According to my calculations based on government data, such [typical] married couples [as I cite in my example] will begin receiving monthly Social Security checks that will, on average, total about $550,000 after inflation. They will receive health-care services paid for by Medicare that, on average, will total another $450,000 after inflation. The benefactors will be a generation of younger workers who are trying to support themselves and their families while paying taxes to finance the rest of government spending.
We cannot even remotely afford to make good on these promised benefits. Although our system of personal liberty, free enterprise and limited government has made us an affluent and upwardly mobile people, we are not yet a nation of [wealthy benefactor] John Beresford Tiptons.
The existence of so many million-dollar couples is not the result of elected officials carefully weighing the needs of senior citizens against the financial ability of younger workers to meet these needs. Rather, it is the result of decades of separate legislative actions by both political parties to liberalize retirement and health-care benefits, the sum total of which no one has bothered to calculate.
Come on, its also decades of the payments in being stolen. Can one imagine just how much money there would be in the fund if it had been carefully invested all these years instead of siphoned off.
Grandmother
Well that’s the point isn’t it. The money should have been invested and the profits used to pay the promised benefits. Instead the Congress and President spent it it.
Grandma has a good point. As a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, I still bristle when some news jocky suggests I am a blood-sucking leach for taking a Social Security check or using a medicare benefit. I have paid into both of these ponzi schemes for 40 years or so against my will. While this house of cards heads for the flames of hell, you still have Debbie Frizzie Hair, new DNC Chariman(?) rolling anyone who wants to reform these two atrocious programs. So who is the real enemy of the people here?
This is a faulty analysis. The proper analysis is if government hadn’t forcibly taken the $500,000 in payroll taxes that was confiscated from the typical married couple over their lifetimes, and they had instead been able to invest the money, what would their investment have been at the time they retired?
Instead of investing it, the government embezzled this money from our retirement and medical accounts and spent it. If this happened in the private sector, the persons responsible would be sent to prison.
The government created the retirement problems we are going to have, and now are claiming it is our fault, not theirs. People should be outraged.
“many retirees will collect double in Social Security and Medicare from what they paid in”
Please note the headline, makes it sound like it IS our fault. We’ve lived too long, drained the health care (altho no one ever notices that we return at least 10 percent of our monthly check in MEDICARE premiums) and just generally outfoxed the folk who make predictions. SHAME on us…
Grandmother
If one considers leaving the country better off, The greatest generation begat the worst generation. It is not like we didn’t know that the birth rate was falling, so that fewer would be supporting more and that the costs were skyrocketing. There was a recent op ed piece on wealth redistribution. A common charge of liberals is that because the ultra welthy have done relatively better than the lower classes, then the poor have been lost. This ignores the fact that all income classes have done better – I.e. the pie got bigger. But the op-ed piece asserts that what is goig on is that wealth is being redistributed from young to old.
I am at anglican men’s weekend (you men not here are missing out. ABp Venables has been great). When I get back, I will find the reference.
The good news for me, as a Gen Xer, is that it appears that Social Security is finally going to die. I never counted on getting any benefit from it, despite paying into it since the age of 14, so when it dies, all it means is that there will be one less tax being taken out of my pay and stealing from my wife and 3 children.
That’s right…my family suffers from this tax to pay for the support of others and we will receive no benefit because as of last year, and for the foreseeable future until it goes bankrupt, Social Security is paying out more than it is taking in.
This should come as no surprise to the Boomers. They were perfectly aware that they were a demographic bulge, that SS is a ponzi scheme, and that they kept electing politicians that were stealing the money.
I feel sorry for the [b] responsible Boomers[/b] that had their money forcibly taken from them too and that voted for different politicians…it isn’t their fault that their peers were a bunch of drug-abusing-freeloading-serial-monogamist-self-centered-latchkey-kid-making jerks! They did what they could to try to stop this, but there were just too many liberals supporting the “Great Society” ponzi scheme.
But hey, the Left all felt good about themselves because their “intentions were good”. That’s all that mattered to them.
I live in hope that my children won’t be robbed by Social Security and Medicare when they grow up as I was robbed. I am looking forward to the collapse of those two horrible, thieving, rip-off “entitlements”.
I sincerely wish that the Left had listened to the private accounts ideas being floated a decade ago, but they didn’t and here we are. As soon as my kids start working, I will be opening ROTHs for them and funding them as best I can so that they will not have to rely on or try to steal from the generation following them.
The way I read the Scriptures, a good man is supposed to leave an inheritance for his children’s children, not steal from them or rob their future. (Proverbs 13:22) So what does that say about the generation now that is stealing from their children through Social Security and Medicare? $14-15 Trillion in debt and a $1.3 Trillion deficit and we don’t dare fix Social Security and Medicare. The Republic itself on the very edge of financial collapse…and these sacred cows cannot be corralled within the confines of sustainable fiscally responsible policies.
I think we’re forgetting that Social Security is counted as taxable income…..or at least mine and that of my wife is. I am rated at 100% disabled by the VA because of service-connected injuries, and as a result, I receive VA Disability Compensation in lieu of Military Retired Pay. Do I consider this to be double dipping? No, not really, since I’m paid part of that income for service rendered to my country. It’s part of the contract that I voluntarily entered into with the U.S. Government and the American people. And I also paid into the Social Security system for every year that I was able to gainfully work…..including my USAF service. I am still paying taxes on at least part of my compensation; my Social Security. So at least I am paying some of it back.
And by the way: VA Disability Compensation is tax-free.
CD-13, thank you for your service to our country. You can triple-dip as far as I am concerned.
Ditto what the Captain said.
Just a “by the way”…my brother-in-law and I served in the same unit for years. He is now 100% DAV from injuries during service in Iraq. I know all about “concurrent receipt”, etc. Double ditto to what Captain Warren said.