Wall Street Needs Social Security (SS) Money Far More Than SS Needs To Be Privitized [View All]

[Yavin4]

A thought occured to me the other day. There's a strong reason why the markets have returned consistently higher gains in the last 25 years or so. It's called demographics. Starting in 70s, baby boomers became professional workers, and then in the 80s, they started investing in the markets as a means to save for their retirement. Literally, since the 1980s, the bond and stock markets have been mostly a bir retirement fund for the baby boomers, for no other instruments are even available that can return enough money for retirement, esp. as corporations have stopped offering pension plans.

This current system is all well and good until the demographics shift. When the boomers start retiring, they will take their money out of the markets. The largest generation, population-wise, will all start to pull their money out of stocks and bonds and live on cash to pay their retirement costs as well as their health care in retirement. This will create a huge drain on the market. It will make stocks and bonds prices plummet.

The markets need a huge infusion of cash from somwhere to make up for the baby boomers pulling out of it. Enter SS privitization. Now, we're told over and over again that SS is in trouble because there will be more retirees than workers paying into the system. This is the doomsday scenario that the think tanks have peddled through the media. What they haven't told you is that this anamoly in the system was addressed years ago by a hike in the payroll tax in the 1980s which created a SS surplus. This surplus was even bigger during the Clinton years. Recall the much ridiculed Gore lockbox This surplus was big enough to overcome the anamoly.

However, the SS surpluses were raided by Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. These tax cuts were never enacted to help the wealthy. Rather, they were enacted to destroy SS. Thus, creating the need for privitization, which is nothing more than another Wall Street bailout scheme.

Correct me if I am wrong.