Originally posted by gunnut
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He points to how the role of the central government has spilled over from the constraints put on it by the Constitution. The slice that allowed that to happen began in the 19th century when state after state decided that their US Senators should be elected by popular vote rather than by their state legislatures. Today Senators with 6 year terms are only slightly more immune than US Representatives with 2-year terms from the constant need to curry favor with the voting public. The Senate is now more, though not entirely, a rubber stamp for the US House of Representatives. The states, in effect, forfeited a key check they once held over the central government. Once Senators no longer depended on their state legislature for reelection, the states lost their true voice in Congress, and the country was opened up to socialism.
What a government does is pretty much racketeering, if the same were conducted by another party. Government runs a ponzi scheme called Social Security yet we persecute a private party for running the same scheme, but on a much smaller scale.
We may differ a bit on Social Security. I see it as an annuity plan similar to what private life insurance offers. You pay in and if you live long enough you take out. The downside, as you say, is that it's forced on people. IMO, it needs to be, as I will try to explain. The Ponzi part is typically how insurance plans work, present pays future. The bad part is that the retirement payout is too small for most people to live on comfortably. My view is radical in this regard. I think we should be paying a higher rate.
Here's why. Currently you pay only 6.20% of our gross wages into Social Security. Your employer matches it, or if you are self employed you pay the whole 12.40%. The maximum you have to pay a year is currently set at $6,420, and that's only if you earn $103,000. You pay nothing on what you earn above that amount.
So, currently 12.4 cents of every dollar you earn goes into your social security account. When you reach retirement age at 65, your monthly checks will be based on what you and your employer paid in all your life. But regardless, the most you can receive monthly is currently $2,323 or $27,876 a year. Most people get less. The average payment for all retirees is $1,153 a month. This is simply not enough to live on.
True, someone starting out in the workforce at 18 years old ideally will have 47 years to get his act together so he won't have to depend solely on social security once he retires. Things like 401Ks, private pensions, IRAs, saving accounts, and paying off his home mortgage would help a lot. But in reality, the majority of working people don't prepare enough, if at all, partly because they have no excess earnings, partly because they don't understand how these things work, and partly because they thought they were immortal when they were young and healthy and didn't save. But they do pay into a retirement account all their working life because they are FORCED to by law, and thanks to that they are not totally destitute when they reach 65.
I think now that we have Social Security, and are stuck with it, we ought to make it work better. We should up the "premium" and grow the social security trust fund so folks can get a higher payout when they retire. Bush wanted to do the latter and was summarily ignored. I don't know; maybe his plan stunk.
What do you think? From the point of view of fiscal responsibility, isn't it better to have a compulsory Social Security system into which people must pay some of their earnings rather than later doling out tax-funded welfare to them because they are too old to work and too poor to support themselves. Now Shek will come out of the woodwork and blast me across the room.:)
I know corporations don't have my best interest in mind. I don't have to give them money if I don't feel like it. I can't NOT pay the government when its thugs are at my door demanding me to pay for a service that I neither need nor want.
Mr. Williams even touched on the subject of why the world seems so wrong today. Capitalism is so successful that it has eliminated the most serious threat to the human race, all within the last 200 years. We no longer worry about starvation or pestilence. We are able to adapt to harsh environmental conditions with advanced technology made cheaply by capitalism. Without the threat to our very existence, we start to pay attention to boogeymen that in reality cause very little harm to us as a species. The religion of "global warming" is a great example.
I think it was Ray Bradbury who said, paraphrasing here, "when evil has been eliminated, we will start to separate the good from the no-so-good."
We're suffering from the same problem here. Our lives are too good, too comfortable. We no longer struggle to stay alive. Now we struggle to live well. Eventually we will struggle to live as easy as possible.
Thanks for sharing your views.
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