Bush administration proposes to cut...

[WindowSill]

promised social security benifits by a third... (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45726-2005Jan3.html?nav=rss_politics)


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I got an idea, an idea so smart my head would explode if I even began to know what I was talking about.

[HBox]

"If this was a case of just price indexing and doing nothing else, frankly, some of the [opponents'] charges are pretty valid," John said. "But if you give the personal accounts as well, you're giving people the opportunity to make up the difference. Not everyone will do that, but a substantial number will."

And if they don't, old people die easily and by that time we should be able to reprocess their remains for the common good.



Who lives in a body bag under the sea?

[GodsFavoriteMan]

I like this quote:

"A person with average wages retiring at age 65 this year gets an annual benefit of about $14,000, but a similar person retiring in 2050 is scheduled to get over $20,000 in today's dollars," Mankiw said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. "In other words, even after adjusting for inflation, a typical person's benefits are scheduled to rise by over 40 percent."

Of course, that's assuming that in 2050's dollars that 20,000 is worth more than 40 percent of 14,000 in today's dollars. What kind of retards does this guy think we are?

<img src="http://home.comcast.net/~stan_ferguson/GFMSIGPIC_copy.jpg">
"Story goes these great big rats come scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkies."

[FUNKMAN]

they have to change the way the stock market works...

a company will profit 1 billion in 2003, Then in 2004 it only profits 800 million, so what occurrs in alot of cases?

1. the stock price goes down
2. people get laid off or have their benefits reduced
3. manufactuing plants are closed and moved overseas or across the border

so what's the problem? the company still made a profit of 800 million

the problem is the price of the stock, it needs to go back up to satisfy the shareholders


they should make laws where companies that are making a sensible ammount of profit should not be able to lay people off and reduce benefits

everyone is still getting paid and the company is still making a profit

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v91/SatCam/sig_funkmanstill.jpg ">

[HBox]

[quote]As pretty much all the sensible articles on Social Security have made clear, to the extent that we have a problem, it is not a Social Security problem, but an accumulated national debt problem. And this isn't just a looking at one side or the other of the coin issue, but a category difference.

There are various ways to illustrate this point. But the following, I think, is the best.

The United States has a bit over $7 trillion in accumulated national debt. You can say that's been built up over the history of the country. But overwhelmingly it was borrowed over what happens to be the span of my lifetime -- the last thirty-five years -- and especially over the last twenty-five years.

After 1980 we started borrowing money big-time to finance our deficits -- in large part because of tax cuts on high-income earners. However you want to slice it, we started spending substantially more than we were taking in in tax revenue.

So where'd we borrow the money?

This is from memory, so I may have the numbers a bit off. But I believe about $4 trillion of that debt was borrowed on the open market -- individual Americans have them in their investment portfolios, or pension funds hold them, or the Chinese, Japanese and the Saudis and others have them in bonds.

But about $3 trillion of those dollars we needed to fund the 1980s and 1990s deficits we managed to borrow closer to home. We borrowed it from the Social Security (and a few other government) trust fund(s).

Almost the entirety of President Bush's Social Security phase-out plan comes down to a simple proposition: finding out how not to pay it back.

Now, admittedly, this is an approach that the president is rather familiar with from his own business career at various failed energy companies. But it is, in so many words, a straight up con -- one of vast scale, and one which virtually no one in the media ever frames in just these terms.

Before discussing that aspect of the question, consider a hypothetical. Let's say there'd not been a Social Security -- President Bush's dreamworld. We'd still have had the same deficits. The difference would be that we'd have had to borrow from private borrowers in the US and abroad.

Think we'd just be able to decide not to pay them back? Not likely. The Joneses and the Smiths with their 401ks probably wouldn't like that. And the Japanese and Saudis probably wouldn't like it much either. Of course, defaulting on our entire national debt would also certainly trigger a seismic international financial crisis. So you can probably figure that no one would be a huge fan of it.

So why does the president figure he can get away without making good on the debt to the folks who pay Social Security taxes, who are overwhelmingly low and middle-income wage earners (since no one pays Social Security tax on investment income or wage and salary income over about $85,000 a year)?

Isn't it obvious? Because he thinks they're an easy mark.

If anything, the fact that a sizeable portion of our huge national debt is owed (in the aggregate) to ourselves would seem to be a good thing since it gives us in extremis at least some flexibility on repayment. But to the president this is a reason to abolish Social Security so the money doesn't have to be paid back at all.

As I said at the beginning of this post, the challenges we face over the next several decades aren't really Social Security problems but national indebtedness problems, though the issues are clearly related.

One obvious and immediate way to relieve long-term pressures on Social Security financing is to reduce the national debt ... by ending our habit of running huge annual deficits or even better by paying down some of our accumulated debt (there are complicated macro-economic questions related to this second point; but in general it's correct.)

But what has President Bush done? He's presided over the biggest fiscal turnaround in American history, taking the country from modest annual surpluses to the biggest deficits -- at least in non-adjusted dollar terms

[Recyclerz]

"If this was a case of just price indexing and doing nothing else, frankly, some of the [opponents'] charges are pretty valid," John said. "But if you give the personal accounts as well, you're giving people the opportunity to make up the difference. Not everyone will do that, but a substantial number will."



And if they don't, old people die easily and by that time we should be able to reprocess their remains for the common good.


Well, this shows those damn liberals that the Bushies are committed to Darwinism and recycling!


You youngin's better stop buying all them iPods and all that fancy imported chiba and start saving some shekels cuz one market downturn after Bush puts this into place y'all are gonna be responsible for buying the Depends and cat food for your own Grannies. :(



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[b]Rooting for the Rapture to happen soon, so I can have my country back.[b]

[FUNKMAN]

when it comes down to it "what the fuck does he care' if it works down the road or not. due to his wealth he will never have to care about his social security benefits for his family for generations to come.

the divide between rich and poor grows each year regardless of who is in office. it's capitalism and there is too much greed at the top and too many people getting fucked at the bottom.

then you create people who have nothing which means they have nothing to lose and have no problem flying planes into buildings or carrying bombs into crowds of people. or they enter someone's home or place of business and are willing to kill for a little bit of money.

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[A.J.]

And if they don't, old people die easily and by that time we should be able to reprocess their remains for the common good.

"Homer, stop reading that Ross Perot pamphlet!"

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