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

To: tejek who wrote (887307)	9/13/2015 12:59:34 AM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Recommended By TimF Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576882

>> The article told you how both ways can be avoided. Read it again plz. The article was one guy's view and it is based on some technical suppositions that aren't about to happen. The basic mistake people make WRT SS is to look at it in isolation. We hear people like Sanders say, "Eliminate the cap and it will be fine," for example. While it is almost (not quite) true that eliminating the cap would provide enough funding for SS it does nothing to address the far bigger problems of Medicare/Medicaid which will be creating massive demand on tax revenue at the same time. If eliminating the cap would solve the SS problem and there were no Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare program, I'd be for it. It would solve a big part of our upcoming issues. But the reality is that you're talking about what amounts to a 15% tax on wages over the cap and you don't begin to solve the problem. Medicare along is 5-6 times the size of the problem. Obama care is small now but will become huge. The Disability Income trust will run dry (OUT, not just low) in 2016. The national debt is out of control and unsustainable. And employment, for the next 20-40 years, will be on the decline due to automation. I understand the author's point but when all this stuff is happening simultaneously, the reality is we are going to be out of money and SS will be but one portion of the problem.

To: tejek who wrote (887307)	9/14/2015 3:55:19 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576882

Yes it said there could be a massive increase in productivity (I didn't use the term massive increase, but that's what a big enough increase could reasonably be called). There is no sign whatsoever of such an increase happening. It also talked about reducing spending. No direct reduction would be necessary if the future growth was reigned in, but reigning in the growth of this spending seems to be what you've been opposing from the beginning. It also talked about raising taxes, but that isn't really an answer. It doesn't answer affordability at all. The point is that taxes probably can't raise enough money. As has been pointed out to you more than once but you keep ignoring at every rate from single digit income tax rates all the way up to 90%, the feds have never been able to raise enough money as a percentage of GDP, to cover the projected cost of entitlement spending, let alone entitlement spending and interest on the debt (even with leaving $0 for everything else). Well technically the issue here is just Social Security. Enough could be raised to let Social Security spending keep climbing in to the stratosphere, but not to cover that and Medicare and Medicaid both doing the same.