a valid question...

[acroyear]

"if Social Security privatization is supposed to be about making "younger workers" better off, as Bush has said, will he please explain why piling yet more debt on their backs should make them grateful?" -- Editorial on Social Security reform at the 'Post.

Comments

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I want to buy out of the ponzi scheme and then make charity payments to cover the poor bastards who were forced to stake their life savings into it, and who were fooled into thinking it would cover their retirement. I'd prefer paying for an honest bail-out to pretending that the system isn't broken until maybe I could be the one depending on a bail-out. Ponzi schemes are illegal for everyone else, I don't think that the massive scale the federal government used to make it work should make it ok for them. Bush has shown a complete lack of financial restraint so far, but apparantly even he can see a con-job for a con-job. Once you get this far into the game, there's no easy way out. Do we pay for it now, soon, later, or hope to pass the problem off to our kids? I'd rather just fix the mess now.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

yeah, but the issue in passing off the problem to our kids is the fact that we're passing a very different (and potentially less manageable) problem to our kids. fix SS now and find that the debt is so out of control that nobody can fix it...or worse, run up the debt and deficit spending to an irreversable point and then find that nobody will give us credit anymore...

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Our parents bought into the ponzi scheme. Now we are stuck with having to pay for it. No matter what we do, many of them failed to take steps to cover their retirement, because they had been scammed into thinking it was paid for. So, being as our shared values say we can't let them starve, we have to cover their bad decision. The money is lost. It's gone. Now, we can admit that and try to find an answer, which yes, will involve either us (people working now) paying money, or passing the debt along in some way, or pretending that SS isn't a scam, and making the problem bigger.

Our budget is an issue, but it's not this issue. We can't put off this problem because of other problems. If we do that, this problem will never be solved. It's never a good time to tackle a major money problem, especially one that is on maintenence, there's always something more attractive to spend the money on. We spend the money now, we fix it, and that debt is money we pay off over time. It's just a debt, so we have to tighten our belts some. Not a big deal. We don't pay it, and we end up with a huge population of elderly people with no money, looking to a small population of young people and demanding food, shelter, and medicine so expensive that it will make the young people wish that the old people just wanted big screen TVs. I can't see zero retirement savings as the managable problem to hand off to our kids. Ponzi schemes suck, but they suck worse when people lose their life savings, and that's the situation we're in now.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

and actually the problem today was one that couldn't have been predicted back then. the numbers that justified SS at the time were based on a population growth figure that made sense at the time, but didn't account for education leading to planned parenthood, improved health care extending the lifespan, and birth control causing the birth rate to hold relatively steady. (America grew from 210mil to 280mil from 1970 to 2000, compared to planet-wide growth from 3 billion to 6 billion).

had America grown at the rate of the rest of the world, the population between 20 and 40, paying for those who are 60, would have been 2 or 3 times what it is, and likely the money would be there no problem.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

It would have worked longer, but ponzi schemes always break down. What could have worked is if SS had been a bailout for the poor (as originally intended), and not a universal retirement plan.