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]

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.