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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Dietrich who wrote (17166)	11/25/2002 10:17:51 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

Raising the payroll taxes permitted two things: that current obligations be met through the direct use of payroll taxes, and that the government undertook an unrenegable obligation for future redemption. I call the "trust fund" an accounting trick in the sense that the government has undertaken such obligations, and will not change them without a political consensus, with or without the "trust fund", but it is true that the "trust fund" hedges against reneging, and the rise in taxes creates a greater moral claim to eventual benefits. All I know is that the President's Commission portrays the level of payout, all things being equal, as a rising burden, going from about 10% of the general budget to about 18% in just a few years. I am not familiar enough with the reasoning behind it to say much more now. Yes, if you look at the summary, the President's Commission does predict the exhaustion of the trust fund. It does not make a big deal of it, though, because either way, payments are out of the general budget. I am not saying that the retirement of the babyboomers and the exhaustion of the trust fund are concurrent. Rather, the need to pay from the general budget, which begins in about 15 years, is roughly concurrent with the retirement of the baby boom. The baby boom is generally dated between 1946 and 1964. The first boomers, at regular retirement age, will enter the system in 2011. The last boomers will retire in 2029. Actuarially, the longer you live, the longer your expected life span (since you avoided infant death and so on). Even without further advances in medicine, most boomers will live into their mid- 80s. That means that there will be a huge number in the system by the time the last boomers retire, and for some years thereafter. The first numbers I quoted in this discussion, talking about the trust fund running out in 2041 and so on, were from Social Security, not the Presidential Commission. Perhaps they are pessimistic. The only thing is that that is the prudent way to budget, so I doubt the crisis is a lie.......