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Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

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Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a millennial, I do. There are just too many easy mitigations here that will extend life several decades: - Remove the cap and tax income above $120k, just like medicare and income tax - Increased tax rate, possibly just on payroll not income (the employer-paid portion) - Limited forms of means-testing (Maybe, attenuated survivor benefits as your estate value clears a certain high mark like $3 million) - Eliminate…

Came here to say the same thing. There are some very sensible fixes to extend SS to younger folks. Medicare, however, is another story.

The easy way to fix Medicare is to get medical costs under control.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#92
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said this above as well, but our latest DoD budget is $700,000,000,000. I agree with the crux of your analysis. But I also think we literally can't afford to ignore how $700 billion contributes to a multitude of our problems.

I would be the last person to say that there isn't a lot of waste in defense budgets. But you can't spend zero on defense. And the United States also defends all of NATO and a lot of Asia as well as certain other allied countries. Let's say you could somehow shave a few hundred billion out of the budget without materially impacting our defense capabilities and obligations. That's not enough to fix our bigger problems…

No one said anything about spending zero on defense (straw man).

And if we can’t solve it completely in one shot, why bother at all? (false dichotomy/nirvana)

0 for 2 on your arguments there.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#93
post #55

We've known this was coming for a long time...as a Millennial, I don't expect to ever see a cent of Social Security benefits.

You'll receive social security. Benefits will be in tomorrow's inflated dollars but at today's amounts. I've been predicting huge inflation for a long time for the simple reason that housing has inflated so much. Housing is so unreasonable and house prices are so sticky (people hate to take a loss and most are on loans) that the only reasonable way out of the housing affordability crisis is for the rest of the econom…

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. I think this is what will happen as well. It also helps solve the pension crisis.

Not that it's a "fair" solution but it is a solution.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#94

We've known this was coming for a long time...as a Millennial, I don't expect to ever see a cent of Social Security benefits.

As a millenial, I'm eating a teaspoon of cat food each day to prepare my body for the day when it becomes my full-time diet.

There are cheaper sources of protein than catfood, sold for human consumption. This is a weird meme.

Though, if I was a retired person, I'd move back home in the mountains and eat trout and squirrel and deer meat everyday. Buy a lot and a trailer for a pittance. Get a library card.

God, that'd be a life...

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not wrong but for the sake of argument perhaps its better to look at the DoD budget through the political lens ... its a corrupt jobs program in which the government funnels money to a broad swath of American states and counties, mostly via defense contractors. Yes its incredible dumb and inefficient but many millions of people earn their livelihood, healthcare and pensions by building useless bombs, so its ha…

If only it's politically feasible to slowly redirect their activities to peacetime activities, like reassign a lot of that personnel to the Army Corps of Engineers, and have them fix America's crumbling infrastructure.

It does seem a little insane that we don't adopt the part of the Roman professional military system that was arguably one of the most effective.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#96

We've known this was coming for a long time...as a Millennial, I don't expect to ever see a cent of Social Security benefits.

As a millenial, I'm eating a teaspoon of cat food each day to prepare my body for the day when it becomes my full-time diet.

Typical, lazy millennial. You should be getting out there and catching your own birds, lizards, and other prey.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of military spending is building stuff to blow up. I rather pay people to build windfarms and trains.

Oh God So Would I. I'm on my phone otherwise I could list umpteen better uses of the money. But they all involve firing people then hiring people. MRE quality assurance however is not co-located or skill- transferable to installing solar panels in the llano estacado. And people losing their jobs are always going to be more motivated voters than people who might get a job.

Some jobs deserve to end. - like insurance sales jobs and ceo's, medical billing, and excessive military jobs that we don't really need. What value does insurance really have? It's a glorified red-tape filled billing system. All it does it take money, split it up to pay employees, and then give like maybe 40% to the actual doctors and hospitals providing the services (made up #, no idea what they really get) -- but then the hospital employees hundreds of medical billers to work w/ the insurance agencies and negotiate rates and procedures and get paid as much as they can.

One reason GBI/universal healthcare would be beneficial is because then we can have a reason to end useless jobs that we don't really need to have, and eventually (hopefully) we have post-scarcity, low-employment, and high-enjoyment because AI/Robots do the work, and we all live in varying degrees of middle-to-upper class life. Maybe we spend 18 hours per week working (the same as during the middle ages), and the rest of our lives we actually live.

The rich can still be uber rich and live in mansions and fly on their jets, but lets fill the millions of vacant homes, and make sure everyone has a home, basic comforts, and food.

Life is precious, we don't get much time. We spend 10 full years out of 90 working -- that's if you add up all the hours and divide by days/years.

Then you sleep 8 hours per day. That's 1/3rd of the day. 30 years of life gone to sleep. Now we're at 40 years gone -- 40 years that we do not get to keep at all for ourselves.. This is a middle-ages life-time. They only got 40 years total, and we waste all of that.

There's tons of other stuff we waste time on with school, eating, restroom, commuting to work, etc... That might add up to 10 more years. This means you may get 40% of your life --to claim for yourselves, this is ONLY if you don't have to ever work more than one job, and ONLY if you never ever work overtime or more than 40 hours per week.

If you work on side projects or moonlight projects, it's more fun and rewarding but you're also losing time spent with family and loved ones, or enjoying life.

This keeps me up at night, knowing I could die at any time, and never really have lived because of all the things I have to do just to make sure I make it through next month - financially.

I'm a freelance developer, but have months where I do really well, and others where I'm on the verge of losing everything, because my pipeline dries up. I'm hoping I can even it out, and make it work, because when it works the stress is so much less than commuting to a corporation.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#98
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your linked article: "Why, according to the OECD, is the US system so progressive? Not because the rich face unusually high average tax rates, but because middle-income US households face unusually low tax rates--an important point which de Rugy mentions and Chait ignores. How does the picture change if you take indirect taxation into account? That would make the US system look even more progressive, because the…

No, the real point of the article is that "according to the OECD, "the US system [is] progressive." The most salient feature of the U.S. tax system is that "middle-income US households face unusually low tax rates"-- i.e. the system is highly progressive. The U.S. tax system is progressive well into the top 1% of income earners (by contrast, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark have a relatively flat tax structure after abou…

Read it all the way to the end. Again, from the article:

"Should the US system be even more progressive than it already is, bearing in mind the skewness of the pre-tax distribution, especially at the very top? Maybe it should--but a steeper tax-band schedule is a dumb way to improve fairness and raise more revenue."

A progressive tax system is progressive in effect, not just in form. The author is saying that people who focus on the tax rate bands are barking up the wrong tree, because the US system already looks like one of the most progressive, even though it may actually not be.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#99
post #9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be because a lot of US politicians are ideologically opposed to any welfare program.

As are the countless people who elect them, even though those same voters as a bloc rely far more on Social Security than those who vote for the other party.

If you poll those same voters on individual social welfare programs, particularly Social Security, you'll find they support them.

It's really upsetting.

Re: Social Security says system's costs will exceed income this year

#100
post #99
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As are the countless people who elect them, even though those same voters as a bloc rely far more on Social Security than those who vote for the other party.

If you poll those same voters on individual social welfare programs, particularly Social Security, you'll find they support them. It's really upsetting.

If the voters are so dumb that they're voting directly against their own stated interests, then maybe they shouldn't have those programs.
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