Dearest, greatest, holiest!
Please give us all, the full heaven on earth!
I thank you, & I worship you.

For more information, please visit http://www.normism.org !

Dearest, greatest, holiest!
Please give us all, the full heaven on earth!
I thank you, & I worship you.

For more information, please visit http://www.normism.org !

“Of course, there can be no certainty about this.”

Political Liberalism, p. 68.

Snark aside, two points:
(1) Pointing out that many people who’re taxed heavily with the promise of a future benefit then fail to save and rely on the future benefit proves exactly nothing about how they’d behave in the absence of that program.
(2) Since retirees are often living largely off accumulated assets, focusing on income makes sense only if you’re being intentionally deceptive or obtuse. I’ll assume the former in the case of those who promulgate those figures, but in monkyboy’s case, I think the latter is probably more tenable.

Will might be wrong about all of this, but please address his arguments and show why he is wrong instead of attacking him as a hack.

Social Security provides one third of retirees with their sole source of income and another third with their main source of income.

Any poll you choose to look at shows only a small minority of Americans want Congress to alter SS.

Not even the right-wingers hide the fact that the push to change SS is funded almost entirely by Wall Street firms.

As posted above, the lowest quintile of Americans have a combined annual income of $345 billion. They also have no net worth.

The highest quintile of American families have a combined annual income of over $4 trillion and about $50 trillion in assets.

The problem is that the federal budget continues to grow and those who can afford to pay for this increase have been let off the hook. We are in debt $8 trillion and growing. The push to “reform” SS is just a smokescreen to draw attention from the crippling effects of Bush’s massive 2003 tax cut.

When Will offers up anything other than lines from Carl Rove’s talking points, I’ll be glad to counter it…

Seriously, Will, hasn’t he overstayed his welcome yet? I’ve actually stopped bothering to read a lot of your comments threads because I’m sick and tired of having to scroll past his brain-dead non sequiturs and slanders. He’s already proved he’s not interested in debate; why don’t you start deleting his posts?

I don’t know the solution to helping out America’s poor, but it sure ain’t the scam you’re pushing…

Now, as a matter of legal fact, the social security payroll tax is a tax. The Supreme Court ruled that SS was constitutional because it uses, on the one hand, congressional taxing power, and, on the other, spending power under the rubric of promoting the “general welfare.” There is simply no dispute whether or not thhe SS payroll tax is a tax. The question is whether a tax plus a set of non-guaranteed intergenerational transfers counts as insurance in any strict sense. The answer is that it does not. I admit that it is insurance in the loose sense, but then so is everything else, and the regular criteria about progressivity etc. kick in.

The first generation got a phenomenal deal. But there is simply NO WAY that the current cohort of workers is going to get the same ratio of benefits to tax dollar as the current cohort of retirees. THAT IS WHY EVERYBODY IS FIGHTING. Taxes will go up, future benefits will go down, or both. And that is the sound of current workers getting screwed.