21–30 of 44 posts
He is wrong on the second count, nyt had an info thing some time ago where you could come up with a plan to balance the federal budget. It was easy to do without raising taxes.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/d...
I think a big part of it is more to see how you would balance the budget, and what trade offs you would make. I'm relatively comfortable with raising taxes (2%) and cutting spending(98%).
Fixing Social Security - it's always up for discussion and nothing ever gets done about it. The frustrating part is that the solution is somewhat simple, but politically it's untouchable. Here's my quick & simple solution for the problem: 1) Phase out Social Security benefits if your income level hits $50k that year. - This aspect of Social Security is perhaps most baffling - why does someone who is making $250k a ye…
1.) FYI - Your car insurance analogy falls apart in aggregate because some people do use it, but the element of luck is what you can't account for, so we use risk tables. There's no refund for you because other people got unlucky - you're paying for them to absorb your risk. Social Security isn't insurance - it's a progressive tax for the purpose of generating a small pention for everyone.
Military and "defense" costs far more than "just" $1 trillion every year. There are many many hidden costs and the massive expenses for the thousands of severely wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan that survived instead of dying because of modern medical technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S... This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense…
Fixing Social Security - it's always up for discussion and nothing ever gets done about it. The frustrating part is that the solution is somewhat simple, but politically it's untouchable. Here's my quick & simple solution for the problem: 1) Phase out Social Security benefits if your income level hits $50k that year. - This aspect of Social Security is perhaps most baffling - why does someone who is making $250k a ye…
1.) FYI - Your car insurance analogy falls apart in aggregate because some people do use it, but the element of luck is what you can't account for, so we use risk tables. There's no refund for you because other people got unlucky - you're paying for them to absorb your risk. Social Security isn't insurance - it's a progressive tax for the purpose of generating a small pention for everyone.
For example, consider a very rich person, with P(income < $50k/year) = 0.01. If SS were really insurance, he should only pay $50k x 0.01 = $500 + administrative costs. If bluedevil truly believes SS is insurance, and if we implemented his 1), then 2) would be utterly unnecessary.
This is a terrible article. The heart of the projected deficit is increased medical spending -- if you don't deal with that, nothing else matters much, and vice-versa. Social Security is projected to be in balance for decades, then modestly out of balance for some time -- there is no rush to adjust it, and when we do the adjustment will not have to be dramatic, because although the expenditures are huge, so is the de…
We are in the middle of a global economic contraction, it is not the time to be reducing spending (redirecting spending to useful infrastructure, sure).
The calls to cut Social Security are especially irritating. Thirty years ago, Reagan increased Social Security taxes to save the system. It worked, and the Social Security benefits are fully funded until 2037.
For 30 years, workers have paid extra into Social Security to keep it solvent long-term. Now a bunch of rich elites demands that benefits -- that they don't need, but millions depend upon -- be cut. That is a bait-and-switch of the highest order.
He doesn't even talk about Medicare, which is the real budget problem. You can tell if someone is serious about reducing the budget deficit if they have a real plan for Medicare.
Despite my disagreement on entitlement spending, I appreciate that he thinks military spending could be cut and tax rates on the wealthy need to be raised. Since he's wealthy, I appreciate that he is willing to make a personal sacrifice.
He is wrong on the second count, nyt had an info thing some time ago where you could come up with a plan to balance the federal budget. It was easy to do without raising taxes.
It might be easy to do in a spreadsheet, but that doesn't mean it's easy to do in a politically realistic way.
Military and "defense" costs far more than "just" $1 trillion every year. There are many many hidden costs and the massive expenses for the thousands of severely wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan that survived instead of dying because of modern medical technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_S... This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense…
Fixing Social Security - it's always up for discussion and nothing ever gets done about it. The frustrating part is that the solution is somewhat simple, but politically it's untouchable. Here's my quick & simple solution for the problem: 1) Phase out Social Security benefits if your income level hits $50k that year. - This aspect of Social Security is perhaps most baffling - why does someone who is making $250k a ye…
* Raise the retirement age
* Privatize a portion of the program
* Reduce benefits to a more sustainable level
* Decrease the rate at which benefits increase each year
Fixing Social Security - it's always up for discussion and nothing ever gets done about it. The frustrating part is that the solution is somewhat simple, but politically it's untouchable. Here's my quick & simple solution for the problem: 1) Phase out Social Security benefits if your income level hits $50k that year. - This aspect of Social Security is perhaps most baffling - why does someone who is making $250k a ye…
There are a lot of other options you left out as well: * Raise the retirement age * Privatize a portion of the program * Reduce benefits to a more sustainable level * Decrease the rate at which benefits increase each year I don't particularly like the options you laid out as it asks an already strained middle class to pay for benefits to the poor without the recipients making any concessions. But that's why the solut…
You can make anything sound politically bad by calling something an attack on the middle class. The thing is, you can define middle class however you want. Are people who make more than $106k a year middle class? They're in the top quintile of incomes. How about people who make more than $250k? They're in the top 2%.
Raising the retirement age will disproportionately hurt anyone who works physical jobs, who are already strained by the decline in construction and manufacturing. Privatizing the program will be a giant subsidy to Wall Street. Decreasing everyone's benefits will hurt the middle class and the lower class, and might take away a little disposable income from the upper class.