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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (107461)	7/10/2011 11:02:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224756

The whole problem lies with stooopid people not being able to do simple arithmetic and how much exactly is $50 to $60 trillion. If we wanted to invest enough (at T-bill rates of return) to pay the promises the government has made under Social Security it would cost something like $50 to $60tril. That probably isn't more than the total value of everything in the US now, but it is much more than the GDP, or the useful liquid assets that could possibly be extracted from the economy in any year. But we don't have to extract that much money now. As the economy grows over time the federal government can extract more. Social Security by itself would be unaffordable in the economy was static, but in isolation is unlikely to be unaffordable with a growing economy. The problem is though that Social Security is far from being in isolation. We won't and realistically can't have the federal government just do Social Security and nothing else. Medicare and Medicaid are over the long run a worse problem than Social Security. The debt is growing, and so interest on it will grow (perhaps by a very large amount), and then there is all the other things the federal government does (many of which it probably shouldn't but what it can reasonably and constitutionally do would still cost a lot, and what it will be likely to do in practice will cost a lot more). So in the context of everything else, Social Security probably is unaffordable in its current setup (and Medicare and Medicaid are worse.)