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Politics : The Citizens Manifesto -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (8)	6/13/2005 1:12:29 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 492

I'm all for things like social security, but I can't stand entitlements. For instance, social security as it stands today is an entitlement, because it is not self-sustaining. We may fix it by increasing taxes overall and to the richer, but then it will have to be fixed again later on when demographics change. Why don't we just create a system that can be set up once and never has to be fixed again? I vote for having an enforced savings mechanism at the current rates. However, all the income from a person is tagged to that person's social security number. Then the income is invested in a lifecycle fund with a target date of whenever that person is 65 years old. We can also say that none of the money can be withdrawn until the person is 65, at which point an annuities is purchased with the proceeds. All money not used up by the person upon his/her death is then inherited by his/her heirs. To me this is the fairest type of plan and will help people save properly and ensure they retire well.

To: neolib who wrote (8)	6/15/2005 1:48:59 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 492

RE: " You should live in a place that has great extremes in wealth, by which I mean a small fraction of the populace living in luxury, while a significant fraction (of non substance abusers/non mental cases) live in rags, and scavenge for food. Democracy is on the wane in the latter places. " Democracy is actually a problem in those 2-tiered places. For example, India vs China, illustrates the point that Democracy encourages two-tieredness. China is a communistic, yet has done a superb job at spreading the wealth compared to India's democratic country. Why is that? It's because communism is much, much more efficient than democracy in growing a country's wealth below a certain GDP. Waiting around for wealth, which is the Democratic style of let's wait until the "rest of the population catches up" and let's all waste time voting before we take any decisive action, is highly inefficient on GDP growth. Both India and China started out their growths around the same time - in the 70s, yet China is nearly TWO TIMES richer per capita than India. This means China has saved millions of lives per year from poverty compared to India. This implies Communism is more efficient (China's brand of it), than slow-growing Democracy. Simply put, Democracy retains too much poverty below a certain GDP by stunting growth, while China's Communism quickly grows the country efficiently - they are headed in teh right direction. This is one of the reasons why the Congress party won in India. The poor want more - Democracy hasn't been very sharing of the wealth, compared to China. (CIA Factbook). Regards, Amy J