Originally Posted by
FighterHayabusa
Don't forget that you STILL have to fund the retirement benefits of everyone on SS now. There's no investment account, grandpa takes almost all of that dollar you me and jungle put in as soon as it leaves our paycheck.
This is why a big portion of Bush's partial privatization plan was borrowing a bunch of money to pay the shortfall that would be caused if you and I started a mandatory 401k account - the shortage caused immediately from going from a pay as you go pension to a defined benefit pension. This borrowing portion tipped his hand in my opinion. Why is it ok to borrow now and not later for a slightly modified version of SS?
The proposal included rules that kept people from investing in single stocks, limiting you to a few index funds with very low expense ratios which would then be converted to an annuity at retirement age which would have probably would have amounted to more than Social Security. It was all a little too complex for the average joe and easily propagandized by the then scaremonger "party of no".
I didn't really have a problem with it actually, but not because I bought the BS that SS was about to collapse under its own weight.
SS
would collapse under its own weight in short order if the government couldn't rob Peter to pay Paul, print money or increase taxes. Instead it will merely be one of several social welfare programs that together will eventually bankrupt the country.
Although I'm a frequent critic of government social welfare programs, I realize it would be impractical or even immoral to end them overnight. Instead, we need to find ways to wean us off them over time. I wish I had the answers, but I don't. What I do know is this: I don't want any of them expanded and I don't want any new ones including ObamaCare or whatever it's called. Call me a "scaremonger" or whatever, but if healthcare "reform" goes down like they would
like it to, it will be the straw that breaks this country's back in more than one way.
On a related note, I was just reading the Constitution and the Declaration this evening and I couldn't find anywhere where it talked about "healthcare" being a right or role of government. Did they slip a new amendment in there when I wasn't looking? When exactly did "healthcare" become a right? If healthcare is now a right, can we make happiness a right too? Can we make it a right for all pilots to make wide-body capt pay too?