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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (262292)	4/22/2008 5:08:03 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

t is the definition of an insurance program. You pay in premiums which you may or may not collect in benefits. Paying money, and possibly receiving benefits is not the definition of an insurance program. Insurance is about pooling the risk of unlikely bad events. Also involuntary payments to the government are taxes not premiums even if the government called them premiums (and actually the government is honest about them in this case because it is called a tax) No, taking off the income tax will fund Social Security I think you phrased that incorrectly. I probably wouldn't bother to point it out, we all make mistakes, its not like we have editors for these posts, but this mistake obscures your meaning, so I don't know what your trying to say. the baby boom lump is a demographic oddity and will come and then die away The baby boom isn't the only problem. We also have a problem of fewer new children and thus fewer workers, combined with increasing life spans. Besides the baby boom might be "a demographic oddity", but its a big enough oddity to cause massive problems with these programs all by itself. Do you think that someone who makes more than $100K should get a tax break on SS that someone who makes less does not? Your the one saying it isn't a tax but a premium for insurance. Since there is no extra "insurance payout", for wealth over the cap, why should their be higher premiums? Or maybe you would allow higher payouts for this extra income, but than you increase social security spending even more. In any case removing the cap is a massive tax increase. If we are going to remove or even greatly increase the cap, than we should lower the rate so as not to have a tax increase. The problem with SS is not that we can't impose high enough taxes to pay for it. In theory we definitely can, and in practice the political system may indeed do so. The problem is taxes at the level would be a very bad thing.