🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:07:17 +0000 (UTC), Merlin Dorfman
<dorfman@green.rahul.net> wrote:

>In ca.general Gunner <gunner@lightspeed.net> wrote:
>
>...
>
>> "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and
>> chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first
>> Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the
>> inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the
>> British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might
>> have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't
>> know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N.
>> and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this
>> time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not
>> just continued sanctions."
>> --Bill Clinton, July 22, 2003
>
>     And that's exactly what happened, and Saddam did let the UN
>inspectors back in, and they found nothing.  And the rest of the
>world believed them, and Bush said the UN inspectors were wrong
>and invaded, and found...nothing.  As the rest of the world (not
>blinded by ideology) knew, the UN inspectors were right.
>
>> Btw...being allowed to put 3-4% of your social security funds in a
>> private account is hardly "destroying the system"
>
>    It's not 3-4% of "your" Social Security funds, it's 1/3.  You
>see, Social Security is about 12% of "your" funds (6% from you and
>6% from your employer, unless you happen to be self-employed, in
>which case you have the honor to put the entire 12% in yourself.).
>    So 3% of "your" funds would be 1/4 of Social Security, and 4%
>would be 1/3 of Social Security.
>    But that's really beside the point.  The point is that the
>purpose of Social Security is to provide a minumum guaranteed
>income to everybody, regardless of the state of the economy, or the
>state of the stock or bond market, or the quality of investment
>choices made by the individual.  Social Security should do just 
>that--take the minimum in taxes necessary to provide that absolute
>floor of retirement income.  Individuals should have the complete
>responsibility for providing for themselves above and beyond that.
>The government should help, with tax deferral for IRAs, 401k's,
>etc., but that's all.

That's a very cogent argument.  But here's the problem - SS
is not actuarially sound.  It could be made so, but only
through changes (like lowering the benefits, increasing the
retirement age, etc.) that SS's biggest supporters oppose.
Private SS accounts would be actuarially sound, for obvious
reasons, but SS's biggest supporters oppose them, too.

Anyone who still has time had better have a strategy for
later life beyond SS.  You'd best consider SS like a
waitress considers her hourly pay - nice, but you can't
actually live on it.  Of course, it wasn't originally meant
to be something to live on - it was meant to be a buffer to
the problems of old age - not the solution.  In the past,
old people typically "retired" to live with younger family
members.  The old poor brought nothing with them.  SS
changed that and allowed all the old to bring something with
them.  Now some of us expect SS, by itself, to provide the
old with an independent living.  It wasn't meant to do that;
it never has; and it probably never will.  To do so would
place a very heavy burden on the working young - probably
more than would be politically supportable.

--
Robert Sturgeon
Summum ius summa inuria.
http://www.vistech.net/users/rsturge/