Is there a better way of doing Social Security?
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@mayjay Thoughts?
Currently, the way the system works we will have to just keep increasing the amount paid in taxes or enforce a Chinese-type children law to decrease the population growth rate.
With that being said, we have time. I think I read a 2% tax increase will extend Social Security for another 30 years or something like that.
My suggestion, would be to phase out Social Security and introduce a slightly modified version of it. We still force people to save money. We will keep an 8% tax for that. The other 4% we currently get taxed (to make up the 12% tax), will be used to pay off Social Security years and years down the road. Social Security will need to be funded by the feds until it is paid off, but it eventually would. This tax starts for those who haven’t paid a dime into social security yet. All those who have paid into social security will receive it, in full. Those who will be apart of the new system, will get all of the money they put in, untaxed. But not a dollar more. I like to think of it as literally, a forced savings account. You will only receive what you put into it and what half of your employer puts into it. The other half of the employer match will go towards the costs it takes to run the program. Theoretically, health care will be free by the time this rolls around, so people who worked their entire lives should be able to retire on this amount. Once Social Security is 100% paid off, the 4% tax goes away and people then get to keep all 12%. A guaranteed interest rate of everyone’s funds will be 6% yearly no matter what. Any market gains on the funds will be placed into a separate fund to pay off any down years in the market.
It is very similar to social security, except that it doesn’t allow us to EVER run out of money. And people are putting away anywhere from 14-18% of their income, Tax Free. This would help impoverished people, I believe. Those who live at the poverty line receive barely any social security. Roughly $1,000 a month. Adjusted with their life-spans, they only receive about $240k in benefits. This plan would allow them to have closer to $345k that they could have right at retirement.
If we were to cap funds received by the top 5% and increase the interest rate somewhere near 8% we are talking about $500-$600k at retirement.
Of course there is a lot more too it, but the simple numbers look pretty great to me.
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One quick and sure way to fix Social Security. Have congress join the program and do away with their current retirement plan that pay them obscene amounts of money. They are vested after 5 years in the program (1 term senator and 3 terms congressman) and they can retire at 62 with 5 years, at 50 with 20 years and at any age with 25 years of service.
Have them join social security and see how quickly they fix the system. Same thing for health care, have them join AC and see how quickly the u fix it.
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@JayHawkFanToo Well that is WHO and the HOW you get social security to change. I’m looking for the WHAT do you change to make social security work better for (mostly) everyone.
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Actually a good system is the Rail Road Retirement. I have some poker buddies that work for the Rail Roads. From my understanding they don’t pay social Security. Not only do they get a pension yet if they are Lucky to be married there spouse gets a half pension of what their mate gets. For example if a railroader gets 4,000 grand a month for retirement. Their spouse will get $2,000, so between the both of them they’ll get $6,000 a month to retire on. Also believe it’s a 30 years of service and at 60 years old to be able to retire on a full pension.
I don’t know all the logistics. Do know they pay three tiers into the Rail Road Retirement. Also believe the Rail Road board (a government agency) that governs the retirement plan for all railroaders are allowed to invest a certain percentage of monies collected.
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@DoubleDD The Railroad does have a great pension. But they are coming after it right now. Problem is the Railroad has a stupid number of unions and none of them are strong. So if someone does come after that pension, it’ll be pretty easy to take it.
The railroad system probably wouldn’t work nationally either due to the pay discrepancy. Railroaders all make good money. So the system works because enough guys making enough money can all help keep the Pension fund afloat. They also know the number of people that will be drawing from the pension fund. Where, nationally, we didn’t plan for such a large growth rate or this size of a retirement boom to happen all at once. The Railroad will have people retiring and being hired consistently it’s entire life-span. So the ebbs and flows are predictable. One law allowing illegal immigrants to collect extra benefits could completely change the pension system on a national level overnight.
I’m just not sure that the Pension system would work for an entire country. At least, not if people aren’t willing to spend 30-35% of their paycheck on taxes every month.
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@Kcmatt7 I will have to think on this one, to give it the thought it deserves. Thank you for coming up with a provocative and interesting topic!
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The truth about what to do?
Here is one explation that I recall.
SS is not part of the government’s general operating budget. It is a separate trust fund that does not technically belong to Uncle. Uncle, who is reputedly just the effective trustee .
SS reputedly has no funding problem and never has. It has a fiduciary problem. SS is a trust fund that has reputedly always had more funding than it ever required for its intended purpose.
The problem has reputedly been (and remains) that the gubmint and it’s central bank owners run enormous deficits (for whatever mysterious reason) and somehow strip both the annual funding of SS and the corpus (if that were the correct word) of the SS trust to help pay for its overspending in other areas. It is thus always dependent on the trustee borrowing enough from the privately owned FED to make SS payouts to Americans at any given time
In short, the government TRUSTEE has borrowed social security’s money, left IOUs for the beneficiaries that pay in (each generation paying in for the next) and gone in big for domestic spying, undeclared wars abroad, massive appropriations gained through lobbying, and reputedly many trillions of Pentagon money simply unaccountably “lost”.
The solution appears obvious, and is, though it would hatch its own set of problems. Have the private owners of the Fed print enough currency (I.e., issue enough Fed debt notes) for the government to pay back SS all the money it has “borrowed” as trustee with IOUs, and, voila, the trust would be solvent and likely in a position to become a major lender and borrower in financial and capital markets. One infers SS was given IOUs instead of being allowed to keep its cash precisely to keep it from being such a massive investor inevitably reflecting the interests of its beneficiaries.
The SS problem is a kind of fake problem that obscures budget priorities Americans likely would not be willing to fritter away their retirement monies on.
Always reputedly has been since the 1960s, or 1970s.
To reiterate: its robustly solvent, if it were allowed to have its money back.
If one sets aside the major trust funds that are deceptively and incorrectly included as part of the Federal budget , which should never have had their monies drained and left with IOUs, then one begins to see the US budget for what it has become: a giantic national security sink funded by borrowing from the privately owned (but financially and militarily secured by the publc) FEDERAL RESERVE.
All roads lead to the FED and one road leads from the Fed to BIS (the bank of International settlements). But I digress.
Keeping SS effectively insolvent has the same net effect as keeping the USA insolvent. At any time, the American population can be threatened with catastrophic default for not going along with the hegemony building required for building a private global central bank system.
We are each a kind of PERMANENTLY INDENTURED SERVANT working pay off our national debts incurred by our government induced to run budget deficits and trade deficits to build a global hegemony for the private owners of the central bank, and enabled by borrowing from the PRIVATE OWNERS of THE FED.
There is zero conspiracy involved.
It’s all officially instituted.
SS is apparently one of many ways this indentured status has been accomplished.
This is the way I have had it explained to me.
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While the Fed has a private component insofar as banks are stockholders in the a Regional banks they have no decision making ability and the Fed is primarily a Federal instrument with members of the Board of Governors being nominated by the President and confirmed by Congress. It does have independence insofar as its decisions do not require presidential approval. By the way, the Fed does not print money, the Treasury Department does. Enough of that…who really cares…
Social Secutity is in real trouble and not just because of the money the federal government borrowed from the trust but primarily because the model is unsustainable. The system was created with the premise that most individuals lived into their 70s and the younger base kept growing, basically what we call a Ponzi scheme. People now live well into their 80s and the contributing base has grown considerably slower than anticipated and a good portion of the population growth is now due to illegal immigration that does not contribute to the fund and who after granted amnesty, which has happened before and will happen again, will be able to collect large sums after having contributed very little. Bob Dole led a restructuration of the system that extended its viability to what at the time they though it would be 2050, but we know now it will became insolvent much sooner. Unless a large change is made, people like me that are close to retirement will probably be OK, but our kids will not. As you know, retirement age is now 66 or one year later than the original 65, but considering how much longer people live, the age needs to be raised periodically and right now it should be close to 70; I and other saw this a long, long time ago and I have been advocating changes for the last 30 years…it is basic math.
More importantly, what does all of this have to do with KU basketball? I wish we could get back to talking KU basketball and leave other issues for other board not called KU Buckets. Just my opinion, of course, and much like private banks and the Fed, while I am a member of this forum, I have no decision making capability whatsoever.
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Why are we talking about this in a site section entitled “politics and world affairs”?
Howling!
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Is social security politics? It affects every one of us regardless of political affiliation, right?
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JayHawkFanToo said:
Is social security politics? It affects every one of us regardless of political affiliation, right?
Howling!
