribution rates to correct future estimates of insolvency.
5.Enhance Collection of Existing Taxes. The tax gap is the amount of taxes that are legally owed, but not collected, by the federal government in a timely fashion or at all. The IRS estimates the total tax gap at about $345 billion a year, of which approximately $58 billion is in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes (most of the $58 billion is from Social Security payroll taxes). Increasing the collection of unpaid Social Security payroll taxes could significantly reduce the funds needed to make Social Security solvent over the next 75 years.
sooo... generally, increase taxes, destroy jobs, slow growth, and tell ourselves that if we just hit reality with a magic "I believe" wand, that it will produce more money for us.
Your Joe retiring with 46.5 G a year is a pipe dream for most working americans especially for the 90% who are sharing 10% of the countries wealth
without even checking your figure I know that it is a pipe dream only for most of the Boomers - because they have not saved for retirement like they should have. It certainly wasn't a pipe dream for their parents, who
did save for retirement (on smaller incomes, no less) and generally retired fairly well. That's the beauty of responsibility. Nor is it a pipe-dream for me -I should be retiring with a good chunk of change more than 45,000 a year, and all of it on a non top-ten-percent-salary. Because whereas most people are stupid and say things like "oh how could I possibly save with all my credit card debt and me needing a new car and large flatscreen television" and "we don't like to be constrained by budgets". I budget my money, and save for the short and long term. I am 28. I had my come-to-Jesus-you-are-being-stupid-with-money moment when I was 24, and we were about to have our first child. Since that time, I've got 30K in a Roth, 10K in an emergency fund, 10K in college savings for the boys (ages 3 and 1), and 37K in savings that we are socking away for when we buy a house. All of it on an E-3 through E-5 Salary, which is, of course
publicly available.
pipe dream my butt. it's a pipe dream only for those who don't choose to take personal responsibility for making it happen. at current, that is sadly not enough people.
Ask and you shall receive
ahhh.... you treated those figures as
starting salaries. in other words, the people in your example actually made much more than what you wrote down for them.
let's see what the actual
Social Security Administration says:
okay, if Joe started working last year at the age of 20 making (as in our earlier example), 25,000 with that pay raise (suggested by the SSA) of 2% a year... his monthly retirement benefit will be.......
$253.00 at age 65 (in constant dollars).
mind you, if Joe had instead been allowed to put merely two-thirds of his FICA tax into a personally owned account (leaving 1/3 to go to pay current retirees), he would have retired under this plan with a monthly retirement check of a little over $5,000 (also in constant dollars).
the math is very simple. Social Security offers a
much smaller (by several orders) rate of return than even basic index funds. over a working life-time, that equals
massive differences in the benefits that the two can provide.
