You have the full faith and credit of the US government.
No you don't. You have the current law. Its not likely to be changed on a whim, and if it is changed its not likely to eliminate the benefit, but you don't have the full faith and credit of the US government. Your promised SS payouts are like other political promises, with only the fact that they are promised to a lot of people, who care intensely about getting the payout, making them more likely to be met than some other political promise. But they still may not be met as the entitlement threaten to become to expensive even for a government that has long been lavish with tax payer money.
In any case my point was not that the payout is less likely than some contractual payout, but that it is not a contractual payout. If it was 100% certain, it would still be very different than an insurance payout.
BS. In the real world, if they took away SS they certainly would have to cancel the SS tax.
Even if there was no way to cancel one without the other, they would still be two different things. And it isn't true that there is no way to separate them. Its quite possible that the tax could be changed or even replaced with something else, without canceling the benefits. You keep bringing up the less likely way that one could go without the other, and ignore the more likely way.
And even just focusing on canceling the benefit without removing the tax. The "in the real world they would have to get rid of the tax", just means that people don't want the tax without the payouts and will vote against such a course of action. It doesn't mean that they are intrinsically linked, it doesn't make them the same thing.
Only at it's extreme peril.
True, but that still doesn't make it something other than discretionary using the common English meaning of the word. The spending is still at congress discretion. It shouldn't some how be considered spending that just doesn't count, or spending that can generally be ignored. It counts just as much as every other dollar of spending, and should be included in calculations of what the government spends on different types of activities.
Wars are temporary. I'd rather have more stability in tax systems instead of constant change.
BS.
So wars never end, or are you asserting that I don't like stability in taxation?
The former is obviously false. As for the later your mind reading skills aren't as good as you think they are. |
