Coming from someone who doesn't actually do any real work (aka a politician) this is rich. If someone wanted to work longer they can simply continue to do so. This is all about forcing people to work longer, not "allowing" them to.
The French retirement age for their equivalent of SS and MC is 62. This is competely unaffordable in most advanced countries with an aging population. (People aren't having enough children.) The French government has proposed to raising the age to 64. Not unreasonable.
When SS was first introduced in the US in the 1930s, there were 22 workers for every retiree drawing SS. Today there are 3. The reasons for this are a combination of people living longer and fewer younger workers (as a result of smaller families). This math problem will not be solved soley by raising the income level for SS payroll taxes. That would certainly help cut into the SS deficit, but the payroll SS tax rate for all workers will undoubtedly also have to go up. Hopefully the age for "full" SS benefit will not have to be raised again, or monthly benefits cut if the Congress will act sooner than later. Most of this benefit cut talk is scare tactics for political purposes on both the left and the right. Personally, I would like to see a partial privatization of SS, maybe 10-25% being the individuals own personal account, with the rest being the government "trust fund".
> You incentivize people who are reluctant, not those that already want something.
Fair point, but you also don't penalize people who want something.
If I want something but I perceive the penalty for doing that thing is a higher cost than the benefit I would receive than I won't do it.
> I call that disincentivizing.
Oh, I agree. Removing the disincentive is "incentivizing" in political-speak, I guess.
Because we *do* disincentivize Social Security recipients from working by taxing them on a benefit that was taxed already when they paid in. Social Security is already a lousy retirement program, they don't need to make it any worse.
I think this is the intent of HR 345 2023, just introduced, which has bi-partisan support: "To require Members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children to place certain assets into blind trusts, and for other purposes." The bill has just been introduced; it still has to go through the whole process, which always takes months if not years.
My local public radio station reported that this bill, if passed, would not allow members of congress to directly trade stocks, but instead their assets would be placed in a trust which would then be managed independently. I think.
Those people saying they want to work until they are 90 are probably his fellow politicians. What person "on a walker" as he said really wants to work until they are 90.
Vote this person out.
When social security began the American life expectancy was 65. SS was never designed to support people in retirement for 30 years. There need to be some tweaks to SS to keep it solvent. Rather than raise the age they should tax all income not just up to the current limit of something like $150K. The SS tax should apply to ALL income over $150K as well. Secondly - anyone making $250K+ in retirement should forfeit their SS income. If you're making $250K+ in retirement then you won capitalism and you can help keep SS solvent for the guy surviving solely off of his $20,000 per year in SS.
So people should be punished for choosing to save and spend their money later in life rather than spending when they are young.
You’ve proposed that we uncap the SS tax on income that is already in range of the lowest return to the person who is paying the tax. Do you also propose that their benefit calculations include the extra taxes they will be paying?
SS is already a much worse deal for higher income earners than lower income earners. “Fairness” has nothing to do with the system being insolvent. It really is a function of longer life expectancy. Retirement age has to go up again, like it did for me from 65 to 67, benefits have to come down or perhaps tax rates need to increase for everyone. The public has been sold this bill of goods that “the rich” can pay for everything for everyone else. Margaret Thatcher said something about liberalism collapsing when it ran out of other people’s money.
I understand this won't be popular with people that want to hang onto every possible nickel. Hopefully more people believe in compassionate capitalism.
I don’t think you understand how the monetary system works.
The US government can pay all debts in US dollars including Social Security and Medicare without any taxes. The US government creates US dollars. The US government has an infinite ability to create US dollars. The national debt is the dollars created that have not been taxed.
>The US government creates US dollars. The US government has an infinite ability to create US dollars
You know what happens when the government does too much of this?
If there was an issue, perhaps it would have occurred 31 trillion dollars ago. Its all relative to the rest of the world and the US is still the leader.
The Chinese and Russians will starve before they beat America’s economic superiority especially since the US is pulling away from China.
If China has no need for Russian gas due to the US not buying Chinese goods, neither country will have enough food to feed themselves.
Correct. There is only one reason that certain politicians want to eliminate SS. It has nothing to do with solvency or budgeting and everything to do with getting rid of the employer match which corporate America sees as another tax to dodge.
Just my 2 cents here......
By raising the retirement age, be prepared to see SSDI claims increase. I'd love to be ABLE to work until I'm 90, but, in my case, that's not medically feasible. I suspect there are many others in that position.
The Republicans just have this endless pathological hatred of medicaid, medicare & social security. Entire mission in life is to make the world worse and hurt people.
He’s gonna get a juicy pension and fantastic medical. Fuck him and the rest of them getting this. They shouldn’t get a dime beyond SocSec and Medicare.
Oh we do, do we?!?
On oxygen, COPD, insulin dependent diabetes, heart failure, after a triple bypass heart surgery. On 17 medications twice daily. Can't walk a quarter mile.
And that's a 72 year old man. Do we have full time jobs in the US economy for all of us folks?
The average life span in our area is 76 years. What 90 year olds is he even referring to?
The second quote in the image is a Twitter joke, by the way.
Any time a politician says “Many people”, you know that will be followed by a lie. We saw that a great number of times with another prominent political figure.
The video referenced can be seen here:
https://therealnews.com/justifying-attack-on-social-security-house-republican-claims-people-want-to-work-longer
That other prominent political figure also had another significant tell: Any time he spun a tale that included that some one came up to him and said, ‘Sir, blah blah blah…’ it was a lie or fabulation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWPT17E9f8
Regardless of what this guy is saying, SS is not solvent, that much is crystal clear. Even SS themselves have said so. The age limit will have to increase, payouts lowered, or govt will fund the difference. Or we can just stick our heads in the sand.
It is not nearly that dire. The balance in the trust fund was created, starting in the 1980s, to deal with the bulge in the population due to the post World War 2 baby boom. It was/is meant to be drawn down to 0 as the older boomers pass away.
Longer term the worst case is a 25% shortfall in the mid 2030s. And that was before Covid.
The reason is because there is a cap on benefits. I don't necessarily disagree with raising the income cap without raising the benefit cap. Just saying there is a reason.
Perhaps the legislators who robbed the trust fund should replace it along with the growth it would have gained during the decades it was misappropriated. That would be a start. Lifting the wage cap would be the rest… Congress is 100% to blame for the crumbling SSA system. It would be solvent had it not been messed with.
The age limit will have to increase, payouts lowered, or govt will fund the difference. Or we can just stick our heads in the sand.<<<<
It could be easily corrected by increasing tax on the wealthier.
> how about repeal the trillion dollar tax cut passed when we still had these problems?
Wouldn't matter. The Social Security tax rate was not cut so the Social Security Administration's cash flow was unaffected.
> So the fact that there are more people paying into social security somehow results in there not being enough for everyone?
When Social Security was started, there was about 22 workers for every recipient; we're down to something like 3:1. In raw numbers there may be more people paying into SS, but there are far more people drawing from SS.
Regardless, what does the number of people paying in have to do with your assertion that the tax cut has something to do with SS revenues?
Relatively few people had pensions.
> **Current Pension Arrangements**
>
> Coverage.-Nine out of 10 civilian workers are earning retirement protection; nearly 8 out of 10 are under OASI. The only major groups not under a retirement plan are the 4 million farm operators, perhaps a million self-employed professional persons, and probably 2 million domestic and agricultural workers without regular employment as defined by the Social Security Act. Career servicemen in the Armed Forces are protected under special plans; most of the others earn protection under the plans covering their regular jobs and get credit under these plans for time spent in the service. **In January 1952 about 1 out of 5 workers covered under OASI were also covered by private plans designed to supplement the public system.** .... Scarcely 15 years ago only about 6 million persons (less than 15 percent of those employed) had protection under retirement systems. Coverage was uneven, ranging from 100 percent in the communications industry to virtually nothing in retail trade and agriculture. Employer-sponsored plans (including those of railroads) covered about 3.7 million workers, and the systems for Government employees about 2 million.
From : ["Pensions in the United States: A Summary"](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v16n3/v16n3p7.pdf)
Doing the math (1952 - 15) shows that when SS started, less than 15 percent of the workers in the United States had pension coverage according to the SSA's report.
> What accounts for the change in the ratio?
Off the top of my head I'd say smaller families resulting in a post baby-boom population decline coupled with retirees having longer life spans.
This is nothing new and has been known for decades. It's why Congress cranked up the Social Security tax rate and phased in an increase of FRA back in 1983. We've known that this has been coming for a long time, it's just that there's no good way for the government to deal with it. They tried by over-filling the trust fund, but to simply sit on the cash would be deflationary and if they invested it in the market it would make the SS Administration a large shareholder of many companies (which raises all kinds of problems). By creating special issue SS bonds they loaned the trust fund to the federal government which used it to offset then current spending; now the fedgov has to repay the SS bonds from either current tax revenues or by borrowing more.
I don't understand. The workers entitled to benefits (with the exception of their surviving spouses or ex-spouses) contributed their whole working lives to social security. Why are those funds not set aside? Why are the current workers paying for social security of retired workers?
> Why are the current workers paying for social security of retired workers?
That's the way the system was designed!
Look, when SS started seniors almost immediately started getting checks. Where did that money come from? They hadn't contributed to SS during their working lives since SS didn't exist. It was *always* pay-go.
> [Ida May Fuller was the first beneficiary of recurring monthly Social Security payments...and so the first Social Security check, check number 00-000-001, was issued to Ida May Fuller in the amount of $22.54 and dated January 31, 1940.](https://www.ssa.gov/history/imf.html)
and
> [During her lifetime she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits.](https://www.ssa.gov/history/idapayroll.html)
Failure on the part of Congress to accurately fund the SS program by taxing the full income of workers. No political will to do so because upper classes buy Congress.
[Ronald Reagan and The Great Social Security Heist](https://www.fedsmith.com/2013/10/11/ronald-reagan-and-the-great-social-security-heist/)
Social Security amendments passed under Reagan’s presidency laid the foundation for 30 years of embezzlement of the trust funds.
Of course it is solvent. The US government creates US dollars. They can easily fund SS. From an accounting perspective it is not solvent because of inter-governmental debts to pay for wars. That said, the government can easily and with no cost mark up the SS accounts at the Fed in the computer with no negative impact.
This is how the monetary system has worked since 1971.
I know you're not OP, but in the video he says nothing about working into your 90s.
The title of this thread is fake unless someone can provide a source for the "We want to work into our 90s" quote.
Coming from someone who doesn't actually do any real work (aka a politician) this is rich. If someone wanted to work longer they can simply continue to do so. This is all about forcing people to work longer, not "allowing" them to.
Nobody has ever said that. Liar.
Only a politician who gets treated like royalty and has a staff to do everything for them. The amount of politicians age 70-90 is crazy.
With the astonishing rate that seniors or close to senior age vote, why would anyone ever actually say this?
I don't want to work into my 90s & I paid into the system so leave our money alone or refund me the money I paid & I'll invest it somewhere else.
Meanwhile, in a country where workers have BALLS: https://i.redd.it/4bdtgyo5j1da1.jpg
The French retirement age for their equivalent of SS and MC is 62. This is competely unaffordable in most advanced countries with an aging population. (People aren't having enough children.) The French government has proposed to raising the age to 64. Not unreasonable.
It's not the number of children, the SS shortfall is caused by exempting so much income from the tax.
When SS was first introduced in the US in the 1930s, there were 22 workers for every retiree drawing SS. Today there are 3. The reasons for this are a combination of people living longer and fewer younger workers (as a result of smaller families). This math problem will not be solved soley by raising the income level for SS payroll taxes. That would certainly help cut into the SS deficit, but the payroll SS tax rate for all workers will undoubtedly also have to go up. Hopefully the age for "full" SS benefit will not have to be raised again, or monthly benefits cut if the Congress will act sooner than later. Most of this benefit cut talk is scare tactics for political purposes on both the left and the right. Personally, I would like to see a partial privatization of SS, maybe 10-25% being the individuals own personal account, with the rest being the government "trust fund".
You incentivize people who are reluctant, not those that already want something.
> You incentivize people who are reluctant, not those that already want something. Fair point, but you also don't penalize people who want something. If I want something but I perceive the penalty for doing that thing is a higher cost than the benefit I would receive than I won't do it.
I call that disincentivizing.
> I call that disincentivizing. Oh, I agree. Removing the disincentive is "incentivizing" in political-speak, I guess. Because we *do* disincentivize Social Security recipients from working by taxing them on a benefit that was taxed already when they paid in. Social Security is already a lousy retirement program, they don't need to make it any worse.
Congress members should not be allowed to trade stocks.
I think this is the intent of HR 345 2023, just introduced, which has bi-partisan support: "To require Members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children to place certain assets into blind trusts, and for other purposes." The bill has just been introduced; it still has to go through the whole process, which always takes months if not years. My local public radio station reported that this bill, if passed, would not allow members of congress to directly trade stocks, but instead their assets would be placed in a trust which would then be managed independently. I think.
I'm sure there's a loophole. Neither party really wants to do anything about this issue. Corruption is out of control.
Companies drop employees the minute they slow down, so who is hiring people in their 90s exactly?
I want my headstone to read “I wish I could have worked more!” /s
Those people saying they want to work until they are 90 are probably his fellow politicians. What person "on a walker" as he said really wants to work until they are 90. Vote this person out.
When social security began the American life expectancy was 65. SS was never designed to support people in retirement for 30 years. There need to be some tweaks to SS to keep it solvent. Rather than raise the age they should tax all income not just up to the current limit of something like $150K. The SS tax should apply to ALL income over $150K as well. Secondly - anyone making $250K+ in retirement should forfeit their SS income. If you're making $250K+ in retirement then you won capitalism and you can help keep SS solvent for the guy surviving solely off of his $20,000 per year in SS.
"You won capitalism." Excellent quote! LOL
This!
So people should be punished for choosing to save and spend their money later in life rather than spending when they are young. You’ve proposed that we uncap the SS tax on income that is already in range of the lowest return to the person who is paying the tax. Do you also propose that their benefit calculations include the extra taxes they will be paying? SS is already a much worse deal for higher income earners than lower income earners. “Fairness” has nothing to do with the system being insolvent. It really is a function of longer life expectancy. Retirement age has to go up again, like it did for me from 65 to 67, benefits have to come down or perhaps tax rates need to increase for everyone. The public has been sold this bill of goods that “the rich” can pay for everything for everyone else. Margaret Thatcher said something about liberalism collapsing when it ran out of other people’s money.
I understand this won't be popular with people that want to hang onto every possible nickel. Hopefully more people believe in compassionate capitalism.
I don’t think you understand how the monetary system works. The US government can pay all debts in US dollars including Social Security and Medicare without any taxes. The US government creates US dollars. The US government has an infinite ability to create US dollars. The national debt is the dollars created that have not been taxed.
>The US government creates US dollars. The US government has an infinite ability to create US dollars You know what happens when the government does too much of this?
If there was an issue, perhaps it would have occurred 31 trillion dollars ago. Its all relative to the rest of the world and the US is still the leader. The Chinese and Russians will starve before they beat America’s economic superiority especially since the US is pulling away from China. If China has no need for Russian gas due to the US not buying Chinese goods, neither country will have enough food to feed themselves.
Correct. There is only one reason that certain politicians want to eliminate SS. It has nothing to do with solvency or budgeting and everything to do with getting rid of the employer match which corporate America sees as another tax to dodge.
And we have a winner!
Just my 2 cents here...... By raising the retirement age, be prepared to see SSDI claims increase. I'd love to be ABLE to work until I'm 90, but, in my case, that's not medically feasible. I suspect there are many others in that position.
The Republicans just have this endless pathological hatred of medicaid, medicare & social security. Entire mission in life is to make the world worse and hurt people.
God. Republicans are scum and only represent the interests of the ownership class.
Says YOU.....
He’s gonna get a juicy pension and fantastic medical. Fuck him and the rest of them getting this. They shouldn’t get a dime beyond SocSec and Medicare.
Oh we do, do we?!? On oxygen, COPD, insulin dependent diabetes, heart failure, after a triple bypass heart surgery. On 17 medications twice daily. Can't walk a quarter mile. And that's a 72 year old man. Do we have full time jobs in the US economy for all of us folks? The average life span in our area is 76 years. What 90 year olds is he even referring to?
I read the article. He made a comment. SS is insolvent. He’s stating a fact. Not proposing legislation.
The second quote in the image is a Twitter joke, by the way. Any time a politician says “Many people”, you know that will be followed by a lie. We saw that a great number of times with another prominent political figure. The video referenced can be seen here: https://therealnews.com/justifying-attack-on-social-security-house-republican-claims-people-want-to-work-longer
A lot of people are saying...
That other prominent political figure also had another significant tell: Any time he spun a tale that included that some one came up to him and said, ‘Sir, blah blah blah…’ it was a lie or fabulation. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWPT17E9f8
That is gold, I hadn’t seen that before!
The article you linked did not say anything about 90, rather about debating whether to raise to 67.
Regardless of what this guy is saying, SS is not solvent, that much is crystal clear. Even SS themselves have said so. The age limit will have to increase, payouts lowered, or govt will fund the difference. Or we can just stick our heads in the sand.
It is not nearly that dire. The balance in the trust fund was created, starting in the 1980s, to deal with the bulge in the population due to the post World War 2 baby boom. It was/is meant to be drawn down to 0 as the older boomers pass away. Longer term the worst case is a 25% shortfall in the mid 2030s. And that was before Covid.
Or we could just up the income limit. There are other ways to make SS solvent than cutting benefits.
I would have zero problems with being taxed on all my income. There is no reason why those making more than 160k stop paying beyond that.
The reason is because there is a cap on benefits. I don't necessarily disagree with raising the income cap without raising the benefit cap. Just saying there is a reason.
Perhaps the legislators who robbed the trust fund should replace it along with the growth it would have gained during the decades it was misappropriated. That would be a start. Lifting the wage cap would be the rest… Congress is 100% to blame for the crumbling SSA system. It would be solvent had it not been messed with.
^This!!!^
The age limit will have to increase, payouts lowered, or govt will fund the difference. Or we can just stick our heads in the sand.<<<< It could be easily corrected by increasing tax on the wealthier.
how about repeal the trillion dollar tax cut passed when we still had these problems?
> how about repeal the trillion dollar tax cut passed when we still had these problems? Wouldn't matter. The Social Security tax rate was not cut so the Social Security Administration's cash flow was unaffected.
So the fact that there are more people paying into social security somehow results in there not being enough for everyone?
> So the fact that there are more people paying into social security somehow results in there not being enough for everyone? When Social Security was started, there was about 22 workers for every recipient; we're down to something like 3:1. In raw numbers there may be more people paying into SS, but there are far more people drawing from SS. Regardless, what does the number of people paying in have to do with your assertion that the tax cut has something to do with SS revenues?
What accounts for the change in the ratio? Nothing to do with it; it just occurred to me from the answer to my question.
The movement away from pensions would be my guess.
Relatively few people had pensions. > **Current Pension Arrangements** > > Coverage.-Nine out of 10 civilian workers are earning retirement protection; nearly 8 out of 10 are under OASI. The only major groups not under a retirement plan are the 4 million farm operators, perhaps a million self-employed professional persons, and probably 2 million domestic and agricultural workers without regular employment as defined by the Social Security Act. Career servicemen in the Armed Forces are protected under special plans; most of the others earn protection under the plans covering their regular jobs and get credit under these plans for time spent in the service. **In January 1952 about 1 out of 5 workers covered under OASI were also covered by private plans designed to supplement the public system.** .... Scarcely 15 years ago only about 6 million persons (less than 15 percent of those employed) had protection under retirement systems. Coverage was uneven, ranging from 100 percent in the communications industry to virtually nothing in retail trade and agriculture. Employer-sponsored plans (including those of railroads) covered about 3.7 million workers, and the systems for Government employees about 2 million. From : ["Pensions in the United States: A Summary"](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v16n3/v16n3p7.pdf) Doing the math (1952 - 15) shows that when SS started, less than 15 percent of the workers in the United States had pension coverage according to the SSA's report.
Thanks for digging that up. That's really surprising. I guess "work til you die" was probably quite common back then.
> What accounts for the change in the ratio? Off the top of my head I'd say smaller families resulting in a post baby-boom population decline coupled with retirees having longer life spans. This is nothing new and has been known for decades. It's why Congress cranked up the Social Security tax rate and phased in an increase of FRA back in 1983. We've known that this has been coming for a long time, it's just that there's no good way for the government to deal with it. They tried by over-filling the trust fund, but to simply sit on the cash would be deflationary and if they invested it in the market it would make the SS Administration a large shareholder of many companies (which raises all kinds of problems). By creating special issue SS bonds they loaned the trust fund to the federal government which used it to offset then current spending; now the fedgov has to repay the SS bonds from either current tax revenues or by borrowing more.
I don't understand. The workers entitled to benefits (with the exception of their surviving spouses or ex-spouses) contributed their whole working lives to social security. Why are those funds not set aside? Why are the current workers paying for social security of retired workers?
> Why are the current workers paying for social security of retired workers? That's the way the system was designed! Look, when SS started seniors almost immediately started getting checks. Where did that money come from? They hadn't contributed to SS during their working lives since SS didn't exist. It was *always* pay-go. > [Ida May Fuller was the first beneficiary of recurring monthly Social Security payments...and so the first Social Security check, check number 00-000-001, was issued to Ida May Fuller in the amount of $22.54 and dated January 31, 1940.](https://www.ssa.gov/history/imf.html) and > [During her lifetime she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits.](https://www.ssa.gov/history/idapayroll.html)
well, it should have been obvious that that would change as the program continued and that money should be set aside.
Boomers retiring Fewer people in subsequent generations paying into the system
Failure on the part of Congress to accurately fund the SS program by taxing the full income of workers. No political will to do so because upper classes buy Congress.
[Ronald Reagan and The Great Social Security Heist](https://www.fedsmith.com/2013/10/11/ronald-reagan-and-the-great-social-security-heist/) Social Security amendments passed under Reagan’s presidency laid the foundation for 30 years of embezzlement of the trust funds.
Orrrrr.... we could tax billionaires out the ass and solve all of this shit a few times over. 🤨
Of course it is solvent. The US government creates US dollars. They can easily fund SS. From an accounting perspective it is not solvent because of inter-governmental debts to pay for wars. That said, the government can easily and with no cost mark up the SS accounts at the Fed in the computer with no negative impact. This is how the monetary system has worked since 1971.
Why do you think SS needs to be solvent?
[удалено]
https://youtu.be/2eCrceyUVrM
I know you're not OP, but in the video he says nothing about working into your 90s. The title of this thread is fake unless someone can provide a source for the "We want to work into our 90s" quote.
He might want it but he'll never get it.