Quote:
Originally Posted by jungle
Agreed, a carefully constructed safety net is a very good thing.
A monstrosity of spending forced on the public at large is not.
A climate of encouraging individual responsibility might go a long way to helping and encouraging people to plan for their retirement. Something along the lines of a mandatory 401k type savings account held in the name of the taxpayer might remove the temptation toward theft that has been consistently witnessed.
Some people can't handle their own affairs and government has proven untrustworthy in this regard, so where does that leave us?
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I agree with you that it's shameful what the government has done with the Social Security surplus.
But I disagree that a mandatory 401K type account can replace SS. For one thing managing such an account is beyond a lot of people. It just is. People would invest in single stocks and do things like move all of their money into the mutual fund that had the highest return the year before. The only way to avoid it would be to mandate what the investor could invest in, and that would first of all devalue the best funds and limit the returns on 'other' investing, and would second of all take away most of the gain that you or I could probably get from being able to invest that money.
For another thing, it doesn't take into account things like SS disability benefits and survivor benefits. If we eliminate retirement benefits from SS but keep the rest of the program in place, the taxes needed to fund that ALSO eat up most of the benefits we'd see if we could invest the retirement portion of the program.
My 2 cents.