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

To: Road Walker who wrote (397354)	7/9/2008 9:37:02 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1587790

When you said "the only remaining variable" you lied because both the benefit and contribution are variable. No, they aren't. They are both fixed by Congress and cannot be adjusted based on the other variables in the equation. Your benefits, though based loosely on what you paid in, are not flatly determined by what you pay in. Thus, you can have two people who have totally different lifetime earnings records getting precisely the same monthly benefit. You can have a person whose contributions should yield a higher benefit receiving a lesser benefit than someone else; and vice-versa. And then there is disability thrown in on top of that. In short, it is totally f*cked up. The contribution is a fixed percentage of the first n dollars earned during the year, where n is indexed. The percentage hasn't changed in many years, at least 10, I believe. At any rate, the plan can be considered neither a defined benefit nor a defined contribution plan because BOTH are defined by Congress. And that's what is wrong with the system.