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Post by lar on Jul 28, 2016 18:24:04 GMT -5
At what point does Putin decide that Trump is a loose cannon and have the KGB silence him for good? After he loses the election? Mike Then we're stuck with the other goof unless Putin goes for a two-fer. Then, I think, it would be Paul Ryan. Maybe not be best but certainly not the worst. 'Course we would have to beat him black and blue until he promised to keep his grubby mitts of the social security we've all been paying for all of these years.
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Post by millring on Jul 28, 2016 18:45:53 GMT -5
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Post by lar on Jul 28, 2016 19:28:12 GMT -5
Ryan is wrong in saying that social security is funded by ". . . current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees." He's right about the funding. What he's wrong about is the payees. There are a lot of people receiving benefits who did not pay into the program.
I won't argue the point that there are fewer people supporting each recipient than there were years ago. I think he's probably right about that. What he and every other politician in Washington seem to ignore is that the social security tax is not part of the regular normal government income scheme. It's a specific tax of a specific group and for a specific purpose. It's not money we give to the government so they can spend it any way they want. It's money that we give to the government in trust (that's why the call it the Social Security Trust Fund) and we're supposed to get it back. It's a moral, if not legal, obligation of the federal government.
Had the politicians been able to avoid doing what politicians do and if they hadn't monkeyed around with who gets to receive benefits the problem wouldn't be the size it is now. It should have worked like a normal trust, money goes in and gets invested and the fund grows. The fund pays out to those who paid in. Sometimes those who paid in live longer than expected and get more than they paid in. Sometimes people don't live as long as expected and that offsets the long-livers. It's not complicated. And it was never set up like a real trust in the first place. Any Tom, Dick, or Harriett with a Sen. or a Rep. in front of his/her name can pass a bill that the government needs to fund and they government can "borrow" money from the trust. The term "borrow" seems to suggest that at some point in the future the money will be repaid. Sadly, government borrowing doesn't quite work that way.
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Post by fauxmaha on Jul 28, 2016 19:53:54 GMT -5
Lar, that's not how it works.
The "trust fund" is "invested" in a special class of Treasury notes. Your inference that Congress raided an otherwise secure system isn't true. The only thing that SS can do with excess funds is to buy Treasury notes.
The problem is, tomorrow is here, and now SS is calling on the Treasury for it's money. But the Treasury is empty. Worse than empty, actually. So the Treasury has no alternative but to issue new, general notes in order to generate cash to repay SS.
How could this have been handled differently? Short of structuring SS so that it could have invested excess cash in the stock market, I don't see one. But that ship has sailed.
The root issue here is that we've long been told that government spending is an "investment". We're now finding out the hard way that that is not true.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2016 21:15:23 GMT -5
Just keep adding zeroes. No one's calling the bluff. It'll be okay.
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