Schumer – Republicans Out To Undo “Most Successful Program”….Social Security

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Just when you thought the garbage spewed by the Democrats couldn’t get any worse we get this from Chuck Schumer: (h/t JammieWearingFool)

“The fact that five senators are for privatizing Social Security shows we’re not crying wolf here,” Schumer said. “This is a serious movement to undo the most successful government program of the 20th century.”

The most successful government program? Are you kidding me?

Sick and getting sicker, Social Security will run at a deficit this year and keep on running in the red until its trust funds are drained by about 2037, congressional budget experts said Wednesday in bleaker-than-previous estimates.

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This year alone, Social Security will pay out $45 billion more in retirement, disability and survivors’ benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said. That figure nearly triples – to $130 billion – when the new one-year cut in payroll taxes is included.

The system is running in the red….it will continue to run in the red, and we need to act to fix it. But when Obama’s own deficit commission proposes fixes its tut-tuted away. Everytime any serious idea’s were bandied around the Democrats made it into a political issue to keep or gain power.

I understand, its politics. Neither side wants to be the bearer of bad news that eventually we are all gonna pay the piper. Either their benefits will be cut or their taxes will skyrocket. We’ve been kicking this can down the road for decades and based on Schumer’s comments it appears nothing has changed. Our children are all gonna get royally screwed because of these yahoo’s.

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It was the Democrats like Chucky Cheese that bankrupted Social Security in the first place. The fund had a surplus in the first years that it was in place. They used it as their private slush fund to buy votes in the 40 odd years that they were in power. They don’t want it privatized now, because if that happened, they would not be able to dip into that till anymore. The next piggy bank they will raid is the Highway Trust Fund.

THE way they spend prove that they are not to handle anyone’s money or funds, HERE the CONSERVATIVES are right again,

Good old ChuckYou Schumer, proving once again how indifferent he is to the reality of the situation, and how hellbent he is on screwing over as many generations of taxpayers as possible.

he is the most self absorbed quack ever to sit in that body of self absorbed quacks. some of his utterances are too good to be true. he is so obvious in his love of communism that he probably scares himself with the things he says. only from ny could this idiot have come, along with, of course, senator hillary, billy’s wife, clinton. kinda like rumymanuel getting placed on the mayoral ballot for chicago. Whew!

And he ignores the sad fact that last year SSA in both its components went $76 billion in the red.

The 1935 SSA was also a ponzi scheme, doomed to failure. First of all, when it passed in it’s original version, the retirement age was 65. However life expectancy for those years was 59 for men, and 62 for women. With retirement only allowable at 65, it was the perfect government fraud to collect, and bank that most wouldn’t live to collect a dime.

The SSA gov site actually spins this glaring fact themselves, stating that at that time the birthrate mortality was higher, and that less would live to attain adulthood. So it then assumes that:

As Table 1 shows, the majority of Americans who made it to adulthood could expect to live to 65, and those who did live to 65 could look forward to collecting benefits for many years into the future. So we can observe that for men, for example, almost 54% of the them could expect to live to age 65 if they survived to age 21, and men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).

Also, it should be noted that there were already 7.8 million Americans age 65 or older in 1935 (cf. Table 2), so there was a large and growing population of people who could receive Social Security. Indeed, the actuarial estimates used by the Committee on Economic Security (CES) in designing the Social Security program projected that there would be 8.3 million Americans age 65 or older by 1940 (when monthly benefits started). So Social Security was not designed in such a way that few people would collect the benefits.

sigh…. still comes down to them banking on people not living to collect, doesn’t it? Thus the problem with the goverment decides to become an insurance agency or retirement pension planner.

From the onset – and just like Truman, the first who signed up to collect Medicare bennies – the original beneficiaries did not pay into the system. Those that followed in the following decade had little “skin in the game”, as this POTUS likes to say. What was being paid out was being collected from those who could not collect until the future.

Yet for most those that try to think of a solution to SSA, they simply want to move the goalposts. To what? Again something close to end of the life expectancy after decades of paying in? To suggest that in this economy is absurd. With unemployment high, those approaching the “aluminum years” cannot compete for jobs with the young. To push their retirement benefits further down the field can mean the difference of hanging on to their homes and lifestyles if they are laid off, or their business has to shut down.

The only way to fix this is by phasing out SSA entirely for those under a certain age, and allowing those at a certain threshhold to stay on the system status quo. They are unlikely to go this route, as they figure it’s the baby boomers who will ultimately be breaking the bank – now that Congress has robbed the “trust fund” and replaced it with IOU’s – therefore it’s the baby boomers who need the shaft. So instead, expect them to move the goalposts, hoping the boomers don’t make it to the endzone.

MATA they should not take from the ederly as oppose to the young, IT is a very different issue that should not be dealt with as an ensemble, when we know that the ones in 1935, where many survived the diffrent warzone, they did not chip in money wise but dam chipped in with their blood spilled for the rest of the country, THAT is a good enough argument to this day also, the VETERANS who are the one in line to protect the AMERICANS should have the best arrangment on their security till their end ,
THEY and their loved one EARNED it THEN, AND EARN still now, IT would be a SHAME to devalue their efforts on protecting the GREAT AMERICA WHERE anyone FROM FOREHEIN COUNTRY CAN COME IN AND TAKE THEIR PLACE AS THEIR EXCUSE IS TO MAKE BABYS TO GET THE SUPPORT TAKEN FOR GRANTED FROM A GOVERNMENT WHO WOULD COWARDLY TAKE IT FROM THE ELDERLYS WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE YOUNG FAMILYS”S FREE LIVING. bye

@MataHarley, #6:

Actually there’s an entirely straightforward means by which solvency of the Social Security retirement program can be extended 75 years into the future. Consider this article, with particular attention to the last two paragraphs.

The problem isn’t that there’s no way to do it; there are perfectly sound, completely workable ways to do it. The problem is the current political environment, wherein opposing partisan factions are more interested in scoring points against one another that actually getting anything done for the good of the nation.

The assertion that there’s no way to save Social Security retirement is simply a polemic intended to discourage serious consideration of the means by which it can be saved, advanced by those who are philosophically opposed to the entire concept of publicly funded social insurance programs. It’s the redistributive element that punches the button.

Considering the current distribution of wealth and income in America , the fact that the upward redistribution of wealth and income is an ongoing trend, and the fact that public debt has skyrocketed as this trend has accelerated, it seems obvious that moderating mechanisms are required. The distribution of wealth and income obviously needs to be part of the context of the discussion. It’s a central element of the entire economic equation. What gets in the way of its necessary inclusion is the deliberately ginned up hysterics about socialism.

If Chuckie had a brain he’s remove it every night and keep it in a jar of vinegar. Vinegar might remove the massive amount of alchol.

If democrats had kept their hands out of the trust fund there would be trillions of dollars available to pay benefits for years. Since the citizens let them rob it they will have to pay through the nose to make up the shortfall. In addition to robbing it themselves they (democrats) put million in the system who never paid a dime in. They bought a lot of votes in the past with the money. How’s that working out for you?

GREG, why concentrate on the elders social security payment, some of them has paid all their life on it,
why not take it from the young welfare recipients who can afford concentrating on how to earn their wages with a job as humble as it can be, a job is always a source of pride for one, better than waiting for a check not earn in any way,
the elder for whatever their reason deserve their money, that has been collected from their earnings,
some with life threatening jobs, it’s not their fault if the GOVERNMENT spend it, and why would you think of raising the ages at 75, this you can do for the generation of welfare recipients also, they haven’t earned it, so get your focus of the generation that change your diaper and had to wash those also, and focus on the younger generation which just threw the diapers in the garbage and polluted this AMERICA.
FAIR ENOUGH DON’T YOU THINK?

@Scrapiron, #10:

Actually, the money has been used as part of a budgetary shell game since 1981 to pay for a series of totally irresponsible republican tax cuts. How has that been working out for 80% of the population?

GREG, when you and whom you obey religiously,start to focus on taking legitimate social security from the ELDERLY and MILITARY end of carreer money well earned that by the way are not socialist
because they contributed on it,by means of payments from earning or fighting for the AMERICA.
I repeat WHEN this kind of talk start that GOVERNMENT want to take away from elder AMERICANS,
DON’t YOU THINK IT”S TIME FOR AMERICA TO CLOSE IT’S BORDERS.AND SEND IT’S ILLEGALS BACK
TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM, this is just to remind you where the BALANCE of JUDGING IS,
AND THE ELDERLY AMERICANS ARE THE PRIORITY, WAY AHEAD.

You have to look at it from Schumer’s angle. From a politician’s view the Social Security Administration has to be one of the most successful cash cows the government created. Can you name a government agency or program that lets the politicians tap into it and spend more of OUR money any way they want? Most government programs are created to help the politicians, not the rest of us.

I am on Social Security and found out that millions of illegals are getting more SSA money than I am, and I paid into it all of my working life. They haven’t. The republicans aren’t any help. They have to do what the businesses who use the illegals for the cheap labor tell them to do or they don’t get their reelection campaign money. Other programs have been started that use SSA money. There are no more republicans in congress. They have absorbed so much of the democratic agenda that they have become republicrats. They have been in power several times but didn’t fix the problem, because they liked tapping into the SS money as much as the democrats.

I have recommended to my kids that they figure that there will be no SSA for them to retire on and to set up their own retirement program. I suggest this for everybody. This brings up the subject that Clark Howard said that if a 15 year old puts just $2,000 per year in a Wroth IRA and does it for 7 years, and never touches it, at age 65 they will have $1,000,000. This is based on the average of what the stock market has done since it was started. The idea is that you have to start early and leave it there to grow. How much would you have if you kept putting just $2,000 per year in it?

If investing just $14,000 can bring a return of $1,000,000, how much money would SSA have if it had been put in a separate account from the beginning and paid out only to the ones who paid into it. When it was started, a person could pay a certain amount into it, then get SSA payments for the rest of their life. Even wealthy people couldn’t pass up a deal like that.

There is no doubt that Social Security is a mess. It was expanded beyond its original intent and the funds were raided for politcal gain. Just like the debt, it needs to be addressed in a serious way now and not later. Either scrap it or try to fix it. I’m inclined to go along with Mata’s solution in Post #6. If the other approach is taken, the one Greg linked in Post #8 has some merit. My main concern with that one is that once the funds start to build up, our pols in D.C. will tap into it to fund their agendas and we’ll end up back at square one.

@Greg: Actually, Johnson opened the “lock box” and allowed the SS funds to be used as general funds.

Does anyone remember the standing ovation President Bush got in his state of the union speech where he commented on his efforts to revamp SS? Center stage was Hillary Clinton jumping up and down clapping because the effort failed. I thought at the time. “So much for the smartest woman in the world!” She could only oppose, not provide solutions. Chuckie is of the same cloth.

Schumer is one of the wannabe dictator types. Granted he has some socialist leanings, but overall he thinks people like him should decide what rights we have.

Yes, it has been successful. It was designed as a vote buying scheme and to this day a percentage of already brain dead seniors still vote “D” to protect it even though the gutless politicians wearing “R”‘s won’t end this sham.

The Libertarians have known for years how to get rid of this. Sell all non-essential federal property, use the funds to pay the current obligations and re-pay the stolen “contributions” to those who aren’t on the program. Get back to the Constitution! FDR did more long lasting damage to the US than Hitler and Tojo combined.