Reply to What Would You Be Willing to Do to Save SS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The SS funding mechanism is a total mess. SS is so much more expensive than anybody ever anticipated and I really doubt it would have made it past congress if anybody would have had an inkling about what SS taxes would have turned into.

Hell, people in this thread basically abandon any pretense about SS being anything other than a welfare program. The reality is that every 10-15 years SS needs some massive patch that amazingly (!) always involves more revenue from higher taxes.

Rather than be humbled by its incompetence in predicting future demographic trends and its inability to design a sustainable program, the political left just doubles down and wants even more money for the program.

Since 1970 alone, SS revenue and benefits have spiked from below 3% of yearly GDP to 5%. I'm sure this thing looks even worse if you track back to inception.  Data suggests SS cost 2.2% of GDP in 1960.

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Huh? Nobody here has "abandoned any pretense" about it being a welfare program. In fact several of us have argued that it's *not* welfare and gave clear reasons why not. Either you didn't read those comments or it serves your purpose to make things up.

Yep the program has gotten bigger. It's driven by population growth and population aging. More workers are paying in, the average age of the population has increased, and the share of the population that's retired is much larger because of the boomers. None of this is the program's fault--it's providing security to many more retirees. Expenses as a share of GDP will level out in the early 2020s as the youngest boomers retire. [/quote]

No. You don't seem to be very intelligent.  How could population growth explain an increase in cost as a percentage of GDP?  Lack of population growth has been the problem.  Fertility rate has dropped 46 percent since 1960, which eventually translates into fewer workers (even after accounting for immigration) as a percentage of total population.  Fewer workers are now supporting more beneficiaries, and hence, cost as a percentage of GDP has increased. This is an inherent flaw in the program in that if demographic trends end up not coming to fruition in a negative manner, the program will be woefully underfunded. And since politicians will always price social programs based on the most optimistic projections in order to hold costs down (and keep taxes at a minimum), it is almost certain that SS will never be poorly funded. Eventually, the continuously escalating probability of systemic failure due to this inherent flaw will turn into actual failure.

Ida May Fuller, the very first SS beneficiary paid less than $23 into system and received $22k in lifetime benefits. This thing has been unsustainable from the start and hence you have to keep dipping into the pockets of the American people to try to make it work. Rather than admit your inability to get this thing right, this one time we'll actually fix SS with a tax increase, right?  The definition of insanity is....[/quote]

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