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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (180952)	1/19/2004 1:11:19 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575659

Al, from the article you posted, When the pay-as-you-go system starts up, there is a generation of retirees who receive benefits without having made contributions. (What this corresponds to in the real world is the very high rate of return received on contributions by early recipients of Social Security.) That debt - equal in this example to $1 per worker - is never paid off; instead, the earnings from each worker's contribution are in effect used to pay the interest on that debt. And that's where the money goes. The author is partially correct in mentioning this generation of retirees who got benefits without having made any contributions. But he fails to mention that those who did pay their contributions, i.e. the generation that followed, then became the next generation of retirees who got benefits without having made any contributions, except to a debt. The benefits of this second generation then get paid for by the third generation, and the debt keeps growing. The result is the Ponzi scheme that needs reforming. None of this says that privatizing Social Security is necessarily a bad idea. But the way that privatization is being sold is spectacularly dishonest, and to propose privatization and huge tax cuts at the same time is spectacularly irresponsible. Perhaps the author ought to ding the opponents of privatization for not telling the truth about Social Security, that it is indeed a big Ponzi scheme that is growing and growing without end. Meanwhile, the author avoided answering his own question over whether Social Security should be privatized or not. Instead, he ends his article by attacking only one side and ignoring the political stunts of the other side. Tenchusatsu

To: Alighieri who wrote (180952)	1/19/2004 4:39:16 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575659

>> NOTES ON SOCIAL SECURITY The individual who wrote this article doesn't understand the problem any better than you do. Why is it, do you think, that only Republicans and Conservatives seem to want to solve this problem, while you libs just want to let it rock on?

To: Alighieri who wrote (180952)	1/20/2004 1:02:09 AM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 1575659

Alighieri, RE: "I am pretty sure that the cost of paying off the overhang of obligations would be something north of $3 trillion. Which brings me to the reasons why I am angry with the peddlers of privatization proposals...First, the proponents try to pretend that there isn't any cost. " Good post. Privatization needs to happen, but they can certainly be clearer about the transition costs. RE: "But the way that privatization is being sold is spectacularly dishonest, and to propose privatization and huge tax cuts at the same time is spectacularly irresponsible." Bush either has extremely poor math (a possibility) or he uses a level of dishonesty when spinning his tax cuts - he uses "average" rather than "median", making it look better than what it really is. For example, he said the "average" person would receive $1,100 back in taxes. Paul Kruegman of NY Times spoke about this at a Churchill meeting in Silicon Valley, and it drew a few chuckles, since the crowd knew the difference between using "median" and "average." Regards, Amy J

To: Alighieri who wrote (180952)	1/20/2004 5:05:42 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575659

Al, Good post. I think you need to read this a few times, so that we don't have to go over and over the same stuff. There are a few things the author missed, such as average life span increasing so much faster than the retirement age that there are an order of magnitude or more recepients per payer than when the system was started, meaning that this liability is not a fixed startup debt incurred, but an ever growing debt, reaching astronomical proportions. I am not commenting about the BS toward the end of the article. Joe