The nation can afford Social Security but not health care system

[G2099]

Taxpayers owe more than a half-million dollars per household for financial promises made by government, mostly to cover the cost of retirement benefits for baby boomers, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

That is the equivalent of a $510,678 credit card debt for every American household. Payments on this delinquent tax bill must start soon if financial promises to the elderly are to be kept.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-24-retiree-taxpayers_x.htm

[Massacure]

1. The way that is written is to scare people and misleading though.

[Telly Savalas]

2. Huh?

This nation has the highest per captia GDP in thw world. If we can't afford a health care system, then how does every other Western democracy?

[Benhurst]

3. Bullshit! What the country can't afford is a corrupt

military/industrial complex.

"The World's Only Superpower." Yeah. Sure.

What a dump!

[liberal N proud]

4. What we have spent on war would treat the worlds health problems

But bu$h wants to be a "WAR" president.

[FogerRox]

6. Impeach & Indict, then we can fix the mess they made. Make America

A 1st class nation again.

[rman]

5. Some nations can't afford both, others can

Somehow the wealthiest nation on the planet can't, while more then a few less wealthy nations can afford both social security and universal healthcare.

[Warpy]

7. BULL. SHIT.

They've been pulling this crap since the 1930s, trying to scare the young into thinking they'll be in the poorhouse for supporting all the folks who spent their lives working to raise them and establish them.

The system was designed to be pay as you go. Reagan jacked the taxes up SIX TIMES to provide a back door tax increase on the poorest workers, putting 50% of what he collected by the end into the general fund along with income taxes. The "crisis" is that the government will no longer be able to rob the young of their OASDI overpayments as the boomers retire, and the true cost of two and a half decades of tax cuts for the rich and corporate will finally become known.

This article is garbage, just like it's been garbage for 70 years now, and it has nothing whatsoever tying it to ending the most expensive, wasteful, rationed and cruel health care system in the world.

[PA Democrat]

8. The federal government has robbed the social security surplus to fund

tax cuts for the richest Americans and the obscenely bloated military industrial complex. This article is extremely deceitful. The truth is that the US cannot continue to spend trillions on wars and the military.

Our military spending is more than that of the total of the REST OF THE WORLD combined. That's why we are the only developed nation that doesn't have universal health care.


http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm

[WinkyDink]

9. The Defense Budget puts the lie to this absurd claim.

[Toots]

10. Bullshit...Social Security has been running a surplus for years

Bush* decided he didn't want no stinkin "lockbox" and continued the raid on Social Security Surplus for bombs and killing....why do you post such crap?

[lpbk2713]

11. Wrong. The "nation" voted an inept cowboy into the White House

and it went all downhill from there, THAT is the problem. To suggest scrapping SocSec in favor of other benefits is falling right into their hands.

[BillZBubb]

12. Catapulting the propaganda???? It's RW bullshit.

The nation already pays for health care in a messy, ad hoc system. Fourteen percent of GDP is used for healthcare. Developed countries with national health care spend about half that percentage.

The nation could actually save a huge amount of money by going to a national health care system.