Ah, some more Boomer hatred. DEN FUCKING LOVES IT!
Also, short correction: SocSec doesn't "run out of money" = the acquired surplus fund (i.e., for about until mid-2000s it's taken in more taxes than paid out in benefits) will run out. The Luxury Boomer Communism redistribution gotta stand on its own two feet from about ~2032.
Americans have been hearing about the looming demise of Social Security for decades. The number of old people receiving benefits has been increasing much more quickly than the number of working-age adults whose taxes pay for those checks. Yet politicians have let the problem fester for so long that the public could be forgiven for thinking that the crisis would never actually arrive.
Obviously. Democracy is the delusion that everyone can live at the expense of everyone else...
"A program designed to reduce poverty has morphed into a transfer of wealth to the richest members of our society."
and worse:
A social safety net that so heavily favors the old and rich over the needy and young is probably not what most Americans would design if they were starting from scratch, but it’s what we have. The likeliest outcome of whatever Congress comes up with in the next six years is that same dynamic, only more so.
[Politicians elected this year] will have no choice but to come up with a way to save the federal government’s largest and most popular program, lest they be blamed for its partial collapse. The available solutions are politically tricky but not particularly mysterious. They involve raising taxes, increasing the national debt, and cutting benefits, or some mix of the three.
Nah, don't mix. Just cut benefits, primarily and especially for (wealthy) boomers. Then abolish the entire thing and try paying back what you stole from workers.
something flipped since then... #1528464
- Life expectancy up
- Congress voting above-inflation benefit increases
- Americans earning more
Tl;dr for the entire problem:
The average 65-year-old now has about 20 years left to live, up from 13 years in 1940. Meanwhile, the pool of workers paying into the system has not kept pace. Fertility rates have fallen, and fewer babies mean fewer workers in the future.
How does SS / Boomer Luxury Communism work?
The tax formula is simple: Each worker, along with their employer, pays 6 percent of their income, up to $184,500.
OK. What about benefits?
The Social Security Administration takes your highest-earning 35 years of work and calculates your average monthly earnings from those years, adjusted upward for subsequent growth in average wages. A progressive formula determines how much of that you’ll be paid monthly: Assuming that you elect to start receiving benefits at age 67, you’ll get 90 percent of the first $1,300, 32 percent of the next $6,500, and 15 percent of the remaining.
Very intransparent and confusing.
"Thanks to the wage adjustment and long life expectancies, most people receive substantially more money than they paid in."
Yes, we know. Boomer communism. Fuck. them. all
The economics of old age have changed a lot since the 1930s.
the biggest problem with these plans is not the new taxes—it’s what the new taxes pay for. Conceived as an anti-poverty program, Social Security today pays out most of its benefits not to the poor but to the middle class and the rich. The bottom 20 percent of older Americans receive just 7 percent of the total benefits.
...for instance:
If the public craves a trillion-dollar tax increase on the well-off, there are better ways to spend the money. The federal government already spends about six times as much for each elderly adult as it does each child, even though children and their parents are more than twice as likely to be poor.
Government shouldn't steal people's stuff and decide who gets what, but they certainly shouldn't pay funds to filthy boomers. Fuck em.
Uncapping the payroll tax would not close the Social Security shortfall, but it would provide enough money to pay an allowance of $4,500 a child to every family in the country every year.
Reforming Social Security by cutting benefits for rich people and raising them for poor people would make the most financial sense and return the program to its roots.
The final solution is quite simple. OFF THE BOOMERS.
Here's a variation on one of my previous ideas to fix Social Security:
Make it easy to claim old people as dependents and create large transferable tax credits for Boomer dependents. That way, my wife and I could claim our parents and, since we don't have enough taxable income ourselves, we could sell the tax credits to Elon Musk or whomever at close to face value.
The credits could be set to half or some other fraction of SS benefits.
The trick here is figuring out how to get you into a position of influence so you can get these ideas into the bozos in office.
Alright, I have a plan for that too but it's going to involve kidnapping @Cje95.
aw shit what am I getting kidnapped for 😂
A ruse
after getting ahold of The Economist mouthpiece, should be a piece of cake
Beautiful
This is very depressing. also frustrating. Social security seems like such a perfect example of a badly designed government intervention in society. Almost every aspect of it is a disaster, but it's also such a huge program at this point that it will take something like a miracle for it not to wrecking ball things for the next two or three decades until it's so despised that people finally get rid of it. Yay. looking forward to the future.
Oh, also: isn't social security income subject to income tax? So the government collects more revenue if it gives more benefits to people in higher tax brackets (ie wealthier people)?
Yes.
And, I suppose yes...? You're thinking that having wealthy Boomers on the SS payroll lets them claw back a decent bit (bc of higher brackets)?