The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    The SS Trust Fund is going broke. Good

    There ought not to be any amount in the Trust Fund. It's a rip off.

    As I've explained tediously , each year some money is subtracted from the TF  to be paid out in benefits. And some is added by witholdings from workers' pay checks.

    How much should be withheld? Just enough to cover those benefits.How much is being withheld.? A lot more.Then that excess is loaned to the government.

    Got it? Our paychecks are being raided not just to cover retiree  benefits but to do that and  in addition to finance the government.

     If the Government needs money it should get it from all the citizens rather than extorting it from workers under the pretence that it is something to do with providing for their retirement

    Now the Right and associated viewers with alarm are viewing with alarm the forecast that by 2037 the "Trust Fund" will be  depleted. Good .That means the workers will finally be released from this requirement.It should be sooner.

    What should be done?

    Cut benefits.

    Raise withholdings

    How about  do nothing.?. It ain't broke , don't fix it. At least not until 2037

    I hear, endlessly , that the Government  needs to  cut the deficit  W imposed upon it..Fine .Then the Government should get on with it . Since it's its problem..

     And not by further  screwing the workers- and retirees- by pretending that  they  have to increase the size of the sweet- heart loan they've been manipulated into providing to the Treasury for 70 years.

    Comments

     Fourteen years later I've developed belated appreciation for Al Gore's proposal for a lockbox for SS withholdings. Withholding does serve as enforced saving and I'm sufficiently conventional to assume that's desirable:  ant and  grasshopper  etc

    Except that we've seen the downside - or at least some of the downside - of entrusting savings to the tender mercies of the Treasury/ politicians.But that's a whole n'other subject as the saying goes.