So, is there ANY chance I'll have Social Security in 20 years?

[Blue Gardener]

I saw a headline about dumbass wanting to pursue changes to Social Security. If I ready anything about I'll just go ballistic, so I thought I would check here to see what you've heard.
It would suck if I've been paying all this time to wind up with nothing.

[Sirveri]

1. SS and medicare are the first in line for him.

So says the main stream media.

Welcome to privatised health care and even deeper levels of national debt.

[pleiku52cab]

2. HELL NO - where do you think awol is going to get the money......

to finance his next - wars, corporate giveaways, rich persons tax cuts, etc. etc.

[2Design]

3. you will have something it is those of us coming up in 5 - 10 years that

are getting screwed

[Another Bill C.]

4. The biggest danger

to the Social Security fund is the government borrowing from that fund to cover deficit spending. It may be purposeful that Republicans are the biggest culprits here. I tried finding the exact amount owed to the SS fund but wasn't successful. I once heard 28 trillion dollars but that might be the entire national debt.

At some point this debt will be so large that the country has a choice between bankruptcy and repaying the SS loans. There will be some sort of emergency declared and the Social Security system will be dissolved.

Then we'll revert to the "good ole days" when old folks had to be supported by their children or carted off to the county work farm.

[robertangel30]

6. re:"The biggest danger"

ok, let them dissolve it, just pay me all the taxes I paid into it WITH INTEREST!!!

If the repuke-lickans don't want a revolution on their hands they will make sure we get our money.

[German-Lefty]

9. The numbers + why government privatization is crap

The Social Security Fund is supposed to save money from times money is coming in for times when the money flows the other direction, like when the baby boom retires.

I tried finding the exact amount owed to the SS fund but wasn't successful.
Here are great numbers: http://zfacts.com/p/654.html
So SS has bought 1.6T$ of the 7.4T$ US debt. That's no big deal.
What is a big deal is what SS owes us. The thing promises a retirement plan with a fixed retirement age and a monthly payment that scales up with average salaries. This is where you get that 28T$ or 50T$ number depending on who you talk to.

http://zfacts.com/p/477.html
"According to the Social Security Administration (pdf), in 2018, the program will have to start using the surplus built up over 35 years to help pay benefits. In 2042, the surplus will be gone."

Here's what you can do to fix the problem:
* raise social security taxes
Decrease benefits by
* raising the retirement age for eligibility. If people are living longer, maybe they should be working longer.
* correcting benefits relative to inflation not salaries which rise faster. (Greenspan idea)

Bush's idea is to get the SS not to invest in government debt, but to invest in the private sector. The argument is that the private sector should give greater returns.

The counter argument is obvious. The private sector loans the government money. Why should the government loan the private sector money? The reason the private sector buys US bonds is that they are perceived to be very low risk. If something in the market is generating higher returns, it has higher risk. We shouldn't be putting SS at risk.

Put it to a "conservative" in favor of it like this:
"So how about we have the Fed borrow 1T$ and invest it in the private sector. Wouldn't the Fed make the difference in the interest rates and come out ahead? Why stop at 1T$? You could keep borrowing money from the private sector and reinvesting it in the private sector until the interest rate on US bonds is the same as the expected rate of return on the stock market."
Such a system could obviously fail with the slightest downturn in the stock market. The Fed wouldn't be able to pay its bonds off without just printing money, but doing this would make it impossible to issue new bonds and blamo the whole thing would come crashing down.

The only places where it makes sense to loan government money to private industry are 1) when you're trying to subsidize one particular industry, like with small business loans or 2) the government has no debt and can't figure out what to do with the money, like Norway. Norway gets a bunch of oil money and doesn't know where to spend it, so it loans it to private industry.

[bemildred]

5. Touchy subject.

Fiddling with existing benefits will cause a political revolt.
Old people vote, and are cranky. So they won't just trash it,
unless they can sell it first, and it's fairly difficult to convince
old people they should eat dog food for the good of the country.
But they will try to meddle with the younger people, with where
the money goes and what they get for it eventually, and they will
try to give you "options" that allow you to throw it away on
Wall Street.

[Blue Gardener]

7. There will be a lot of old folks in 20 years

I'm 45 now, so I have a ways to go. But if there is strength in numbers, we'll be able to fight for what is owed us. There will be a lot of us "boomers" that are going to want back what we've been paying in all these years. At least I hope so.

[RawMaterials]

8. I heard an economist say if you pushed the age of

retirement back right now to age 73 then you wouldn't have the current problem financially. I think the retirement age should float with the current life expectancy, when SS was created the retirement age was set at 65 the current life expectancy age(at that time).

[amazona]

12. U.S. life expectancy is 77, most can't work long before then

You can only go so far with raising the retirement rate before you cripple productivity because, there is no getting around the biological realities that people slow down and you are cheating young people of their chance to advance.

They've already raised the age of retirement once. I'm blanking on the year but I know that my partner, born in 1964, cannot collect full retirement at age 65. It is already at age 67. He is in heavy industry! Most people in manufacturing, heavy industry, etc. are long since disabled by age 67.

[bemildred]

10. I can start taking benefits in 3 years.

I expect to get some, but don't feel I can rely on it in the long
run.

I expect that you trailing edge boomers, as opposed to leading
edge types like me, will have to raise hell, that attempts will be
made to finesse you out of some of what you have paid for.

There is no social security problem, and repeated studies have
shown that. There are elements in the government that don't like
the program and want to gut it and divert the money to things more
profitable to themselves and there friends. If we have money for
boondoggles like Iraq, then we have money for old people, it's the
same money. It's just a question of priorities. You have to figure
out (collectively) where their nuts are a grab them and squeeze as
hard as you can. Good luck.

[amazona]

11. i don't know I'm in the same bucket

If you save ten percent of your income for ten years, then in twenty years...you have enough money to live for two years in retirement. And most young people can't save anywhere near that amount because, they have to pay for education, establishing a household, etc. So it isn't realistic to expect people to go back in time and start saving for retirement at age 18 even if it were physically possible.

Now this is somewhat over-simplified because I am not allowing for interest or dividends ... I'm assuming that gains in inflation and taxes will wipe that out. But you get the idea. There is
no way to save enough money for retirement in the real world without Social Security. People just live too long beyond the point where they are strong enough to work.

So what happens in 20 years? My guess is that people would literally riot as in lock and load if they realized that they were going to be expected to lay down and die at age 67 or so. I think there will have to be some sort of entitlement pay-out to prevent violent revolution. Formerly middle class people get very nasty when asked to starve to death; see under the French Revolution.

[many a good man]

13. The problem's not Social Security

Government is financing its deficits by "borrowing" cash from the SS fund. After 2018 SS will need to start dipping into its surplus but there's nothing but IOUs. Government will have to start raising taxes dramatically to both fund government and pay off those IOUs. Or we can refuse to raise taxes and allow the entire monetary system to crash...