Yes, you put your money in and it will be there when you retire. I don't see anything that says it won't be. Of course no one foresaw the baby boom, which is the generation under discussion.
soylent green?
It's all about how you frame the argument. It's pretty convenient for people who dictate policies to frame it in such a way to make aging seem like some kind of greed scheme to steal money from their "children". Don't fall for this hype. The truth is if it wasn't for SS, many retirees would have to be cared for by their children. A major problem we face today is real wages for most American workers have lagged productivity for the past 40 years. That has surely effected the amount of money being put aside for this program.
Snip:
"It’s difficult to gauge the combined effect of slow wage growth and rising inequality since the two are related—the taxable earnings cap is indexed to average wages. It’s probably fair to say, however, that robust full-employment and pro-worker policies could eliminate half to three-fourths of the shortfall. These calculations don’t take into account other full-employment effects, such as reduced unemployment and disability rates, which are harder to estimate with available information.
- See more at: Wages and Social Security | Economic Policy Institute
Oh Lord! Please don't make me pay for my parents that raised me and cared for me! What a disaster! :rantoff:
That is actually the standard in most of the world. You should be asking yourself if it's moral to outsource monetary care of your aging parents to the federal government and tax payer, rather than taking care of your family yourself. Additionally, you should ask yourself if SS is preferred over personal savings.
I suggest 2 things (actual more but these the most obvious)
1. To go a means test. Yeah, rich old people will rage. But there is no reason to give social security benefits to millionaires. This would allow more for others who really need it.
2. "Retirement" USED to basically mean a person was too old to work anymore. The age needs to evolve upward (older). It really doesn't work for a person to pay $150 a month into social security for 40 years and then get $1500 a month plus medical care and the rest for 3 decades. The math doesn't work.
If a person wants to quit working when 65, they should save money to do so. Social security was never meant to be a pension. Rather an avoidance of abject poverty. The reason it would have to evolve to older ages is too many people came to believe social security is their old age pension fund.
The reason to evolve it to an older age is because the system can't afford otherwise and most people are still plenty fit to work at 65.
Um, things like social security become more important when one lives in the age of volatile markets.
After our last meltdown, a huge amount of middle class people lost value on such things as property and/or any kind of private investment fund. While those two things are necessary, social security has been the bigger saving grace for people in the US.
Also, people should pay it forward. Social security makes more sense than on people's working income solely, don't ya think?
Really? Perhaps you think that those in the trades can work past 65, but that poses other problems. The raising of the SS "full benefit" age results in ever more folks qualifying for the (even higher) SS disability check instead. For every senior that must continue to work, past the current SS benefit age, that is one less (good?) job available for another US worker. IMHO, we should not raise the SS full benefit age since it is already much higher than the gov't employee full benefit age, instead we should raise the gov't employee retirement age to match that of SS.
At age 60 I am certainly not able to work as much, as hard or as fast as I could a mere decade ago. I somewhat make up for that by working a bit smarter and recruiting (and training) younger helpers on occasion, but to expect a person of 65 (or older) to be able to stay on a framing, roofing, landscaping or plumbing crew is not really as practical as you make it seem.
Hmm. Old people, eh? As in those folks who didn't have the decency to die early enough, and are now an inconvenience. What should be done with them? I have some ideas:
1) Pass a law that constitutional protections no longer apply to persons 60 and older.
2) Deny them the right to vote, drive, own property or belong to a political party.
3) If any of them object, euthanize those suckers with extreme prejudice.
4) Confiscate their money and property to help pay off the national debt.
That ought to teach them to die at a reasonable age. Problem solved!
Really? Perhaps you think that those in the trades can work past 65, but that poses other problems. The raising of the SS "full benefit" age results in ever more folks qualifying for the (even higher) SS disability check instead. For every senior that must continue to work, past the current SS benefit age, that is one less (good?) job available for another US worker. IMHO, we should not raise the SS full benefit age since it is already much higher than the gov't employee full benefit age, instead we should raise the gov't employee retirement age to match that of SS.
At age 60 I am certainly not able to work as much, as hard or as fast as I could a mere decade ago. I somewhat make up for that by working a bit smarter and recruiting (and training) younger helpers on occasion, but to expect a person of 65 (or older) to be able to stay on a framing, roofing, landscaping or plumbing crew is not really as practical as you make it seem.
Hmm. Old people, eh? As in those folks who didn't have the decency to die early enough, and are now an inconvenience. What should be done with them? I have some ideas:
1) Pass a law that constitutional protections no longer apply to persons 60 and older.
2) Deny them the right to vote, drive, own property or belong to a political party.
3) If any of them object, euthanize those suckers with extreme prejudice.
4) Confiscate their money and property to help pay off the national debt.
That ought to teach them to die at a reasonable age. Problem solved!
In what way? Because you declare it so?
In three years, property values have mostly bounced back (unless you made an incredibly bad real estate decision), and investments have broken records. Are you telling me that someone that retired didn't have any savings to account for a recession lasting only 2-3 years? That just convinces me more that we shouldn't have such a program if reliance is so great on it.
I don't think any insolvent program is better than my savings, investments, or working income. Pay it forward? Seriously.
A strong case can be made for incentivizing people to retire EARLIER - thus opening positions for people to move up, and the young to get employment. The only real question is how you pay for it ..
Get rid of SS and incentivize personal savings instead of paying into a system we'll never have the benefit of using ourselves. It's really a flawed system to begin with. Not necessarily the fault of 'old people', just the same misguided social welfare BS that people have been blinded by for generations.
Which is why children should take care of their parents if they can't take care of themselves at that age. This is the standard in the rest of the world. Of course that would mean maybe they would have to give up cable, 55" tv, 40" rim impala, etc. #firstworldproblems
Well, yes, in a way, you're right Joko. That being said, and I'm not officially old yet, the SS system was in place well before most of us were born, and we had no choice as to whether or not to participate, so as far as I am concerned, I fully expect to get back what I have put in over the (so far) 40 years of my working life, and I still have another 12 years to go, assuming that I live to retirement age. Anyone with half a brain should have realized, even back when it was first instituted, that we would be facing this problem, but our government unfortunately decided that we had to do it anyway, and I see no signs of meaningful changes being instituted. Long term, we're pretty much screwed as a country, as far as economic stability goes.
If you think you will get back from SS what you put in, you are fooling yourself. It might be possible if you retire for four times the number of years you actually worked and paid SS taxes. Not many (if any) can say the can do that.
We need to remember WHY we have these programs or what old age was like without them because we are generations away from the horrors of the poor houses. Virtually every Western nation has retirement programs for the elderly because we were appalled by what is was like without them.
You WILL get you SS benefits by the way.
Those funds — a $2.7 trillion buffer built in anticipation of retiring baby boomers — will be exhausted by 2033, the government currently projects.
Those facts are widely known. What’s not is that the Social Security Administration underestimates how long Americans will live and how much the trust funds will need to pay out — to the tune of $800 billion by 2031, more than the current annual defense budget — and that the trust funds will run out, if nothing is done, two years earlier than the government has predicted.
No, CBO did not say Obamacare will kill 2 million jobsMoreover, the argument could go, this would hurt the nation’s budget because 2.3 million fewer people will pay taxes on their earnings. That’s certainly an intellectually solid argument — though others might counter that universal health care is worth a reduction in overall employment — but it’s not at all the same as saying that all of these jobs would be lost.
I assume they still must give up over 12% of their entire lifetime income to fund SS/Medicare as well
If you think you will get back from SS what you put in, you are fooling yourself. It might be possible if you retire for four times the number of years you actually worked and paid SS taxes. Not many (if any) can say the can do that.
Get rid of SS and incentivize personal savings instead of paying into a system we'll never have the benefit of using ourselves. It's really a flawed system to begin with. Not necessarily the fault of 'old people', just the same misguided social welfare BS that people have been blinded by for generations.