The General Motors/Delphi saga is only a prelude to the battle this country will face when the government is essentially transformed into a money transfer station, moving massive sums of cash from younger workers to older retirees. From George Will’s “A right turn back to making cars”:
The bankruptcy of Delphi is another pebble -- a big pebble; Delphi has 185,000 employees worldwide, 33,000 of them unionized Americans -- in an accelerating avalanche of corporate decisions dismantling "defined-benefits America." As a result, intergenerational strife, which has long been anticipated, may at last be at hand: Delphi proposes cutting the compensation -- pay and benefits -- of younger workers from $65 per hour to $20 or less, so it can fulfill the promise to retirees of a fixed percentage of their salaries.The current structure of entitlement spending will lay a double-whammy on younger workers: it’s likely that payroll taxes will increase to support older Americans but when the Social Security and Medicare trust funds go bankrupt, automatic benefit cuts will go into effect. In other words, Americans under 40 right now will pay more and get less.
2 comments:
If the vested powers are trying to start an intergenerational war, they've made good progress.
If the younger workers have to sacrifice, so do the elders. Period. That means NO cost of living increases for at least 5 years. An immediate increase in retirement age (so they have to wait 6 months or a year, so what?), and, finally, some kind of means testing - an income over $30K a year after Social Security should eliminate that person. If you have kids that can pay for Mom or Dad, why the hell should the public cough up the cash? We cannot keep impoverishing our young to pay for the elderly.
If you have kids, they are the ones paying for social security. SS is not an insurance program, it is a pay as you go program. Those who sacrificed to have kids paid for the taxpayer that childless SS recipients take advantage of!
As a tax payer, why should I pay SS for someone who decided not to have children and also have to pay for my parents?
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