I really should stop myself, but I was reading another one of those absurd Yahoo news reports. This one was in their Finance section, talking about Social Security. The news stories themselves are usually pretty innocuous stuff. Nothing that took too much thinking to compose, but if the author stays away from trying to interpret the facts they have copied from Wikipedia then mostly harmless. It is the moronic comments that get my blood pressure going.
Now the idiots who simply make fun of the the left, or the right for that matter, I can just gloss over. It is the ones who parrot solutions that they have no comprehension of that I find most irritating. You know the old adage. better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it.
And the one 'solution' that I keep reading is to privatize Social Security. I wonder how many of them (those not being paid by Karl Rove and his ilk) have any idea what that really means.
Put simply, the goal of Social Security is to replace some subset of your income when you are no longer able to work. It does that by levying a tax on both employers and employees, and investing the money in US government debt. That is nowhere near the highest possible return on the money, but it is the safest. The cost of overhead is somewhere between 0.7% and 1.0% (I have seen figures quoted in that range from a number of sources). How would you replace that.
Tell everyone you're on your own? That's like telling everyone that they have to be their own doctor! Imagine a minimum wage cashier in 7-11 being told to invest this money for their retirement. Stock market, gold futures, mutual funds, or any Ponzi scheme that comes along, it is all up to him.
I do invest for my retirement, and doing so intelligently is not an easy thing. I pay for advise not because I am stupid but because I am not a professional investor. I maintain a diversified portfolio of stocks and mutual funds. The older I get the less time I would have to replace this money. And if the market should tank, just before I have to retire, I am screwed. But I would still survive. If I were on the bottom rung of society, without the other assets I have accumulated in my life, it would mean homelessness.
How about government approved mutual funds? In order to be eligible for investment, they would need to meet certain criteria. We have seen just how well that has worked in the veterans benefits and student loan industry. For profit colleges with absurdly low graduation rates, who exist only to suck students dry and then throw them away have been running rampant for years now. Can you imagine the next time the debate for funding the people who would police these funds came around?
The people who are in favor of privatizing Social Security are the same ones who think we spend too much on food inspectors and who try to hamstring any attempt to rein in rampant abuses of consumers. They continue to block the appointment of anyone to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because they consider such things as contracts written in plain English to be an unfair burden on business. You really think they will regulate the investment vehicles for Social Security?
Privatizing Social Security is just code for taking the money and turning it into additional bonuses for investment bankers. People like me, who can afford to pay for professional advise, and have the education and the time to devote to monitoring their investments, will do OK. The people for who Social Security will be the difference between a modest retirement and living in a cardboard box, those are the ones that would suffer.
And the ones who are pushing these concept? They know that too.
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Showing posts with label social security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social security. Show all posts
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Primary the bastards
Social Security uses the CPI-W (Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers) to determine the cost of living increases. While this is applicable to the population at large, it understates the fact that the older you are, the more you consume medical services. As the fastest growing portion of that cost of living, this tends to understate the actual increase that retirees face in their cost of living.
This of course leads to the common problem among those social security recipients with the least supplemental income. That is the question, do I buy food, medicine, or heat this month? Which of these can I do without?
Now comes a proposal to use a different index for social security index, the 'chained-cpi'. This tends to understate the actual increase in costs even more. It does not kill social security, it just makes it slowly wither away until it becomes so insignificant that nobody will object when it finally dies.
But the big lie is that this has anything at all to do with deficit reduction. Social Security has not caused one penny of our current deficit. And at the current rate of growth, it will be 20 years before it does become an issue. And that 20 years could become 'the foreseeable future' if they would only eliminate the cap on wages subject to Social Security.
Now you would expect that the right would lie to you about why social security should be squeezed out of existence. But when the same people who swore to defend it start talking this way, then there is only one alternative. Primary them.
Every representative who calls themselves a Democrat that votes in favor of this lie should face a primary challenge from the left when they next come up for election. And every Democratic voter should let their representative know that is the price they will pay for betrayal.
Every one of them campaigned on "Social Security is off the table". Now the president has crumpled like a cheap suit, and many in the party are starting to waffle on their commitment. Either they were lying to us all along, or they really are that stupid. But if only I could get Obama into a poker game then I'd be set, and wouldn't need the Social Security.
Politicians of all stripes rely on your short memory. Don't let this one slip by. If they will screw you this way, there are no limits to what they will do to you.
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This of course leads to the common problem among those social security recipients with the least supplemental income. That is the question, do I buy food, medicine, or heat this month? Which of these can I do without?
Now comes a proposal to use a different index for social security index, the 'chained-cpi'. This tends to understate the actual increase in costs even more. It does not kill social security, it just makes it slowly wither away until it becomes so insignificant that nobody will object when it finally dies.
But the big lie is that this has anything at all to do with deficit reduction. Social Security has not caused one penny of our current deficit. And at the current rate of growth, it will be 20 years before it does become an issue. And that 20 years could become 'the foreseeable future' if they would only eliminate the cap on wages subject to Social Security.
Now you would expect that the right would lie to you about why social security should be squeezed out of existence. But when the same people who swore to defend it start talking this way, then there is only one alternative. Primary them.
Every representative who calls themselves a Democrat that votes in favor of this lie should face a primary challenge from the left when they next come up for election. And every Democratic voter should let their representative know that is the price they will pay for betrayal.
Every one of them campaigned on "Social Security is off the table". Now the president has crumpled like a cheap suit, and many in the party are starting to waffle on their commitment. Either they were lying to us all along, or they really are that stupid. But if only I could get Obama into a poker game then I'd be set, and wouldn't need the Social Security.
Politicians of all stripes rely on your short memory. Don't let this one slip by. If they will screw you this way, there are no limits to what they will do to you.
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Sunday, December 26, 2010
Putting a name to a story
I work in an area of the city where there are a lot of homeless people, and a lot of people living on the edges. Over the past few months, I have slowly become acquainted with one of them.
She is older than me, a while ago she mentioned that she is 74. I see her outside the building where I work most days. She is standing there with a paper cup soliciting spare change from the people waiting for the bus. I try to always have a dollar to give her when I see her.
Unlike many of the people I see begging in the neighborhood, I never see her smoking or drinking, and she never appears intoxicated. She is never carrying a load of possessions, so I suspect that she probably at least has a roof over her head. There are an abundance of residential hotels in the neighborhood, so perhaps whatever social security she receives covers all or part of that.
When I arrived at my building last Thursday, she was already there. It was before 7 o'clock in the morning. I don't recall her ever being there so early before. When I saw her I stopped a moment, and got out my wallet, pulled out a dollar bill. Then I walked up to her and handed her the dollar as I prepared to enter my building.
Reaching inside of her coat, she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. She wished me Merry Christmas and I think I thanked her, I don't remember exactly what I said. I put the envelope into an inside pocket of my overcoat.
When I got to my desk, I pulled out the envelope. It was a little crumpled, closed with a piece of tape. Inside was a Christmas card. The only thing she had written inside was to sign her name. It was Barbara.
Maybe her name is not Barbara, and she found the card already signed. I don't know. But I am am pretty sure that it was me she was waiting for to give the card to,
What kind of a world have we made, where just giving someone a dollar three or four times a week is so important to them? And what sort of a monster really believes that we should be solving our financial woes by cutting social security, and throwing more people out onto the street?
She is older than me, a while ago she mentioned that she is 74. I see her outside the building where I work most days. She is standing there with a paper cup soliciting spare change from the people waiting for the bus. I try to always have a dollar to give her when I see her.
Unlike many of the people I see begging in the neighborhood, I never see her smoking or drinking, and she never appears intoxicated. She is never carrying a load of possessions, so I suspect that she probably at least has a roof over her head. There are an abundance of residential hotels in the neighborhood, so perhaps whatever social security she receives covers all or part of that.
When I arrived at my building last Thursday, she was already there. It was before 7 o'clock in the morning. I don't recall her ever being there so early before. When I saw her I stopped a moment, and got out my wallet, pulled out a dollar bill. Then I walked up to her and handed her the dollar as I prepared to enter my building.
Reaching inside of her coat, she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. She wished me Merry Christmas and I think I thanked her, I don't remember exactly what I said. I put the envelope into an inside pocket of my overcoat.
When I got to my desk, I pulled out the envelope. It was a little crumpled, closed with a piece of tape. Inside was a Christmas card. The only thing she had written inside was to sign her name. It was Barbara.
Maybe her name is not Barbara, and she found the card already signed. I don't know. But I am am pretty sure that it was me she was waiting for to give the card to,
What kind of a world have we made, where just giving someone a dollar three or four times a week is so important to them? And what sort of a monster really believes that we should be solving our financial woes by cutting social security, and throwing more people out onto the street?
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