the cato institute explains why young people should be pissed off

[chequita guevara]

Exactly.

[Dr Strangelove]

IIRC everyone born after 1939 will pay more to social sceurity than they will get out of it. That said, I don't know where these wealthy old people are, because they certainly aren't showing up at my office. Say! I've just gotten a Jim Dandy of an idea! Let's start a Federal program that will force medical clinics having a higher than normal ratio of well-off coots to share the wealth! In exchange they can have some of my Medicaid patients!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Oh oh... stop agreeing with me quick... before someone sees .

[chequita guevara]

So, we got Dr. S down for universal payer. Excellent.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Oh oh... stop agreeing with me quick... before someone sees .

You think that's big news?

I have found myself agreeing with DinoDoc in this thread.

[David Floyd]

You think that's big news?

I have found myself agreeing with DinoDoc in this thread.

And me, which is probably bigger news.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by GePap
The point of Social security is not to make one rich, or to create furhter capital, but to insure a steady income.

I've repeatedly stated (and apparently been ignored) that in that respect SS fulfils that purpose extremely poorly when compared with 90%+ of the pension plans because it is consistently out-preformed by them when it comes to the creation of an income level that will allow you to maintain your previous standard of living. No one has really answered that other than to say that isn't the point of the program, which again serves as a strike against the program as a pension plan.

I also see little to no political will to institute the "simple" changes to SS you have been proposing in this thread.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I've repeatedly stated (and apparently been ignored) that in that respect SS fulfils that purpose extremely poorly when compared with 90%+ of the pension plans because it is consistently out-preformed by them when it comes to the creation of an income level that will allow you to maintain your previous standard of living. No one has really answered that other than to say that isn't the point of the program, which again serves as a strike against the program as a pension plan.

I also see little to no political will to institute the "simple" changes to SS you have been proposing in this thread.

SS is not just a pension plan. It's also an insurance plan. You're comparing apples to oranges.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by David Floyd


And me, which is probably bigger news.

UGH

[Agathon]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I've repeatedly stated (and apparently been ignored) that in that respect SS fulfils that purpose extremely poorly when compared with 90%+ of the pension plans because it is consistently out-preformed by them when it comes to the creation of an income level that will allow you to maintain your previous standard of living. No one has really answered that other than to say that isn't the point of the program, which again serves as a strike against the program as a pension plan.

I also see little to no political will to institute the "simple" changes to SS you have been proposing in this thread.

No you haven't been ignored.

Pension plans simply won't provide the broad coverage that SS manages and thus, they won't be as good at doing the job.

Compare it to health insurance and tell me if private markets manage to provide everyone with decent health insurance. Canada provides excellent health care to all its citizens for a fraction of the cost that the US pays (private plans included) to provide varying standards of health care to between 50-65% of its population. Exactly the same would happen if SS was abolished.

Social Security and other Welfare programs are in a large part public goods. As Che says, people are sometimes blinded to this fact because they've forgotten what life was like without one.

Most people don't want to live in a society where people are dying of easily treatable diseases and where the elderly live in poverty and face the indignity of relying on charity. Most people don't want to live in a society where a large section of the population has no stake in the social and economic system. Hence everyone pays into a central fund which alleviates these problems. It's compulsory because if it wasn't hardly anyone would pay. That's not to say that people wouldn't want to pay, but they would only pay if they could be sure that everyone else was and they weren't being taken for suckers. State compulsion solves this problem.

Of course each of us would be better off if everyone else paid and we didn't, but that's not a realistic option.

I'm not saying that it works well, and sometimes it doesn't. But that is an argument for reform, not an argument for abolition.

[pchang]

Read my sig

SS/Medicaid/etc. are all Ponzi schemes. Every generation of payers is getting ripped of by the prior generation's payouts. It gets worse for every generation and must eventually collapse. If you are ripped off, does that make it right for you to rip off someone else?

[Agathon]

Re: Read my sig

Originally posted by pchang
SS/Medicaid/etc. are all Ponzi schemes. Every generation of payers is getting ripped of by the prior generation's payouts. It gets worse for every generation and must eventually collapse. If you are ripped off, does that make it right for you to rip off someone else?

No it isn't. It's just an insurance scheme. One might as well say that insurance schemes rip off those who don't collect. In which case there would be no insurance schemes.

[Rex Little]

Re: Re: Read my sig

Originally posted by Agathon


No it isn't. It's just an insurance scheme.

Ri-i-ight. An "insurance" scheme which pays off people who never paid premiums (the original retirees when it was first introduced). An "insurance" scheme which pays off whether or not anything happens to you. Anyone who sells or writes insurance policies for a living would be insulted if his product was compared to Social Security.

It's a Ponzi scheme.

[Agathon]

Re: Re: Re: Read my sig

Originally posted by Rex Little

Ri-i-ight. An "insurance" scheme which pays off people who never paid premiums (the original retirees when it was first introduced). An "insurance" scheme which pays off whether or not anything happens to you. Anyone who sells or writes insurance policies for a living would be insulted if his product was compared to Social Security.

It's a Ponzi scheme.

Jesus Christ...

...that's essentially what it is. It's just compulsory risk sharing and risk sharing is what insurance is. That's why in Britain it's called National Insurance. All pension schemes are insurance schemes - they are insurance against dying young and running out of savings.

People who die young lose out, people who die old win - just like a normal pension scheme. The only difference is that it is compulsory and the reason it is compulsory is that private voluntary insurance would not yield as good an outcome overall. No private scheme can universally solve the problem of poverty among the elderly. None ever has, and there is reason to believe that none ever will.

You need to think again.

Of course the initial beneficiaries won't have paid into it. That's because the scheme has to start somewhere. This is no different than a private insurer putting up capital to underwrite the start of his business. In this case the state is the insurer.

[Ned]

For my understanding, Social Security payouts approximately equal its revenue from taxes. This differs from a trust fund where payouts are both from income produced by the res and the res self. In order to make Social Security like a trust, we would have to increase Social Security taxes above the level required for payouts and use that surplus to build a res that would eventually be able to supplement payouts with income from the res.

The problem with this thinking is that equivalent programs are already available to the people in the form of IRAs and 401(k) programs. A major problem with IRAs though is that the amount one can put into such are IRAs are woefully insufficient.

I would leave Social Security alone, but drastically raise the amount one can contribute to IRAs.