Has anyone [in the U.S.] received your stimulus check? How are you going to spend it?

[JSH]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I've said it before, but I'd be happy to forfeit all contributions thus far and get zero SS benefits in the future in exchange for paying nothing into it going forward.

We're living longer than in times past, which creates a new problem. In the past, family would support the elderly the few years until they die. Now that retirement is 1/3 of a lifetime, that becomes a much greater burden.

SS should be an opt in program. What business is it of the governments to force one to set aside retirement savings at essentially zero percent interest or less?

Social Security isn't a retirement program and it isn't a savings program. Zero dollars are being invested or set aside for future use. The cost of today's retirees are being paid by taxes collected from today's workers. No different than Medicare, Medicaid, or SNAP. The only difference is that the tax comes out on a different line but at the end of the day SS taxes go into the general fund like anything else and have done so since day one. The Social Security "Trust Fund" is an accounting gimmick. It is full IOU's (US Treasuries) that the federal government owes to itself.

Social Security is social safety net to insure at least a basic level of living for the elderly and disabled. Without it many would live in abject poverty or be dependent on other social programs. Given the option to opt out most would and yet many of those would not save anything or they would save and then have that savings wiped out by some life event. Taking care of the old and sick is a basic part of the social contract of living in a modern society.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by JSH

Social Security is social safety net to insure at least a basic level of living for the elderly and disabled. Without it many would live in abject poverty or be dependent on other social programs. Given the option to opt out most would and yet many of those would not save anything or they would save and then have that savings wiped out by some life event. Taking care of the old and sick is a basic part of the social contract of living in a modern society.

We did without SS before, we can do it again. People that make bad decisions should not be insulated from those decisions. The social contract is that we take care of people. SS is a shirking of that responsibility.

As you point out, it isn't savings, so it has an unfixable flaw in that fluctuations in population create unfairness and a broken system.

[Piotrsko]

Agreed, but how many of people nearing retirement age have sufficient cash to weather a stock market crash, pandemic, and other crisis? I don't. 1 crisis perhaps, but not several. Used to be 1million IN SAVINGS, was enough to earn you a decent retirement @5% interest, but where can you get 5% non speculative?

Back in the day, the government's job was to take care of you if nobody else did. They did it poorly.

[redpoint5]

Nobody in my community would go without food and shelter.

SS was broken from the beginning, because there were people that hardly paid anything into it, yet received the full benefit. That itself sets the program behind. Now my generation is going to get screwed.

Since my generation is already going to be screwed, might as well take that opportunity to slowly phase it out.

What if the government compelled people to save portion of their earnings in a retirement fund not to exceed what they are already putting towards SS. Transition away from programming people to be dependent on the state and take some responsibility for themselves for once.

[freebeard]

What if the government compelled...

One would think you'd object.

Just take it out of the general fund. It's been bled [almost] to death.

[Fat Charlie]

Not too many people out of work this year because of poor decisions they made.

[Xist]

We managed without insulin injections for millennia. Should we return to that, too?

[Fat Charlie]

My kids are probably going to have to learn to do without antibiotics. It was nice while they lasted.

[freebeard]

Thankfully we now have light injections.

[jakobnev]

We managed without insulin injections for millennia. Should we return to that, too?

I wonder if diabetes was common before agriculture.

Sometimes when I can't sleep at night I ponder on a hypothesis that diets that demand a lot of insulin increase the metabolism of pancreatic cells, and that causes the immune system to miss-identify the cells as cancerous or infected with virus.