Unfortunately that's a lotta people.I have to laugh at people who think SS is retirement.
Like it or not everyone is going to retire either by choice (saving early) or forcibly (usually health reasons). Most employers are not going to keep you on their payrolls when you are in your 70's. People who think they're going to work until they die are fooling themselves. Employers now are shifting more into the "gig economy" where they don't have to pay you benefits such as insurance or retirement matching.
State pension funds, regardless of the political parties that run them, are funded differently. Illinois is famously underfunded while places like South Dakota and North Carolina seem to have their acts together. States act like people, some put money away for the future, some don't. That $10 Starbuck's latte is just like the $10 million dollar pork project to get some votes. That money could have been saved for later and grown with compounding interest.
They can raise the FICA tax and will probably need to and raise the retirement age. The problem I'm worried about is that the majority of the jobs that are being created in this country are minimum wage jobs. Those kind of jobs are not going to fund Social Security that much. You raise the minimum wage to a "living wage" and the cost of those service affected by this will go up. That $7 Big Mac will go up to $10. Either that or they'll just get a robot to do the job.
And the living wage debate. Where is that money going to come from? Bottom line to everything is money. Corporate taxes to fund it? So when the corporations start to relocate to other countries to avoid those taxes then what? Frankly how long will America be an attractive place to do business in when the pressures of retirement, repaying student loans, and lower wages reduce the purchasing power of consumers?
The government carrying such a huge amount of debt causes a lot of people to fear an oncoming bout of inflation but if prices get too high who is going to have the money to buy the stuff? There isn't enough of the "1%" to carry the economy. The government wants/needs to inflate its way out of it's debt but I'm having a hard time seeing a way to get past that point without a fair amount of pain/turmoil on the general public.
Oh my gosh. Are you serious?
The DNC lied constantly, even faking poll numbers against Bernie to show Hillary was winning when Bernie clearly had the most support in certain areas.
Oh my gosh. Are you serious?
The DNC lied constantly, even faking poll numbers against Bernie to show Hillary was winning when Bernie clearly had the most support in certain areas.
You just need to google to find loads of information. I'm not going to do all the work for you. The young turks covered it throughout the entire nomination process, you can just search their videos in 2015 and 2016 and find tons of videos along with links to back up their findings. They weren't making it up.
But here is one very telling post, I think.
http://observer.com/2017/05/ro-khanna-admits-democratic-primares-rigged-for-hillary-clinton/
Democrats did everything they could to suppress Sanders’ candidacy, including Wasserman Schultz changing a rule to help the Clinton campaign’s fundraising; Democratic Party officials perpetuating false, divisive narratives; the DNC whitewashing Sanders’ campaign; liberal media spreading fake stories that Sanders supporters threw chairs at the Nevada Democratic Party Convention; and then-DNC Vice Chair Donna Brazile giving Clinton debate questions ahead of time. T
They even purged Bernie backers from the DNC.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CfFMmBSPT2A#
The amount of attacks he faced from the establishment media during the entire nomination process. Namely from CNN and ABC because of the huge sums of money they gave Hillary. Proof posted on reddit when poll numbers shown on these news outlets didn't line up with polls done in the areas by the cited sources.
You really need to educate yourself on the difference between the corporate democrats and the justice democrats because you seem to live in a fantasy world where all democrats are good people, and not out serving corporate interests just like Republicans do.
I have to laugh at people who think SS is retirement.
I think some people confuse "retirement" with "still able to pay my property taxes and won't freeze or starve to death".
It’s not a good thing to have long term and the fact that Republicans decided to increase the deficit when the economy is functioning well is beyond insane. We will survive though.
No matter how many times you repeat it, it's still dumb.
(June 7, 2018) "I think the U.S. really is more or less at full employment. But do I think the Fed is right to be raising rates, and that we should start being worried about fiscal deficits? Actually, no, for two reasons. First, I might be wrong. And the costs of tightening when the economy still has room to grow are much bigger than those of waiting and discovering that we’ve overshot a bit. Second, everything we’ve learned since a 2% inflation target became orthodoxy suggests that the target was too low. The effective lower bound on interest rates is a much bigger threat than we realized, and the problem of downward wage rigidity is a bigger deal too. So if inflation crept up from 2 to 3 or even 4, that would actually be a good thing." -- Krugman
The rub there is that most of those people get very little SS benefit as they worked low paying service jobs most of their adult life. I think the younger generations who have seen grandma and grandpa in their old age think that SS is something you can live on but fail to understand that grandma and grandpa are part of the last generation that also had decent pensions and still have pensionable health care benefits.
My generation ( or at least those not working for state or federal gov't) have to ensure we save into a retirement vehicle (namely 401k) and hope that health care somehow gets fixed or implodes by time we retire in 10-15 years.
Irony is as much as I see the logic in a 401k for portability, I also see why corporations loved the advent of the 401k (They helped lobby for them of course. It got them out of the pension business. Genie is out of the bottle, so I'm not sure what the fix is.
Well I am obviously not going to convince you since you live in a fantasy world where all democrats are heroes and Republicans the villains. That wasn't an opinion piece. It was a dnc representative admitting to things we already knew about.
I imagine we agree and most things except that you fail to see fault, seemingly at all, with the democrats.
And what, you think Hillary isn't crooked? Of course she is. The Clinton's have accepted 3 billion in corporate money. Do you live in a world where that money didn't buy them anything? Of course it has.
The corporate donors don't just hand out money without expecting something in return. Hillary is the second most hated politician in the US and she was just the lesser of two evils. And lost to the most hated in the country. Mainly because many people simply couldn't and wouldn't vote for Hillary. Whether that was a Jill Stein vote or not voting at all.
When did I say Bernie would have won? Or anything even close to that? I even said in my first post about this subject that I felt the DNC did it because they thought it was best. It doesn't change the facts that Bernie wasn't given a fair shake in the primaries. Those are facts.Even if this was true; so what? The democratic party is a private institution, they can do whatever they feel is best. If Bernie don't like it then he can start his own. (in fact he's not even a democrat most of the time!).
And any thought that Bernie could have won the general is ludicrous! He might be the only one who would have lost worse than hillary. A socialist who wanted to raise taxes to 90% to pay for college for "the librul snowflakes", free health care and more benefits for lazy minorities? hah, that's how that would have played in the midwest! Trump won because he promised to screw over minorties to benefit white, christian men. Very little in Bernie's platform applied to that. (I guess his idiotic trade protectionism could qualify though)
And the double down on innuendo. Or is that the triple down?
Your concern trolling is obvious.
No I don't remember, but you should have responded and called me out. If you don't reply to me, how am I going to know?Remember me? Your favorite "Trump humper" i think was the word you used to falsely accuse me in another thread I was also a Bernie Bro and still am to some extent. But i agree with you on this issue. Any Dems who fail to see how the DNC acted are just blinded by their favorite sports team. The exact same way they blame Trumpers to be blinded. The facts are there, they just dont want to admit their team played unfairly against their own teammates.
One of the quotes in my sig puts it all into perspective about partisanship.
Restoring the FICA taxbase is a better approach. As income concentration has increased, the percentage of the national income subject to FICA taxes has dropped. Remove the income cap on wages subject to FICA and apply the tax to capital gains and the social security funding "crisis" vanishes forever.All that's needed is a modest increase in the FICA, yet there is resistance from "bothsides" to this, one one hand because it taxes poor victim workers, and on the other because it is a tax, period. But it's the most equitable way to fix the problem, and the last time I had at the math, it would have taken less than a 1‰ increase to make ends meet for another half century or so. Since it's employer matched, a little goes twice as far.
What you describe is simply another wealth transfer with a nice sounding name, since those above the cap don't see any increased benefit for their dollar. I know "wealth transfer" doesn't ring any alarm bells for you, but it does for a great number of those who pay attention. A straight rate increase is at least honest, and paid equally by the future recipient and by the ones you'd like to tax more, and is, in fact, a wealth transfer, just a more modest one.Restoring the FICA taxbase is a better approach. As income concentration has increased, the percentage of the national income subject to FICA taxes has dropped. Remove the income cap on wages subject to FICA and apply the tax to capital gains and the social security funding "crisis" vanishes forever.
What you describe is simply another wealth transfer with a nice sounding name, since those above the cap don't see any increased benefit for their dollar. I know "wealth transfer" doesn't ring any alarm bells for you, but it does for a great number of those who pay attention. A straight rate increase is at least honest, and paid equally by the future recipient and by the ones you'd like to tax more, and is, in fact, a wealth transfer, just a more modest one.
I think I could support lifting the cap on Medicare only, though.
We have lots of redistribution already, and there will be even more of it in the future. As I said, even a straight FICA rate increase hits employers for half. That's more redistribution.Wealth transfer? Trickle down economics have been moving wealth & income to the tippy-top since 1980. The lower 75% of families have lost an enormous share of national income to the financial elite. Enormous. That reduces their ability to invest & accumulate wealth for retirement. If you have some notional idea of how to change that back other than via redistribution, lay it out, because otherwise it simply won't happen.
There's no cap on medicare tax. There's also a .9% bump if your income is over certain thresholds.What you describe is simply another wealth transfer with a nice sounding name, since those above the cap don't see any increased benefit for their dollar. I know "wealth transfer" doesn't ring any alarm bells for you, but it does for a great number of those who pay attention. A straight rate increase is at least honest, and paid equally by the future recipient and by the ones you'd like to tax more, and is, in fact, a wealth transfer, just a more modest one.
I think I could support lifting the cap on Medicare only, though.
Edit: Also, I think the retirement age should be indexed according to a formula that takes number of years the average person is expected to survive after retirement into account.
We have lots of redistribution already, and there will be even more of it in the future. As I said, even a straight FICA rate increase hits employers for half. That's more redistribution.
Unfortunately that's a lotta people.
I didn't know that, thank you.There's no cap on medicare tax. There's also a .9% bump if your income is over certain thresholds.