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 : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (133068)	4/17/2013 5:44:30 PM
From: RetiredNow	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Nope; the retirees are getting the benefits they earned when they paid money for their old age insurance. Most of them are putting most or all of it right back into the economy, for food and shelter, and all those on Medicare B,C, and D still have taxes taken out B4 they get their check. When $13K is most, or even only 90%, of your income, you aren't gonna stash it in the Cayman's. - Wharf Rat See the comment of yours I bolded above. That's not really true. If it were true, then the SS Trust fund would not be running a deficit. Even worse, the SS Trust fund has no assets. They have IOUs from the US Treasury. Well, the Treasury has to sell US Treasury bonds to raise cash to give money to SS to fund their deficits. The reason why SS is running a deficit is because people are getting far more than what they put in, even after accounting for growth of their investment based on a reasonable rate of earned interest. Couple that over-payment with the fact that the next generation is smaller than the retiring generation and we see SS running deficit and those deficits are accelerating. Agree with you that whatever the retirees do get, they are turning right around and spending it. But that doesn't take away from my point, which is that when 90 million people in this country are taking from the government, not paying taxes back to the government, and that number of people is increasing, then at some point the system breaks. Money printing to finance deficits only works for so long. Eventually, there will be consequences. The big challenge now is that too many Americans believe there is a free lunch somewhere. Too many like you believe there's plenty of other people's money that can be plundered to pay for everything Americans want. The fact is that we've long past the point where we need to rationalize our taxes and spending to close start living within our means as a country.