Get rid of social security?

Yep, only you have to worry about the failure of the Social Contract and a return of the Obamanation of Desolation should the anti-Tea Party give us every tax a French Aristocrat would love.

"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." (Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 Oct. 1785) http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s32.html

"But the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to exterpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture, and which is one of the principle sources of corruption at elections." (Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, p, 221)

 

This is a non sequitur argument. The individual determines what is an acceptable or non-acceptable compensation package for employment. They are not forced to accept any compensation package that could either include or exclude pension funds. I've negotiated numerous compensation packages related to employment and Social Security was never a consideration related to my acceptance or rejection of the compensation package offered.

A government welfare program is exactly that. It is unrelated to employment per se and the FICA/Payroll taxes paid today are for current recipients. It is not for future benefits and no individual has a vested interest in Social Security as it can be terminated at anytime by a simple act of Congress. It won't be and no one seriously proposes that. What is being proposed it to make Social Security a vested individual program as opposed to a "spend as you go" welfare program.

That is the fundamental difference between what exists today (a non-vested welfare program) and what is proposed by privatization (a individually vested program). We have no "right" to Social Security today but by privatization every individual would be 100% vested in a program that provides superior benefits.

 

Not under contract law. Contract law requires the voluntary participation of individuals involved in the contract.

Social Security is not a valid legal contract as it is imposed through coercion and it's conditions are unilaterally imposed by the government. It was created without the consent of the People that it affects and it can and has been modified without the consent of those required to participate in it. It can be terminated at anytime by the government though a simply change in statutory law without the consent of those affected.

Of interest is the very definition of a social contract:

The US government never secured the agreement of the members of society in creating Social Security. To do so would have required a Constitutional amendment because the States represent the People when it comes to the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Government. The US Constitution, in Article I Section 8, specifically delegates roles and responsibilities through enumeration. If the US Congress wishes to expand the roles and responsibilities of the US government then it must first seek authorization from the States which control the enumerated roles and responsibilities based upon the will of the People. State governments, and not the Federal government, are the direct government of the People. The Federal government is a contracted entity created by the States and not of the People.

I should also include the definition of a legal contract for comparison:

There isn't an agreement between two or more parties related to Social Security. No one is asked if they want to participate in Social Security but instead they are mandaged to participate.

 

Absolute total bull crap of the most smelly kind on the planet, I am talking a sick bull with the runs locked into a stall eating chicken crap. The individual DOES NOT determine what is an acceptable or non-acceptable compensation package for employment, the market does, and the market includes Social Security.

 

FDR was not a Dictator, and threatening to pack the court does not constitute the act of doing it against the will of We the People; he had a picture over the mantle of every good citizen sharecropper who was given a farm in Pine Mountain Georgia and had a slave boy living in the leaky barn to plow the fields, so how dare you...

Article III is as much a part of WE THE PEOPLE as Article I Section 8; that is why it is important that Senators not advise and consent to justices based upon qualifications of being able to have the trains run on time for promoting the general welfare of the euthanasia program that eliminates those sub humans who whine a lot about their taxes being too high when they pay less than their superior human ancestors did up until Raygun and the burning Bush.

Social Security is a general welfare program, based and argued forever upon the promoting the General Welfare thingy, so it serves no purpose to claim it is unconstitutional on those grounds. We the people vote for Ron Paul, and give him a Senate, and you can claim we the people ruled Social Security unconstitutional.

 

How exactly is SSI part of "the Market". The market considers the impact of SSI, but can not influence it.

The individual is forced by the government to do its bidding, because the government doesn't really offer anything of value to trade.

The individual is not forced by any one employer to accept their job, at the terms and conditions the employer sets. Even the market "price" for a position, is a range depending on the employers need and the candidates capabilities. As a highly skilled engineer, my value will be high for a company that doesn't have my skill, and nothing for the company that has more than they need, neither is "market price". I can negotiate a low base salary, with a higher than normal bonus based on my contributions and the impact they have on the companies sales. Or, I can make up the difference in stock, or 6 weeks a year in vacation. What the employer and I agree to is a contract.

Unskilled labor doesn't have those options. But with free K-12 education, and low cost junior college, most that allow 2 years to be applied to a 4 year degree, and many companies that will pay some of that tuition, there is no reason to be unskilled.

 

Did he put it to a national vote? Did he advertise the increase in the number of justices a year before, and ask for public comment?

How exactly did he know it wasn't against the will of the people?

Did he own Pine Mountain? Or, did he give away government property?

FDR was afraid the Great Depression would end before he could enact all his social programs, knowing the people wouldn't accept it.

No! Section 8 spells out what the Congress does to assure the General Welfare - SSI isn't in there, neither is Medicare, welfare, etc.....

The Federal government was the states forming a union for their mutual benefit, not as an overlord.

If the founders wanted SSI, they would have established it - they didn't.

Read the Federation Papers. Here is a snippet from #1

But, that would apply if we saw Socialists turn into tyrants - and that never happens - ROTFL.....

 

Why boss steal money from caveman? Why boss make profit in market with caveman's money?

All poor caveman know is facts.

Boss stole money from caveman and gave it to other who paid for boss product so boss have caveman money to take hot blond MILF to beach; caveman slave for money boss now have.

Get rid of SSI, caveman know only facts. Boss stole money from caveman. Boss gave money to other. Other paid boss money. Boss pocketed caveman's money. Boss get MILF. Boss now not want to pay caveman.

It simple.

Now is the time to pay caveman, if boss not pay caveman, boss better steal from new caveman to pay old caveman, or old caveman vote Obamanation and get his money from boss.

Ugh

 

This is extremely interesting as an insight into the thinking of the founders. They recognize that those who are the biggest proponents of personal freedom and liberty are also the most likely to become tyrannical demagogues.

 

Is that how you read it? I read it differently:

"that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people"

 

Social Security is a welfare program by the US government and is not a part of the free market. As has been noted the US Congress can and has modified Social Security at will without the consent of anyone. Congress can terminate Social Security if it so chooses. It has nothing to do with the employment contract between the individual and the enterprise.

What is being missed when a person establishes an employment contract with an enterprise is that it establishes the free market value. The free market value does not dictate compensation for labor but instead the compensation dictates the free market value of the labor.

Once again back to the topic and the fact is that no one is really proposing an end to Social Security but instead what has been proposed is converting it from a government welfare program to a vested private program where individuals including low and middle income workers will receive benefits equal to or greater than the current welfare program. Why are there those that oppose better benefits with a program where the individual is vested and where the money they earn actually belongs to them?

Remember that the employers and employees would still be contributing the same dollars to the program but instead of that money belonging to the US Congress (government) that money would belong to the individual.

 

Since throughout recorded history the image on the coin and the regulating of the Value thereof was by throwing bread to the mob, or Circus Maximus, or any other means of promoting the general Welfare to keep the mob content, since Congress has the power to coin Money and regulate the Value thereof and power to make any proper laws to do it, therefore, Social Security is a part of the market.

Social Security is Insurance, a part of the market regulating the image and value of the coin, paid by taxes called Federal Insurance Contributions. And to the best of my knowledge nobody who ever got welfare paid Federal Welfare Contributions Act taxes.

SS insurance and the image on the coin and the Value thereof is backed not by some private unregulated market company that has no power to coin an image or set the Value of money, but by the United State's Social Contract.

If you do not want Obama on your coin, you had better do a better job of convincing people that you "Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say," that if you say, "nobody," you had better (*)(*)(*)(*) well mean nobody.

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"Anyways I was wondering if getting rid of social security is good? or at least privatize it since it is taking so much out of our budget." (Ignorant)

"Once again back to the topic and the fact is that no one is really proposing an end to Social Security..." (Shiva_TD)

"Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated."

I do not consider "at least" good enough for this topic to make what you claimed to be a "fact" true.

******

You asked, "why are there those that oppose better benefits with a program where the individual is vested and where the money they earn actually belongs to them?"

Because not enough people who can read a history book believe your private free market annuity is anything other than another scam, where people lost money (their retirement savings) that actually belonged to them and they earned, like an S&L crisis (which took out a Teacher's retirement), a mortgage crisis, or some other balloon in a Greater Depression...

Many little kiddies have known all along that someone's grandma never paid in as much as they took out. So your "vested and where the money they earn actually belongs to them" is outed as a deliberate deception, especially with your other LIE that "no one is really proposing an end to Social Security." Too many people have lost too much of their vested interests in the private market, to ever believe a Private Contract, or any vested interest, is any more safe than a Social Contract.

Mostly you can neither buy or sell in this market without paying FICA or SE Tax; please, please, please note the absolute irrefutable FACT of what I said in my writing, which can be read by anyone if it is not erased, I never said, "free market." Am I going to have to repeat that, or do I have to quote what I said again?

Many a coin has been re-struck with a new sovereignty and the value of the sovereignty reset, because the Prince required that the bread thrown to the mob actually belonged to them and was earned by all of them.

 

A quick facts.

There are no documented cases where individual long term diversified investments that are adjusted for age haven't been successful. Even with the 2008 recession 401K's still averaged over 8% ROI between 2001 and 2010.

Yes, anyone or any institution (e.g. teachers) that places all or a majority of their investments into a single investment is at high risk of losing a substantial percentage of their investment portfolio if that investment fails. Diversification prevents this from happening as the failure of one or several investments does not adversely effect the entire portfolio as they are merely small percentages of it.

I remember watching news stories of individuals that lost everything because of Bernie Madoff's Ponzie scheme and could only shake my head at how stupid they were. First they ignored the most important rule of investing which is to diversify the investment portfolio. In most cases these were retirees that violated the second rule of investing and that is to adjust the investments based upon age. When an individual violates the two most important rules for investing we cannot use them as an example except to show what shouldn't be done.

BTW - The US government does have the Constitutional authority to "coin money and regulate the value thereof" but it cannot create money. Money, as established in the United States and confirmed by Supreme Court decisions, is gold and silver coins. The government cannot create either gold or silver. It can make coins out of gold and silver (to coin money) and can designate a denomination value to those coins (regulate the value thereof). What many confuse with "money" is Federal Reserve (promissory) notes that are legal tender currency and that are a promise of payment in money. For additional information on this please read the SCOTUS decision on "Legal Tender" in the Julliard v Greenman decision.

 

Check out 1929-1939

 

1929-1939 does not reflect a 45 year long term investment program that is diversified and that is age adjusted for the individual.

For example, anyone at retirement age in 1929 would have had virtually all of their investments in guarenteed or secure investments such as government bonds or gold and silver. Of course FDR might have stolen their wealth if it was in gold when he issued his emergency banking executive order in 1933 but that was theft by the government and I will exclude theft as a valid argument.

Even someone at age 50 in 1929 would have had the majority of their investments in secured investments such as government bonds. By 1939 a person that continued investing annually would have earned substantial profits.

Of note the stock market crash of 1929 only resulted in a 20% decline in the average value of stocks and by March of 1933, which was the "official" end of the Depression, the value of stocks and the GDP began to increase again.

So no, citing the "Depression" years between 1929-1939 does not reflect a failure of a long term diversified investment plan that is age adjusted. Those that lost money in 1929 were the individuals that bought on the margin and the banks that funded the borrowing. In a very real sense it was virtually identical to our recent mortgage crisis. Buying on the margin was speculation and not investing.

 

It does document a long term period where the market was down. It didn't recover until 1954, I believe.

 

As noted it was only really down between 1929-1932 where it lost 20% of value. From 1933 on it again began increasing. Yes, it took WW II to bring the US back to pre-1929 levels but a lot of people made a lot of money in investments between 1933 and 1939 as the stock market made gains throughout that time period.

Someone investing in Dow Jones component stocks, for example, in 1933 would have made a lot of money on that investment by 1953. In 1933 the average cost was about $62/share and by 1953 it was over $200/share. That doesn't include dividends that would have been paid out and reinvested in plan.

http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/djia1900.html

 

The government budget you talk about is paid for by taxpayers.

If we have 50 million Americans getting SS, and the average monthly payout is $1000, this is about $50 BILLION per month in payouts plus the overhead to manage and administer the program. Let's assume the overhead is 10% so the total monthly cost of SS would be about $55 BILLION.

The SS payout is fixed at $50 billion, and if we assume in privatization that the overhead will still be 10%, this is still $55 billion per month. BUT, since it's privatized, they must also have profits! For without profits there is zero incentive! So maybe you add another $3.5 billion for profits and now the SS costs are $58.5 billion. And since they are private, they must pay corporate and local taxes, so add a few more trillion and now we're up to a cost of $60 billion per month when privatized.

So, a finite quantity of people are paying for SS costs no matter if they are public or private. Since privatization costs $60 billion per month, people are going to pay more than they do today!

Money is money no matter if it's private or public. Whatever the cost of a program like SS, this cost will exist no matter if public or private. All the money paid to private and public enterprise, comes from people...you and me.

Privatization can find better efficiencies, but privatization also requires more costs for profits so I don't really see a gain. Also privatization will stay ahead of inflation while government does a horrible job keeping up with inflation, which just means we will pay more and more for privatization.

 

You make the assumption that the overhead costs would be the same, public or private.

Lets assume 3 to 5 companies, each handling a pool of recipients. The size of each pool is based on the companies cost (overhead plus profits). Each company will manage for the highest net profit, which usually means the largest pool. There will be other companies trying to enter the market. Costs will be driven down.

Why would the government have any incentive to reduce costs?

A quick check, how many government agencies are so inefficient that they have created a market for private companies to act as the intermediary?

 

And that works so well in the health care insurance industry that their overhead is only 8 times that of the government run programs.

 

All investments incur costs but with a privatized Social Security program those costs can be limited. Only authorized private investment firms would be selected based upon the criteria established for them which could include low load costs. For example the "load" could be established at 5% of return on investment or even as low as perhaps 1% of the ROI of the fund. It does not have to come from the principle contribution of the employee and the employer. Does it cost the individual in the end? Absolutely but it can be a reasonable cost because of the huge number of investors in the plan.

What we would probably see is that individuals would often contribute more than the minimum requirements to their plan because that money belongs to them. It could be like a combined 401K and Roth IRA plan where the mandated portion is paid for with tax exempt income and the additional funds contributed by the individual are after tax dollars like a Roth IRA.

The key is that the money contributed by both the employee and the employer belongs to the individual and not to the government. The government's expendature would be virtually zero as all of the funds are vested in the individual. It would encourage additional investments by the individual because the money belongs to them. That would lead to much higher benefits for the individual eliminating a program that at best today provides proverty level income to retirees and and worse provides virtually nothing if a person dies before reaching retirement age. At least with privatization the fund's assets would be distributed to the heirs and those funds, or a part thereof, could actually be added to the heirs' privatized Social Security plan increasing their retirement benefits.

The key is that privatization increases personal wealth whereas our current Social Security program, because it's a pay as you go welfare program, does not increase personal wealth.

 

Private insurance also has far less fraud involved which "pays for" the additional administrative costs. Medicare, for example, has somewhere between $40 billion and $100 billion in fraudulant billing and those costs need to be added to the adminstrative costs of Medicare but they are not. All expendatures that are in excess of ligitimate costs must be considered to be administrative costs of a program.

 

Using your own arguments, and even a really old argument of Reagan's one could easily claim Social Security is not a diversified investment of any kind. Words have meaning, so stating that "no one is really proposing an end to Social Security," and then proposing a private diversified investment as a substitute is proposing an end to Social Security Insurance, which has a welfare component.

Such diversified investments, such as some form of life annuity, could still run into the same arguments made against the FEDS forcing people to purchase a private product. Splitting the program up into fifty little programs, instead of transferring the entire thing to the States with revenue sharing under a State Compact with the consent of Congress, would make things worse as no two states have the same resources.

So did you make that up all on your own, or did "no one" who is really proposing an end to Social Security do some of that?

"Fans of Dickens and Jane Austen will know that in the 1700s and 1800s, annuities were all the rage in European high society. Annuities owed this popularity among the upper class to the fact that they could shelter annuitants from the 'fall from grace' that occurred with investors in other markets."
http://www.immediateannuities.com/annuitymuseum/historyofannuities/

One could easily make the case that with no death tax on the Marquis de St Evremonde estate, a national sales tax on tea, and a private social security investment the investor passes on, that the anti-Tea Party seeks to return us to a Dickens novel where the urchins play in a wooden elephant in the square.

 

Incentive; $14 trillion debt, $1.5 trillion deficits.

You assume that government programs are inefficiently managed? To be honest, I don't know how efficient the SS program might be? Most of the program is administered via computer transactions so there can't be tons of room for cost savings. And when government programs are inefficient or costly, this is because they are required to service all Americans, while private business can pick and choose who to serve. I think we'll find that government programs are not necessarily inefficiently managed, but instead are bad business models dictated by Congress.

Yes I assume private and public will be similar because as I said public might be inefficient but private requires profits...maybe they offset each other.

There are other reasons for private contractors other than inefficiencies; like establishing a fixed cost, or not wishing to expand government payrolls, or needing a specific expertise, etc.