🚀 go-pugleaf

From: ross@raster.UUCP
>Like many other people, I believe that by the time I am old enough
>to collect it, Social Security will be long gone.  Meanwhile, SS
>takes a larger percentage of my income every year, with the maximum
>amount ever increasing.  
> 
>IS THERE ANY WAY OUT???

I think my father (a businessman) put it well once: "If you do not
wish to pay taxes, do not make a profit".

Beyond that I doubt you will avoid SS.

You might take some comfort, if you are not hopelessly hard-hearted,
that your SS does not go into some 'account' for your future, but
rather directly (more or less) into SS payments for current
recipients. This is how the system was bootstrapped and how it was
always meant to work. Therefore, the only way to let you out is to
stop payments to current recipients, not forego your future needs.
The hope is not that your SS 'savings' are not squandered in the
future, but rather that there are people working at that time who's SS
payments will be delivered to you.

You may be right, it may be eliminated before many of us collect but I
am not certain that the original problem (aid to the elderly, not the
only service of SS, but the main purpose) will have gone away. Will we
just be letting those who did not prepare for themselves to starve?
Perhaps. Or perhaps they will be on whatever we call Welfare by then,
the same thing except perhaps for the dignity of knowing that your SS
payment was the reward of a lifetime of work rather than charity.

Or perhaps there will be no welfare and the less fortunate will beg
and starve in the streets. Or perhaps there will be a nuclear war.
Or perhaps...

Perhaps it will give you some comfort to think of it philosophically
as I do: It never was your money. Remember when your employer said
"You like a fine young xyz, how would you like to work for me for
$XY,000?", well s/he lied, it was $XY,000 - SS - other_things, the
whole figure never was yours, you imagined it, you labor under a
fallacy. If you want more money there are probably much easier ways
to obtain it than bemoaning the SS system and trying to find a way
out (or is this a religious thing? I am assuming you just want more
money and figure not paying taxes would help you acheive that goal,
you mention wanting to buy a stereo with the saved SS money.)

Sorry, not meant to antagonize, I really believe most everything I've
said above in terms of myself.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University