In its latest projection, the Congressional Budget Office found that the Social Security Trust Fund had $1 trillion less than expected. Seems it always happens this way. When will Washington recognize that the problem is the model?
In an A1 story Friday by IBD's Jed Graham, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said it now expects the supposedly vaunted and unsinkable trust fund to peak in 2018 and then decline to $2.7 trillion by 2022.
That's a trillion dollars less than what was projected to be in the pot last year...
The question remains what to do about it:
Continue on as if nothing has happened — which is President Obama's "solution"?
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Unsustainable
That would be the current social security model:
Gee, hmmmm, what to do?
ReplyDeleteMeans test benefits, adjust the index increases, and raise the FICA threshold from 112,000 to 250,000?
Nah, that would be too easy.
Not to mention unworkable with an intransigent GOP.
Why not start with clamping down on the SSDI fraud that is rampant? I wonder how many millions or billions are sent out to these fraudsters?
ReplyDeleteA drop in the bucket compared to military waste.
ReplyDeleteBTW, what solution did W provide during his 8 long years? Were you whinging about the problem back then? Or is this old problem only a crisis when a Democrat is in office?
1. Social security is *not* a drop in the bucket, even when compared to the military.
ReplyDelete2. Good non sequitur, by the way.
3. I usually don't "whing", but I discuss the waste of taxpayer no matter who is in the White House. Unlike lefties, I have values that transcend party.
Thank you for playing. Now back under the bridge you go.
Hmmmm, gee, what to do?
ReplyDeleteWell, we could start by the admission that politicizing retirement inevitably leads to catastrophe since the equally inevitable result of discovering you can stick your hand into someone else's wallet is the discovery of an endless series of reasons why the take has to increase.
Then we could start disarming the ticking time bomb of Social Security bequeathed to us by the marvelous humanitarian and would-be first emperor of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I think that's a good start. Isn't admission that you've got a problem the first step toward dealing with the problem?
We really do have to try to bring our addiction to other people's money under control. There just isn't enough of it to satisfy the demand.