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

To: Road Walker who wrote (211868)	11/17/2004 6:58:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573439

But as was stated before (if you believe it) 1/3 of Bush extended tax cut could "save" SS I don't. The problem with social security has less to do with the amounts that various "funds" that consist of the government loaning money to itself. The biggest problem is simply that as our population ages and the retirement age doesn't move much, and benefits are not cut, workers will have to pay out too much to support retirees. You can get this money from workers by raising social security taxes, or by raising income taxes, or by raising some other form of tax but it doesn't matter much how you do it. If you don't raise the retirement age much, and if you don't cut back on benefits than the workers will have to get slammed to pay for the retirees. The idea that the "government" will pay for people's retirement really means that people who are working will pay for the retirement. This works as long as you don't have to many retirees per worker. But we are leaving a situation with plenty of workers per retiree and moving towards a situation where every two workers has to support a retiree. You can structure the program any way you want, raise or lower any type of tax you want, but it doesn't change the basic reality behind all of that structure. Is it bad to provide a safety net to seniors? Maybe a safety net would be reasonable, but SS retirement is not a safety net. It is not means tested. Tim