I meant bankrupt as in morally bankrupt, not monetarily bankrupt.
But no, it is not propaganda - Social Security is a pyramid scheme. End of story. And now there are more old people than young people. Social Security will be completely unable to support itself within the next 25 years. And given the current budget deficit, I'm not seeing where that extra money is supposed to come from. Unless you want to raise *my* taxes to pay for *other* people's benefits, which I am wholeheartedly against. *My* money should only go to *other* people when there are extenuating circumstances, but everyone gets SS.
And what is this business about private investors skimming off private accounts? All they mean by "private accounts" and "lockboxes" and all that terminology is that *your* money would actually go to *you* instead of going into a pool to pay other people (people who usually aren't anywhere close to being in your peer group, to make matters worse). This is not like me opening up a savings account where my bank gets to skim off all the profit they make by having my money on hand. Perhaps some people are suggesting that fucked up notion, but anyone with half a brain in their head knows that privatization does not mean private investors being allowed to skim off the top, it means me (*privately*) owning/handling my money.
I stopped reading your link after this:
Oddly, the Treasury has borrowed billions for every other reason; why not to pay back the Social Security it owes us?
Haha, yeah, let's just shift the debt from one place to another and that'll make it alright!
Yes, duh, privatization will incur a HUGE cost (and likely add to gross debt) because of its current *horrible* structure (repeat after me: pyramid scheme). The privatization method may run out of trust fund money faster, but it won't ever run out of anything ever again after that, because *you* will be keeping all the money *you* put into it. If they keep the scheme going the way they have it now (and I do mean "scheme" in the con-artist sense), there will NEVER be any financial security in it. Period. End of story. Any time there are more old people than young people, the young people will get fucked.
This is one of the main reasons I skew so heavily libertarian. Government functions as a whole, and it views itself strictly as a whole. The government didn't seem to have any problem tapping into SS funds when there was a little extra to go around to fund other programs. Most people on a small scale basis realize that that's a very stupid idea. When you're planning for retirement, you don't put 200 bucks in the bank, and then take 100 out when you're 35 to pay for a new TV. The bigger the government, the more excuses they have to divert money from where it belongs. And moreover, the less insight they have into where money needs to go. In a city with high homeless rates, more money needs to go into shelters and programs geared to the needs of those people. In a city with children doing badly in math, more money needs to go to after-school tutoring and programs geared to the needs of those people. Instead, right now we have all the homeless and all the poor math students being funded through two overreaching programs that can't possibly address the needs of a community, even on the state or county level, let alone the city or neighborhood.
The only shared tax I would ever support for something like social security is an additional tax that would be levied on the highest income levels and distributed proportionately into the *private* accounts of those with the lowest incomes. For example, those that make more that 500,000 in 2007 will have to toss, say, an extra 500 bucks in the pot, and that pot will be divided proportionately into the accounts of those who made less than, say, 1, 1.15, or 1.25 times the poverty level (adjusted for number of children or disability as well). Not only does that ensure that everyone is getting the money they have earned and deserve, those that need a little bit of help are getting a little boost every year. Take that boost cumulatively over 40 years (a reasonable estimate of the working lifetime of an American citizen) and that's a decent chunk of change stashed away. And no one had to worry about whether the funds would run dry or not!
These are the things that big, icky, sprawling, inefficient governments just can't do. Sure, of course they *could*, but they *won't*. And that's where my libertarian streak kicks in.
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