Are you serious? Medicare & SS are incredibly efficient. Administrative costs in Medicare are only ~2% of operating expenditures. The government got us to the (*)(*)(*)(*)ing moon! End of discussion!
No, i was talking about medicare & SS in the US, not some imaginary moon colony. Are YOU serious, is the more obvious question.. if you think SS & medicare are managed well... They are both nearly bankrupt, & will require MASSIVE infusions of 'bailout' money to keep them solvent.
SS has administrative costs of 0.7% of benefits. Compare this with 15.4% for Chiles privatized fund & 40% for private life insurance companies. Administrative costs in Medicare are only ~2% of operating expenditures. Compare this to the ~17% for the private insurance industry. How is that not efficiently well managed? To the extent that this is true, it is a result of not being funded out of general revenues which itself is a mere accounting fiction.
That .7% is well understated and does not include the costs of collecting the money and paying executives to make decisions. Those costs are buried in other budgets. FICA should be collected from all earned income without a cap and it will remain fully funded.
They are not nearly bankrupt, the SS Trust holds about $2Trillion in US Treasury Bonds, excess funds collected since the 1980s when Reagan signed into law a big increase in FICA taxes after it was explained to him that without it SS would not be able to take care of the baby boomers. In 1994 Clinton made a deal with the republicans to raise taxes and control spending increases so the national debt could be paid off by 2010, which was when SS would begin cashing in its US Treasury Bonds to pay for the baby boomers retirement. Then Bush got elected and the republicans gained control of both houses of Congress and tossed the whole idea of fiscal responsibility out the window. If you care to remember that far back, their mantra was "deficits don't matter".
Paying FICA today is a Ponzi scheme. Today's contributors are directly paying for the SS/Medicare recipients. The money that the recipients paid in over their work careers does not accumulate and does not collect interest income. This IMO is the fundamental problem with FICA. If we paid FICA over our career, and the money accumulated with interest, and at retirement we were eligible to start collecting on our investment, it would not be a Ponzi scheme. Instead, at retirement, we collect an arbitrary amount which is not funded by our investments. We are losing out on trillion$ in interest income, therefore, today's FICA contributors are actually paying much more than they would if our FICA investments earned interest income. As long as it's a Ponzi scheme, we might as well stop with FICA withholding and just include the total costs of SS, SSI, and Medicare in the general fund budgets and collect it from all taxpayers...
Wrong wrong wrong. SS is not an investment scheme but an income support program for old age. Payouts are based on contributions. The program is self funding. SS has been collecting more than it pays out since the 1960s. The excess fund have been invested in US Treasury Bonds, the safest investment on the planet. These bonds pay the same interest as every other bond the Treasury issues. The only difference between other Treasury bonds and the bonds SS holds is that the SS bonds can be redeemed on demand. The SS Trust Fund currently holds about $2Trillion in US Treasury Bonds. In the early 1990s SS calculated that it would need to begin cashing in these bonds in 2010. Clinton and the republican Congress agreed to a program to reduce the deficit and pay down the national debt to put the government in a fiscally sound position to pay off the SS bonds by then. Then Bush got elected and the republicans tossed that program under the bus and embarked on a program of fiscal irresponsibility that by 2006 was projecting a $Trillion deficit in 2010. Instead of acting responsibly to pay back the $Trillions in government debt they racked up the republicans began calling SS a Ponzi scheme that was stealing from people and doomed to fail and those $Trillions in SS bonds do not need to be paid back because that would require a draconian tax increase that would cripple the economy. They blamed the $Trillion deficit on Obama even though he was not even elected before that was set in motion. It was the republicans who created the whole situation with the deficits and inability to pay back SS and the deregulation that created the economic calamity. Gullible imbeciles and brain dead angry idiots all over the US bought the republican mantra hook line and sinker.
This is completely untrue. I work in both public and private utilities. First, costs are lower for public utilities to the consumers. They are usually better maintained and better run than private utilities. Private utilities see their equipment beat to (*)(*)(*)(*) so that less money is spent on maintenance and more on extracting profits. The profit factor, and high executive pay are a huge reason why the private utilities cost more.
then you not only pay for the utilities, but the profits of the shareholders, and you no longer considered a good business unless you increase profits year over year.. which is not realistic when dealing with something like water and sewer
I don't know why people would say private utilities are cheaper withoiut finding out for themselves to see if it's true or not.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator, an individual or organization, pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator" Take out the word 'fraudulent' and you have the SS program. If people do not 'invest' in FICA then they do not get a payout at retirement time. There is no interest earned on the individual investment and this is one of the root problems. Contributors today are paying for the recipients today. If the contributions fall short, bonds are exercised to cover the shortfall. I don't debate politics...all politicians are worthless whores...
the fact that Bush and others are borrowing from the SS fund shows the fund is sound... if we can just keep their hands out of the cookie jar and remove the caps so everyone pays the same tax for EVERY DOLLAR they earn, the rich should not get to pay less per dollar just because they earn so many dollars .
If there is a cap on the SS payout then there must be a cap on the SS contribution...why should wealthier people pay for other people's retirement and medical care??
there should be no caps on either side, everyone should get the same amount as we all should pay the same % tax on every dollar we earn we pay the ss tax to support our elderly during our generation as generations before have.... and the generations to come will pay the ss tax for us as well and on and on it will go I do love how the right cares more about the rich having to pay less per dollar in taxes then they do about the elderly though... crazy .
Because the progressivity of it allows for the poor to have more money to be consumers, and add to the profits of the wealthy, generally.
If you want higher contributions by 'some' people then you need to give 'those' people larger payouts...this has nothing to do with D's or R's??
I have no problem with the wealthier paying higher tax rates but FICA is not a tax. It is a payroll withholding to provide the contributor with some retirement income and medical care...the more paid in the more they receive and conversely the less they pay the less they receive. If you wish for SS and Medicare to be funded by 'taxpayers' then collect taxes through the general fund and stop FICA withholding...
no ya don't, you just require everyone pay the same % per dollar earned and give everyone the same coverage when they retire .
Everyone is a taxpayer, in one way or another. The reason why it was made a payroll tax, and separate from discretionary budgets was because it's too easy for congress to go through one or two elections and see the funding misused, or guided away from the intent of SS.
Talking only about percentages is ignoring the reality of the cost to the individual. You seem to believe a person earning $50K should pay $3825 (7.65% of gross income) while another person earning $2 million should pay $153,000. You act as if the dollar amounts don't have any meaning to wealthier people? It is absurd to expect the wealthier to pay for others in the amounts you are talking about! Using your finite wisdom, the $50K worker should pay $38.25 for an elegant steak dinner while the $2M worker should pay $1530 for the same identical meal? For no other reason except one person earns more than the other? What exactly is wrong with Americans paying their own way?
Yeah right...let any politician try to pry SS or Medicare from old people and they will march on Washington and beat the politicians to death! It would be a civil revolt of biblical proportions! This would be tantamount to trying to take a ham sandwich from Oprah...it ain't going to happen. If Americans feel others should pay their way, with FICA or any programs, then fund it through general taxation where all Americans can share in the funding as applicable to their tax status...
Payroll taxes work pretty well. And there isn't a need to change much, except to eliminate income caps on the payroll tax.
It's completely funded at today's levels of benefits in real dollars until 2033. Then because SS is unable to borrow money to keep benefits at that legal past 2033, the benefits get reduced to 75% of today's real dollars. If the income caps are removed, the program goes on to be funded in full for almost all of the 75 year actuarial window they calculate with.
This actually happens. Stupid rich people pay astronomical prices for marginally better meals than working people can get at their local bistro run by the same chef that used to work at the place the wealthy toss their money around like water. Many are unable to because their wealthy employers pay them less than is necessary for them to pay their own way. Maybe we should just go back to poll taxes to satisfy your complaint. If everyone paid the same tax regardless of income or ability to pay the wealthy would certainly not feel so abused by the horrific amounts they are forced top pay because of this income based taxing scheme. SS would become like taking a ferry, everyone pays the same and gets exactly the same service. Those who cannot afford it can just stay on the side of poverty starvation and death in their old age and disability after spending most of their working lives in and out of prison for defaulting on paying the SS poll tax. Its really pretty simple. If the whole idea is to provide pension support for people in their old age through a tax on income, and benefits are determined by income, taxing people's income by the percentage necessary to support the entire scheme is the most logical means to do so. By your position property taxes should not be based on assessed value but some other measure like acreage because taxing property by its value is totally unfair to those who can most afford it, the wealthy. It is all relative and the wealthy have no concept of what money is to people who cannot afford what they need for basic survival. What is wrong with the wealthy of America objecting to contributing the same relative amount as everyone else to make sure that the old people do not end up begging on the streets? Is it some sort of mass psychopathy?
