Social Security Defenders Circling the Wagons

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What about allowing people to opt out to decrease long term benefits. Besides social security isn't a proper function of government, might as well give people the freedom to chose how to save for retirement. This is the land of the free right?

Doug of PA 10:29AM July 20, 2010

"The next "least painful" change from where I sit would be to s-l-o-w-l-y make the annual cost of living adjustments (COLA) for Social Security a bit less generous. And a bit should be just that. We don't need a major rollback in the COLA. "
Why am I visualizing the image of a frog being slowly boiled to death in a pot of water when you wrote that? Maybe because the metaphor is spot-on.

MiHi of IA 10:13PM July 19, 2010

While the average life span has increased 15 years since 1940, this is mainly due to declining infant and child mortality, not to seniors living 15 years longer. The average life span of 65 year old people has increased about 3 years since 1940 according to the Social Security folks-- http://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html --,while the age for full benefit retirement has gone from 65 to 66 now and 67 by 2027. Reasonable measures, like increasing the upper limit on taxable income, would resolve most of the projected deficit for all those now working.

Charlie of HI 7:40PM July 19, 2010

Rather cut social security which has been fully paid for by payroll deductions, address the budget deficit by:
a) Cutting our military budget in half, closing bases around the world unless the host country pays for all expenses, reducing the sub fleet, reducing missiles and unnecessary new and exceedingly expensive weapon systems. Who do we need to fight anyway.
b) Raise taxes on those that have them cut over the past 40 years (you know who you are).
c) Eliminate the low salary limit on social security payroll tax.
Problem solved.

M of FL 3:17PM July 19, 2010

After doing much research on the "Social Security Earning Limits", I've come to the conclusion that the system is set up for self distruction. If an individual chooses to retire at age 62, but is still able to perform a full time job, why sould there be a limitation on how much he can earn before his benifits are reduced. The benifit calculations are based on prior earnings, not on future earnings. If I were to be able to start drawing my pension at 62, and was in a position to still work and was able to secure a position making $100,000.00 it makes sense to me that I would be paying more back into the Social Security fund that I was withdrawing. Having the additional income available would also have a profound effect on stimulating the economy by increasing consumer spending.

John R. Willis of TX 2:40PM July 19, 2010

All the talk about cutting Social Security in order to reduce the deficits ignores the most serious and urgent Social Security problem--the fact that the government has "borrowed" or "stolen" every dollar of the $2.5 trillion generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike.
Social Security is funded exclusively by FICA taxes. Not a single dollar has ever been taken from the general revenue fund to pay Social Security benefits. Thus, Social Security has not contributed a dime to the budget deficit or the soaring national debt. The 1982 Greenspan Commission on Social Security reform foresaw a problem when the baby boomers retired, beginning in about 2010, unless corrective action was taken. The commission recommended a hefty hike in payroll taxes that would require the baby boomers to prepay most of the cost of their own benefits. The recommendations of the commission were enacted into law as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1983.
Thus Social Security was fixed in 1983. That fix would last until at least 2037, with no action, IF the intent of the 1983 legislation had been followed. In addition to the short-term deficit in this year’s Social Security budget, Social Security payroll tax revenue will fall short of benefit costs annually, beginning in 2016. This was all planned for in the 1983 legislation. The payroll tax hike has generated $2.5 trillion in surplus revenue that was supposed to be saved and invested in real marketable Treasury bonds to build up a large reserve in the trust fund. If the plan had been followed, Social Security would now have $2.5 trillion in “good-as-gold” marketable Treasury bonds in the trust fund which the Social Security trustees could resell as necessary to raise the needed money to pay full benefits until 2037.
The REAL Social Security problem is that politicians developed a severe case of “sticky-finger” syndrome when the first surpluses began to show up in the second Reagan term. Since the money would not be needed by Social Security for another 30 years, these politicians just decided to put the money in the general fund and use if for other programs. That illegal practice has been continued to this very day. Every dime of the Social Security surplus has been spent and replaced with non-marketable IOU’s, which are akin to a note that a bank robber might leave behind in the empty bank vault, stating how much money he has stolen.
I first discovered the great Social Security scam more than ten years ago I have been trying to expose the scam ever since. I have been warning about the Social Security fraud for longer than Harry Markopolis tried to warn the SEC about the Madoff Ponzi scheme. I need help from conscientious citizens who care about the future of Social Security.

Allen W. Smith, Ph.D. of FL 2:24PM July 19, 2010

The Social Security Scam Part II
The hard and indisputable fact is that all of the $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue, has been spent on wars and other government programs. The surplus revenue was supposed to be saved and invested in public-issue marketable Treasury bonds. If that had been done, the trust fund would today hold this much in “good-as-gold” real marketable Treasury bonds that the trustees could resell in the open market to raise funds with which to pay benefits to the baby boomers, who have paid more into Social Security than any other generation. However, instead of saving and investing the surplus revenue, the government funneled it into the general fund so it could be spent on anything and everything. Money can be saved and invested or it can be spent. But you can’t do both. Once money is spent, there is nothing left to invest. The IOUs in the trust fund are akin to a note that a bank robber might leave behind in the empty bank vault, stating how much money he has stolen. They are not marketable, and they could not be sold to anyone even for a penny on the dollar. I have known this for ten years. Others discovered it before I did. Consider the following quotations:
“…the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund ..in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate bank notes.”—Senator Ernest Hollings (SC) speech on Senate floor, October 13, 1989
“There are no stocks or bonds or real estate in the trust fund. It has nothing of real value to draw down.”—David Walker, Comptroller General of the GAO, January 21, 2005
If anyone has any remaining doubts about whether or not the trust fund contains real assets, those doubts should be removed by the following statement from the 2009 Social Security Trustees Report:
“Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance redemptions and interest payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public.”
The American people have a right to know the truth about the Social Security trust fund. I welcome the help of anyone who wants to help me get that truth out.

Allen W. Smith, Ph.D. of FL 2:19PM July 19, 2010

The Social Security Scam Part I
I first discovered the great Social Security scam more than ten years ago, while doing research for my book, “The Alleged Budget Surplus, Social Security, and Voodoo Economics.” I was shocked and outraged. I wanted to tell the whole world so they would be outraged too. But nobody wanted to listen. On September 27, 2000, I made my first major attempt to expose the scam when I appeared on CNN to discuss my new book. I desperately tried to convince anchor Lou Waters that the government was spending all of the Social Security surplus revenue on non-Social Security programs. He seemed amused, and he finally asked me, “Are you a voice crying in the wilderness?” As things turned out, I was a voice crying in the wilderness in 2000, and I have continued to be such a voice for a decade. (Note: With the debt-commission’s call for Social Security cuts, the public and the media have become more receptive to the hard facts about the trust fund. See my recent op-ed articles in the Winter Haven News Chief (July 10) and the Las Vegas Review-Journal (July 16).
I tried hard to make the raiding of Social Security a major political issue in the 2000 presidential campaign. I sent copies of my book and many letters to Al Gore, urging him to break ranks with Bill Clinton, acknowledge that the trust fund was being raided, and promise to end the practice if elected president. I can’t prove, or be absolutely certain, that I was the source of Gore’s Social Security “Lockbox” proposal, but I believe that I was. The important point is that it became such a big issue that George W. Bush was forced to also promise that he would end the raiding. There was no doubt that the trust fund was being looted during the 2000 campaign. Both candidates talked about it and the news media reported it regularly. That looting has continued unchanged, to this very day. However, the same media, who regularly reported the raiding of the Social Security trust fund during the 2000 presidential campaign, stopped reporting news about the raiding of the trust fund after Bush became President. It was as if they believed Bush kept his promise about Social Security, although he did not, and they never bothered to check it out.
I had hoped that the publication of my book, “The Looting of Social Security,” in 2004, would finally blow the cover on the dirty secret that the public was not supposed to know about. But somebody made sure that did not happen. The book mysteriously disappeared from bookstores across the country and was listed as “unavailable” by Amazon.com. It took me three years to get the rights to the book back so I could publish “THE BIG LIE: How Our Government Hoodwinked the Public, Emptied the S.S. Trust Fund, and caused The Great Economic Collapse,” which also reports the awful truth about the Social Security trust fund.
to be continued…

Allen W. Smith, Ph.D. of FL 1:58PM July 19, 2010