If they eliminate SS benefits entirely, do we still have to pay into it? Will they

[LiberalLoner]

just take the amount we generally pay and call it a regular tax now?

I can't see them giving up that amount of money. I believe they will eliminate SS entirely, and soon, but still require that we continue paying the same amount (or more.)

Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic here, but that's what I fear will happen.

[jtown1123]

1. They will means test it at a ridiculous point, i.e. pple who make $40,000 will be considered rich

so that it will be a welfare program and only really impoverished seniors will get SS. Everyone else will pay in and probably get nothing. Then people will get pissed that they aren't getting anything, so the program could be axed entirely.

[LiberalLoner]

2. Yes, that seems like a strategy they would follow...n/t

[LiberalLoner]

3. When they say "means test" - do they mean what you made WHEN you were working or

after retirement? I'm confused about that.

[jtown1123]

5. They average your lifetime earnings by taking what you made per month

for the highest earning 35 year period in your life, and use a formula from there. http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10070.html

What sucks about all these means testing proposals is that there simply aren't enough true wealthy people to afford cutting their benefits, so people start to be considered wealthy in the low 40s...these types of means testing proposals were in the Fiscal Commission plans, which Obama set up.

[CC]

4. They won't eleminate it

entirely, they will just privatize it. There is too much money in there for Wall St. etc. to not run it through their greedy hands,taking their cuts from it. We might get a pittance when they are done. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is old people are the one voting block that scares the crap out of them because they always show up to vote. It can be saved if the rest of us back up those that have been saving it for decades.

[SheilaT]

6. It won't get eliminated.

There's going to be a huge effort to cut back benefits, especially for those not yet even in the work force, but in the long run I don't see it happening.

Old people vote. Plus, I can think of any number of strategies old people can do to bring home to the Tea Partiers and the Social Security Deniers just what a bad idea it would be. Just imagine hordes of elderly invading the offices of Congresscritters and Senators, refusing to leave. Of course, after a while they'd be arrested. Then another horde can move in. And so on.

Old people moving back with their adult children, en masse.

There's a reason old folks often have a reputation for being crotchety. It's because we often are.

Plus, I've been hearing for at least thirty years now that Social Security is going to be eliminated. Unfortunately, if a lie is repeated often enough, people do start believing it. I'm also old enough to remember when many old people had no retirement or pension or social security, or only a trivial amount from SS. It wasn't pretty. I honestly don't think we will go back to that.