Life sucks, deal with it
I recently watched a YouTube clip, now lost in the chaos of the Intertubes, wherein the media spokesweasel tried to make a savagely ironic point to a conservative guest by asking “You say government needs to be cut, but those Tea Party folks say don’t cut my Social Security. What are you going to do?” Or translated, you nasty people may have sorta won the election, maybe, but you are still WRONG and MEAN and we are going to prove what hypocrites you are.
Since the interviewee was Chris Christie, however, the spokesweasel got shoved into a rhetorical blender and intellectually pureed. Then he was smacked around a bit. It was fun.
The Official Snarkatron Position on the Unfairness of It All: We are out of money.
It’s like this. We are all in a plane. The engines have caught fire and are barely working. The plane is losing altitude. We can a) attempt to make a controlled crash into terrain. Some people will probably die. Some people will be injured. Or, b) we can demand a better in-flight movie with the sound cranked so we can’t hear the screaming from the cockpit, demand to get to the airport on time to make our connecting flights, and crash in an uncontrolled fashion when the engines seize and/or run out of fuel. Everyone dies. Nobody makes their connecting flight, the luggage is lost beyond redemption, and by the way there are NO PEANUTS IN HELL. Ahem.
The entitlements known as Social Security and Medicare are running out of money.
Social Security has no assets. It has lots of IOUs from the government, and the only way they can be redeemed is by the government getting more money from someone.
We have no more money.
Social Security is not an enforceable contract. The government can and will change the terms (see COLA adjustments, retirement age adjustments.) You cannot sue to get your SS payments back. They are a tax, they do not belong to you. There is no trust fund.
Wir haben kein Geld mehr.
Old people are depending on Social Security. I acknowledge this.
No mas dinero.
Yelling and complaining about how the Government Lied will not change the facts on the ground, i.e. WE HAVE NO MONEY. It does not matter what you were promised.
The only way the Government can get more money is either print it (which they are doing) which devalues it, or by taking it from people who have it. There is no other way. If you take it from people who have it, they will hide what they have and refuse to earn any more than they absolutely need to, because they know it will be taken away from them. And then we are right back where we started. To wit,
WE HAVE NO MONEY
posted by Snarkatron at 3:06 PM
2 Comments:
I agree....mostly. We are broke. Flat, freakin' busted. However, those seniors who depend on So-So Security do so because they paid into it for over 50 years based on a mutual contract with the government, to wit: Pay a specific percentage of your income into this fund. When you reach retirement age, then you start getting back the money you paid into it. That's a contract the government has broken. They were never supposed to touch that fund because it wasn't a government asset to start with, simply a savings account earning an interest rate only the government could command due to the number of members in the account.
However, Demoncrats are worse than teenagers when it comes to money -- they swear it's going to burn a hole in their pocket if they don't spend it....NOW!
What needs to be done is the unearned entitlements, aka welfare, farm subsidies to NOT grow plants, reparations in the guise of subsidies, funding for nefarious projects and research grants, et al., need to be shit-canned and the money used to replace that which was stolen from the national retirement savings account. Permanently block access to the personal remaining balances for those who are receiving SS payments now. Pay back that which was taken from those who have put into the fund for years but have years yet to go before they retire. Stop taking money that people will never be able to recoup. And then, finally, let each person/family figure out their own retirement plan. It's called self-reliance and America used to be the flag-bearer for that particular value.
Social Security reminds me of the United Thank Offering, which I attempted to do when I was trying to be a mainstream Whiskypalian.
We had a little blue cardboard box, into which we'd put a coin or bill or two, when we felt particularly thankful.
Well, you know me, and how bad I am with money and the getting of it. I would have severely broke periods and pull money from the box, though always careful to put an IOU in there. It got to the point where there was no actual money in the box, just IOUs to myself.
At that point, I quit kidding myself. The government of these United States needs to quit kidding itself. I betcha it won't, though.
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