Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Road Walker who wrote (327091)	2/22/2007 8:39:07 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574302

re: Income taxes will pay for future SS shortfalls. No, they won't. They will pay debt owed by existing bonds. Which is basically the same thing, esp. considering the debt is from the government to the government. True, the debt borrowed by the government from the seniors that paid in their entire lives. The SSA is not the seniors, its part of the government. And SS was originally left out of the federal budget for good reason; it needs to be a separate entity that allows seniors to survive when they retire. It doesn't need to be a separate entity in order to charge the same taxes and make the same payouts, and in fact it really isn't a separate entity. Its part of the federal government. re: Social security taxes, are separate from the spending, and they have no intrinsic tie. BS It would only be BS, if they where inherently connected in such a way that you couldn't kill one without killing the other. But you could fund social security payouts from income taxes, or you could keep that tax, and kill the benefits. I'm not recommending either, but they are both certainly possible. BS. SS is a profit center for the government; military is pure expense. SS taxes are a profit center. SS spending is pure expense. Military spending is pure expense. Hypothetical military taxes would be a profit center. Yeah, right. I was listening to a TRUE libertarian today on the radio... he was talking about how foregin wars are abhorrent to libertarians. Not that is ideological. Which doesn't mean its wrong, or that its right. "Ideological" isn't a comment on accuracy or truthfulness. When you start attacking the Iraq war as wholeheartedly as you attack SS My statements in this discussion haven't been attacks on social security. I've said that social security spending is very large. And it is. So is spending on the Iraq war. I've said that the spending can't be considered something other then spending, and a cost to the government, just because there is an associated tax. That's true, and its also not an attack on the program. Now its true I'm not a big fan of the program but I haven't been attacking it. As for me being a libertarian or Republican, that's completely irrelevant. I could be a Communist, a Nazi, or a radical Islamic terrorist, and it wouldn't invalidate my points. It wouldn't mean that social security spending isn't spending. It wouldn't change the fact that payments to individuals and spending on defense have roughly swapped % of the federal budget from 1956 to 2006, with defense being 60% in 1956 and 20% in 2006, and payment to individuals being 22% in '56 and 60% in 2006.