This is cute... but also wholly retarded.
You shouldn't be trying to "save" Social Security; you should abolish it, pronto.
Yes, obviously you shouldn't hurl out taxed money to wealthy retirees, like another vampiric parasitic extraction system,... but you shouldn't confiscate productive people's value-creation ANYWAY.
It's like yeah, lovely, let's help some poor, helpless elderly. Amazing when they're, you know, relatively few and just returning from a war... less great when they are a fifth of your population, a rate that's growing RAPIDLY.
It's an insolvent, ridiculous system, and Boccia is out here trying to rearrange chairs on the Titanic
You have bigger problemsYou have bigger problems
Social Security is drifting toward a cliff, and Congress keeps pretending the shortfall will fix itself. It won’t. Absent reform, benefits will be cut across the board by roughly 23 percent within six years. That outcome would harm retirees who depend on Social Security the most — while barely affecting the living standards of those who do not need financial support in old age.
And honestly, nobody "depend on" SS. You have savings -- or at least would have if the fed gov hadn't been pilfering you for your entire working career -- and you have family, kids, and neighborhood communities, all of which would be richer if you stopped confiscating their shit.
Government income transfers should be targeted to those who need financial support — not used to subsidize consumption among well-off seniors at the expense of younger working Americans.
"This is an upside-down safety net.""This is an upside-down safety net."
Social Security, if it is to exist at all, should focus on preventing old-age poverty, not provide wealthy retirees with an ever-growing worker-funded annuity layered on top of substantial private savings. When benefits grow faster than inflation and flow disproportionately to those who don’t need them, the program drifts away from its stated purpose and becomes increasingly difficult to justify. [...] If Social Security is going to persist, its role should be limited to what market earnings and private savings cannot reliably provide
Unbelievable that anybody, crazy-ass anarchists like myself or die-hard bleeding-heart progressives, favor this shit. Abolish. Tomorrow.
Preserving benefits for those who depend on the program, while slowing benefit growth for those who do not, is the only way to reduce Social Security’s role as a reverse transfer from younger workers to wealthy retirees who do not need the support
At least in my experience of the US, there's a sensation that SS money is "your money." While this is obviously absurd, I think it's a legacy from how they passed social security: ie, it's not a tax, it's the government helping you save. They call it "insurance" and the money they take is a "contribution." I haven't read up on the history in a while, but I'm pretty sure FDR took this angle because a tax for this purpose never would have been accepted.
The result though is that people like my parents, who do collect SS and for whom it is not a meaningful contribution to their bottom line, feel like they are just getting some of their money back...finally.
It's a stupid system. As the article points out, they soon aren't going to be able to meet their obligations, so they'll either do new tricks to make it look like they aren't just magically producing the funds or they'll increase the "contribution."
It really is insane though, that I, with my three children who I'm trying to keep alive, and running my own business, am required to contribute heavily to this system, while my retired parents are pulling money out of it.
Is there anything like this in the EU?
This has always seemed so simple, which means they don't want to fix it. The two most obvious starting places would be easy political sells:
The reason Social Security sort of worked early on was that most people died before they could withdraw more than they had paid in.
There's a third element that I'd add to take a ton of pressure off the system:
Similar to child care, elder care should be a family obligation before it's a societal one.
These things make sense to me. Why do you think there is no appetite to fix it? It's like a painful open sore...
I always wonder about corruption when there's lots of money sloshing around and no one is interested in looking into where it's going.
There's also a lot of inertia against cutting senior benefits and usually the side of the argument that fits on a bumper sticker wins.
Yeah, family is a massive component — one high-income earner, another low or average — and instantly shove you into social policy territory: incentivize marriage, make spouses economically dependent on one another etc etc. do the contributions follow the earner or the family unit in case or splitup?
Basically every single European system operate like this — with various quirks and tweaks and nation-specific patchwork/hangover. Iceland and Netherlands (Denmark? Perhaps some more), as far as I know, are the only ones that keep substantial "real" assets in their systems — and by real, I mean stocks and bonds and PE/property nvestments — rather than like SS, a pure redistribution grab.
Tho, Iceland forces me to shove 15.5% or my pre-tax income into them (and heavily tax-advantages me another 6%), so compared to that perhaps your single-digit payroll contributions are acceptable??
Without SS you will have many elderly living in poverty.
You really want that???
Many will not save due to inadequate incomes, the cost of raising families and life crises.
Being independently wealthy at the end of your working life is sometimes as much about luck as good management.
You wait!
Here in NZ there is a universal entitlement for all people over 65 (as long as you have lived here at least 20 years.
It is not means tested but is taxed and because of our progressive tax system people with considerable other income sources pay up to 39% on the entitlement.
It is one the most efficient systems in the world and virtually all elderly have sufficient for a dignified old age.