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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (69757)	5/3/2018 7:19:19 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 363025

I don't recognize this supposed claim that current payments are based on current withholding You were the one who made it in the first place. I pointed out that current withholdings are not solely responsible for funding current payments because the SSTF is in fact not 0.0. But for the sake of argument I'm just showing that your original claim that current employment withholdings is largely what pay current benefits, is in no way contradictory to my claim that current benefits are based essentially on what the current beneficiaries paid in over their working career. Which said claim of mine you contested and said was not true because of your statement about current income vs payments. I'm merely pointing out that both your statement about current cash flow and my statement about benefits vs what you paid in are simultaneously correct. They aren't mutually exclusive.

To: Lane3 who wrote (69757)	5/3/2018 7:26:30 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 363025

I both pay in and recieve benefits concurrently right now.

To: Lane3 who wrote (69757)	5/3/2018 7:50:40 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 363025

Interest is introduced because the formula for benefits is based on what you paid in when and what the effective interest rate is from that time, i.e. just like putting the money in the bank and then getting it back with interest. I'm simply trying to show that you can have a system with defined benefits based rigidly on the individual contributions, and some interest rate formula, and yet have the actual cash flow be based on current with-holdings from workers, paying the current retires. You could do that EXACTLY if you could correctly predict both interest rates and population dynamics. SS in fact does try to do that, but of course since you can't predict things exactly its best to be a bit conservative, and hence try to run a little surplus that you invest. Which is exactly what SS has done. The surplus is the SSTF and it is IIRC, still growing, but only due to interest, the actual socking away of surplus with-holdings quite some years back, but the SSTF is still increasing a bit currently because of interest on the horde. The horde will start dwindling in a few years, again IIRC. But SS has also raised withholding % over time, which is another admission that projections were off. In the future they might well address that issue further by cutting the defined benefits. Both dials all you to continue to make a system function where the benefits are defined by a formula of what you individually paid in, while at the same time, being primarily cash flow funded by current employment with-holdings. No dichotomy there, despite what many might think...