Stop funding them? Where did I say that?
You said you wanted to cut payroll taxes. "Yes, and the best way to do that is to trim the payroll taxes, which are applied to every dollar, starting from zero." Sound familiar?
Message 19566937
You apparently do know that social security and medicare are funded from payroll taxes - " I said we cut the payroll taxes so that we have a balanced SS and Medicare budget." - but you also apparently have know clue how they work.
Social security is not a "pay as you go" program of government-paid pensions. It is a trust, a pension fund. It is SUPPOSED to be self-funding (through the payroll tax) and self-sustaining. Future benefits are SUPPOSED to be paid from its assets, not from future general revenues - the income taxes of our grandchildren.
Right now there is more money going in than is getting paid out simply because there are so many baby-boomers paying into the system and relatively few seniors drawing from it. That's the way it's SUPPOSED to be - just like a private pension plan.
The social security "surplus" is not a surplus at all - social security is an under-funded pension plan. The assets of the trust, together with all the money the boomers and the rest of the working population will pay into it over their lives, and less what will be paid out in the meantime, is not enough to pay the benefits we are supposed to receive from it one day.
If any business enterprise with a defined benefit plan for its workers didn't have more money going into its pension fund than is going out or enough assets already set aside to cover future obligations, you and all the other lefty idiots here would be screaming bloody murder. Instead, you want to stop paying into social security. What a freakin' moron!
Cutting payroll taxes does nothing but bankrupt social security and medicare sooner. It's really a pretty simple and obvious finance problem, dippy, but you are apparently too dense to understand it.
PS: If you think any of the current slate of Demo dwarfs is going to actually fix this problem, you are even dippier than I thought. They will either blow it off and then raise payroll taxes (or more likely income taxes) later to cover its shortfalls or hike payroll taxes now to pretend they've fixed it, then claim they've fixed the overall budget deficit and spend the money elsewhere. There will be no genuine reform. |
