Soc Sec

Okay, so everyone is talking about Social Security lately. Since the purpose of this blog is for me to work out what my opinion is (or express it), I'll write about it.

First let me describe the situation as I understand it. This may be completely wrong but this is what I've got to go on.

SS has fewer and fewer people left supporting it. When it was started there were 30-40 people working for every retired person. Now there are 3 workers per retired person and that is projected to dwindle. To me that seems like an issue. In the teens of this century, SS is supposed to finally pay out more than people are putting in. That seems like an issue as well. The big question that everyone wants to argue is whether SS will run out of money in the 2040s or 2050s or 2060s or whatever.

Atrios was talking about the length of solvency. Krugman had argued that it would be solvent for 75 years. Atrios responded to some critisism of the by saying, "how many years of guaranteed solvency do we need to satisfy these people? 5000?" I would answer forever. Putting off the problem is not the right way to handle finances. It's like saying "No payments 'till next year? Next year will never come."

There are some crazy-complex arguments that say that SS will be solvent forever. I get too bored with the subject to actually figure out if these make sense, so I'll just go along with that. For the rest of this entry, we'll say that SS is solvent forever.

But of course that assumes that the "Trust Fund" is real. Talking Points Memo (not affiliated with Bill O'reilly) points out here that the trust fund holds treasury bonds and that those bonds must be honored. Hence the trust fund is real. Of course that puts even more of a debt burden on our government than is already factored in.

I might point out that the Gov't could decide that there is a better way to do things and move the SS trust fund back into the general fund, thus forgiving that debt.

Okay, so that is what I know about SS. Here is what I think about it.

I think that SS is stupid. It is the gov't forcing us to save for our retirement. I would like to take that money and invest it how I see fit with out gov't oversite. The Democrats great legacy basically says that I'm to stupid to save for my retirement. I would much rather have control of my money than allow the gov't to control it.

Dems *great* argument for SS is that it is also a type of insurance for disabled or orphaned people. That's stupid. If we want to have a "safety net" for those people, let's call it what it is, welfare. Make some crazy welfare program for them and we can argue the virtues of that. But including that in SS is basically dishonest.

In the SS sytem, if you earn more, you get more back out (theoretically). That is so dumb. If you earn more, you should have more money saved up. But this allows people to pretend that SS isn't just a well disguised welfare system. If we drop it back down to a welfare system, then people who need it will still get it but people who don't won't be sucking money from the rest of us.

While I'm on the topic, I'm not terribly thrilled at Bush's new plan. It just seems like more government mucking with my money.

Well that's enough for now.

mwz
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