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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (175497)	11/7/2011 10:39:12 AM
From: research1234	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 541042

SS isn't welfare. Its a generational income transfer system. In a perfect world, SS taxes would have always been invested in a broad cross section of the economy which would generate sufficient real returns to provide retirement income roughly equivalent to the SS benefit formula. But when SS was created in the 30's no one wanted a government SS fund to own any significant part of the economy, the concept of mutual funds let alone index funds had not been invented, and the first generation of SS retirees would not have been able to accumulate enough assets to provide a meaningful benefit. The design of SS provides the intended economic result, and is actually pretty fair from a generational standpoint. Having said that, it is also true that SS needs to be modified from time to time due to the uneven number of people in each generational cohort. The modifications that would fix SS today are actually pretty modest and would put the system back into balance for the next 25-50 years if done carefully. Unfortunately, Medicare is in much worse shape and there are no easy fixes available.