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

To: Road Walker who wrote (104)	6/16/2005 5:29:06 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 492

The only problem I have with the 70 age is that a lot of folks work at jobs their whole life that require that you be more physically fit than the average 60+ person. I think the current ages, 62/67 are OK. You also get people who are not fit enough at 50 anymore. I don't think its a good idea to base the whole retirement systems on a small and shrinking minority (older workers whose jobs require a high degree of physical fitness). Such jobs used to be a lot more common but they are becoming less common. Fewer and fewer Americans work hard manual labor as a career. Why not go up to $200K for the cap? Then you could lower the increase in FICA. It would barely be noticed by the very wealthy, but it would be a big tax increase for the upper middle and lower upper classes. They would really take a hit. If you where going to greatly increase the cap it might make sense to go even bigger. Increase it to $1million or $2million and reduce the percentage increase. But whatever increases you make if we continue to have expanded life spans and small familes eventually its going to have to increase again. I think that increasing the retirement age, perhaps indexing it to increases in average life span (or better yet increases in average post-65 life span) should be an important element of any reform package. I know your reasons for not likeing it but in my opinion increasing the age is too important for that reason to be enough. That's a good idea, and maybe should be part of the SS platform. Take apart the "unified budget", and list social security outside of standard budget reporting. Do you extend that to all entitlements, or just SS? (Don't hold me to the details, but I think the "unified budget" was put in during Vietnam, to help hide the cost of the war. What can be done can be undone, and it would keep the government from cooking the books to deceive the Citizens). The problem with eliminating the unified budget is that when SS starts spending more than it is taken in (15 or 20 years from now), a "non-unified" budget will make the deficits seem smaller then they really are. Ideally both figures should be considered but politicians and the media usually want one number to toss around. Tim