That hypothetical. The one you yourself presented.
It's not even an inconvenience, since you were offered a number of ways to avoid it and chose instead to enter the small barred room.
U.S. Social Security - Largest Ponzi Scheme - EVER
- Thread starter Demigorgon
- Start date
-
- Tags
- social security
That hypothetical. The one you yourself presented.
It's not even an inconvenience, since you were offered a number of ways to avoid it and chose instead to enter the small barred room.
Or of entirely restructuring, or of altering the rules,....
And since there's not way of "forcing" more contributions without the consent of the people, that's not "force" under any sensible definition.
If you don't want to pay social security taxes, call your employees and tell them so. They're in the book.
My understanding is that GM was specifically NOT trying to divide the pool of cash in such a way; there would still have been a monolithic pile of money from which checks were cut and into which pension contributions would be made.
The difference is that there would be enough in the pile (and therefore enough investment income) that the pile itself would be able to grow independently of the need for steady income from GM. Or at least, as much income as steadily. In financial-babble, it would have remained a "defined-benefit" plan instead of a "defined-contribution" plan (in that regard, it is completely unlike the "privatize social security" idea), but an independently wealthy one.
It's not really a hypothetical, it's a conditional, but whatever floats your boat.
That's pretty absurd. I guess we can all comfort ourselves during a mugging, since the "being shot" option isn't even inconvenient.
Really? The government can't raise taxes without my consent?
Oh, you said "the people," that doesn't apparently include me. So this mystical "the people" can consent to have my taxes raised.
I'll keep in mind this newspeak: Force is voluntary.
Yes, they can. In exchange, they agree to let you participate in the decision.
More newspeak: Might makes right is democracy.
boloboffin
Unregistered
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2006
- Messages
- 4,986
Wait, I was going off of this 2006 article: GM will freeze salaried pensions, shift to 401(k)s
But I was misreading it, wasn't I? The 401(k)s are only for new hires after 2001. Everyone else gets shifted into a new formula for calculating pension amounts, and I guess the endowment you're talking about applies to this lump sum. Which does sound even more like the conservative SS privatization plan, because weren't they saying the same thing? Older people who had paid into the system wouldn't have to opt into the privatization part, right? I assume the SS excess would have been invested to provide these benefits as the newer workers presumably chose the private accounts and drained the system down.
I suppose when you can't argue a point, it makes sense for you to misrepresent your opposition and call it "newspeak."
It is hard to argue a point when someone just makes stuff up.
- Doing something because of a threat of imprisonment isn't force.
- People making decisions for you, whether you want them to or not, counts as consent.
If you start to claim that 1 + 1 = 3 then there's not much more I can do but point out how absurd you sound.
It's not the same. One generation pays for the next oldest, pays for the next oldest, pays for the next......
It's no different than public schooling. If the supply of SS "investors" ever runs out, then we have much bigger problems than not having enough funds for retirement.
The real danger has nothing to do with SS, but in the public sector's ability to vote itself all the free wealth they feel like taking from private entities - mostly at the state and local level - but also the federal response which is to print more cash rather than cut government.
It's no different than public schooling. If the supply of SS "investors" ever runs out, then we have much bigger problems than not having enough funds for retirement.
The real danger has nothing to do with SS, but in the public sector's ability to vote itself all the free wealth they feel like taking from private entities - mostly at the state and local level - but also the federal response which is to print more cash rather than cut government.
So stop making stuff up. I'm not "forcing" you to type idiocies.
Otherwise, I will freely point out where your innovative use of terminology violates both common sense and the standard semantics of English.
Last edited:
Since when was social security intended as a personal bank account? What you put into it is what you should get out of it?
If someone told you otherwise, don't blame it on the politicians you elected. Blame it on your own misunderstandings.
If you think you should "get out" of social security what you put into it, but don't get it, will you decry those who do "get out" what they paid, because they fulfilled the conditions for receiving it?
Social Security is not a "Ponzi scheme". I know it sounds cool to throw out sound bits like that, but it is anything but a "Ponzi scheme".
If someone told you otherwise, don't blame it on the politicians you elected. Blame it on your own misunderstandings.
If you think you should "get out" of social security what you put into it, but don't get it, will you decry those who do "get out" what they paid, because they fulfilled the conditions for receiving it?
Social Security is not a "Ponzi scheme". I know it sounds cool to throw out sound bits like that, but it is anything but a "Ponzi scheme".
The moment you means test social security it becomes a welfare program and with the Boomers being the largest voting block in the country any politicians that passed it would be on the unemployment line in the next election. Social Security and future policies will not be based on cutting benefits or retirement age unless boomers are exempted, it will be based on raising the taxes required to support it. Boomers will see to that. The only hope for post boomer generations is the soylent green option.
I'd call that nonsense, except for the fact that I've seen much more factually accurate nonsense.
Even in a worst (rational) case scenario, post-boomer generations will still get about 70-80% of current SS benefits with no changes in current law or policy.
Remember that trust fund I was talking about earlier? The one with $2 trillion in high-quality assets? When "Social Security goes broke" as GWB put it in his charmingly typical (i.e. lying) way, in about 2040, the boomers will be in their 70s and 80s and in the process of dying out. At that point, SS will be reduced to only paying out from current income.
That does not mean that it will be broke, any more than you are broke if you have a steady and well-paying job but no savings account. Current projections are that the steady-state income for the next fifty years or so after that will be sufficient to cover about 70-80% of promised benefits. While you may not like living on only 70% of what SS now offers, it's far from "soylent green."
And, of course, that's based on demographic projections. While our projections for the number of retirees we'll have in 2040 are fairly firm (we know how many babies were born in 1985 -- or more accurately, 1983, since the retirement age has been raised once), we don't really know how many twenty-something-year old workers we will have in 2040 since they've not been born yet and we don't know what immigration policy will be like in the 2030s. The projections that the SS has published have deliberately been tarted-up using worst-case demographic assumptions for political reasons -- basically, so that GWB could try to sell his "let's privatize social security" plan, and so the 70-80% numbers, while credible, are conservatively credible and could be substantially larger if we see another baby boom or burst of immigration.
And the fact that baby boomers have already seen their retirement age increased (from 65 to 66) suggests that it's not as politically impossible to adjust boomer benefits as you seem to think. Granted, it's rapidly becoming less and less fair to do so (boomers are already starting to retire based on the plans they made in 1999, and changing the rules at the last minute would be deeply unfair, but there's still time, for example, to raise the retirement age by another year for people born after 1960 or so....
Bob Blaylock
Forklift Operator
It seems to me that the defining traits of a Ponzi scheme are:
Socialist inSecurity is a perfect textbook example of a Ponzi scheme. If a private citizen or company were to offer an “investment” scheme that works the way Socialist inSecurity does, he would very rightly be prosecuted and jailed for outright fraud. And in this case, it's made even worse by the fact that Big Brother doesn't even give us a choice. We are forced to invest in this blatant scam whether we wish to or not.
- Money collected from current investors is directly used to pay expected returns to previous investors.
- Investors expect to get more out of the scheme than what they put in.
- No actual wealth-generating activity takes place in between.
Socialist inSecurity is a perfect textbook example of a Ponzi scheme. If a private citizen or company were to offer an “investment” scheme that works the way Socialist inSecurity does, he would very rightly be prosecuted and jailed for outright fraud. And in this case, it's made even worse by the fact that Big Brother doesn't even give us a choice. We are forced to invest in this blatant scam whether we wish to or not.
mr rosewater
Muse
- Joined
- May 31, 2004
- Messages
- 610
boloboffin
Unregistered
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2006
- Messages
- 4,986
http://www.kleenex.com
ETA: Seriously, this reminds me of AE911Truth's claim that the WTC buildings fulfill all the characteristic features of a controlled demolition, a list that they have drawn up themselves. I guess you will be claiming "and some non-standard characteristics" in about the same time frame that they did.
Last edited: