Originally posted by lmalave
And don't even get me started about the oldsters who scream bloody murder about Social security when they paid a less than 1% tax, and we're stuck footing their bill at almost 8%. And savings? Naaaawww. They're all, like: we didn't know we had to save - we thought Social Security would take care of us. Which all wouldn't be a problem if American kids took care of their elders like EVERY other culture does
Thing is, the current state of affairs is a very forseeable consequence of a policy I feel fairly certain you would have agreed to at the time.
During the depression, old people were screwed. Their kids could not afford to take care of them, they couldn't get work, and the pensions their ancestors had relied upon in old age vanished overnight as the companies supplying those pensions crumbled(*).
Social Security came about because the alternative was to let old people starve to death in huge numbers. Because preparations had not been made throughout the oldsters' lives, the money had to come from the current working generation. This wasn't a problem at the time. The retired population was much smaller compared to the working population.
But people started having fewer kids (which seems to be the general trend for developed nations), and medical technology advanced, and now the elderly are the fastest growing segment of our population. In the meantime, because we had Social Security, companies after the Depression generally stopped providing comprehensive pension plans for most workers. And working adults didn't have to switch over and take extraordinary measures to support their elderly relatives, because the government had stepped in and offered a reasonable solution (at the time).
Now we're stuck with it. You can't cut off the elderly, because they haven't made preparations. And besides, if you want to win elections, you don't piss off the elderly. Old people vote, in huge numbers. It's much easier to convince the working adults that the Social Security they pay today is being saved for their own retirement down the road. This is, of course, a bald-faced lie. Whenever you hear someone referring to the "Social Security Trust Fund" that person is lying to you. There is no reserve of money, even on paper, for future Social Security. Social Security depends directly on the ability to take enough from current working adults to pay out benefits to current retired adults. The former population is shrinking. The latter, growing. Thus the percentage which must be appropriated increases rapidly, and will increase more rapidly as time goes on.
The only thing that can possibly rescue us from this mess is the fact that hardly anybody under 35 or so expects they will ever see a dime of Social Security, so they're forced to actually prepare for their own retirements.
This should be a lesson for us in the future. We must be careful when our politicians come up with these brilliant solutions to emergency situations. Social Security should have been temporary, but the designers neglected to include an exit strategy.
(*) Sound familiar? Enron, perhaps? It's important to note that one of the major reforms of the Depression was a law that restricted the same company from providing both auditing and consulting services. That law was stricken during the Reagan administration, at which point Arthur Andersen went into the auditing+consulting business and the rest is history.
