That’s my non-P.C. paraphrase of this William Saletan article in the WashPost titled: “Curse of the Young Old”:
I hope you have a long and happy life. I just hope your kids don't end up paying one-fifth to one-third of their incomes to subsidize your retirement and mine. Because that's what awaits them: more and more boomers living to age 65 and beyond, perfectly healthy but collecting checks for decades. To head this off, we need a radical change in Social Security. I'm not talking about privatization. I'm talking about rethinking, and possibly abolishing, the whole idea of payments based on age.How about this for a kick quote: “If you thought last week's budget fights over Iraq and Katrina were bad, wait till you see the bloodbath over retirement benefits.” Read the whole thing.
3 comments:
There have been huge productivity gains in the last fifty years, and there will be huge productivity gains in the next fifty years. We, as a people, actually will be able to afford Social Security if we fund it wisely.
Robert
No amount of productivity gsins can overcome the simple demographics. There are more people retiring and living longer than ever before and fewer people to pay their benefits. Unless of course you don't understand that people's SS benefits are paid from SS tax receipts on current workers.
If you ran a program like SS it would be called a Ponzi Scheme and you would go to jail for doing it.
I very much agree that we should switch the employer costs of FICA to a national sales tax. I would not shift the employer portion of the tax for domestic, or personal service, help however.
When people need money the most, the middle years, it is nice to know they wont have to pay for the care of their parents. A lot of the money spent on seniors through SS and thru medicare benefit, directly, the children and grandchildren of the senior.
Do remember, that American seniors were funding an exceptional, per capita, burden of the drug development cost of the whole world.
The new prescription drug plan helps reduce that disparity.
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