The reason for Social Security was never to give people money so they can retire and play 18 rounds of golf with their grandchildren’s money.

Social Security was established as a safety net for when you are no longer able to provide for yourself. It started off with two main parts.
1. Social Security Survivors Insurance was set up to provide for your dependants if you died. This is simple life insurance. Three guys in my college dorm were receiving Survivors payments.
2. Social Security Disability Insurance was set up to provide for you and your dependants if you were no longer able to work. I had a boss who had brain damage in a car crash. He could no longer work. A Physician had to certify him disabled.
3. Some IDIOT decided when Social Security started that it would be easier to “simply declare all people over the age of 65 disabled”. Social Security is paid to people who are too old to work. They are considered disabled. It would be too costly to have each person certified as no longer able to work. The foolish reason they chose 65 was because at the time it was the average life expectancy. Most people would never qualify under the age clause because they would be dead already. Those who did would die after a very few years. Most work was hard labor. Driving a mule drawn plow was hard work. Very few people could do it past the age of 65. Now the average life expectancy is 78. Today most work is sedentary. Most people are able to work long past 78-let alone 65. People collect Social Security for 13 years longer than they NEED it. This is bankrupting our grandchildren. If a coal miner has black lung disease at the age of 55, he is entitled to Social Security. If you want to retire at the age of 55 and play golf all day, you are free to do it-with YOUR savings. You should be ashamed to saddle your grandchildren with debt for your leisure just because you are 65. Can you imagine a 65-year-old man taking out a loan with his two year old grandson as cosigner? Should the kid be responsible to repay the loan when grandpa dies?

A Frenchman one said: “Democracy will last until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesses from the public purse”. We have figured out we can vote ourselves money from our grandchildren. The Federal debt is staggering. It is not only the official 9 trillion dollars. It is the promissory notes for entitlements. The unaccounted liabilities are very much greater. Some say more than 30 trillion dollars. We are bankrupt. We have bankrupted our grandchildren. You can’t force your grandchildren to pay for your retirement. They could not vote on it. Talk about taxation without representation! It is a house of cards. China holds enormous quantities of our debt. They use it to blackmail us. So do the Arabs. We are no longer free. We have sold our grandchildren into slavery. You think that working eight months of the year for the government is freedom? We endure a 35% federal tax rate, an 11 % state income tax rate, a 15 % FICA tax, 8% sales tax, property taxes and countless other fees. 69% and growing.

Almost all of the money we have paid into Social Security has been spent already. It was paid for SS Survivors and Disability payments. The money is gone. The lieyer politicians spent it. In 25 years there will only be two workers supporting each retired person. These workers can’t pay the staggering Social Security payments to retirees. They can’t pay the interest on the Federal debt. Who will pay the Social Security retirement checks if young workers can opt out of Social Security? It is a Ponzi scheme. It will collapse. This will be the end of the United States. Our government will collapse. For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme “As a political metaphor” ¾ of the way down.

Let us be practical. I am not opposed to life insurance. I am not opposed to disability insurance. I am opposed to a “retirement age” of 65. We can fix Social Security simply by raising the “retirement age” to 78. This may be phased-in over 20 or 30 years. Doing it abruptly would never be politically practical. Eliminating the age altogether would be better.

In order for this to work companies would have to change their attitude towards older workers and drop mandatory retirement requirements and age discrimination. They are shedding older workers now at age 50 and some even younger and replacing them with lower paid employees.

You can't assume everyone has or will have a company pension plan or has saved enough to live on until age 78 if they don't have a job.

Social Security is fixable as it is. Medicare and medicaid and drug coverage is a much bigger problem and has future liabilities many times greater than SS.

There was the opportunity to fix this a couple of years ago with privatized Social Security. Unfortunately, the plan was badly sold and buried in partisan bickering.

The Commission to Study Social Security (Google CSSS report) was assembled under Bill Clinton after the fuzzy accounting that declared a budget surplus. Granted, had we continue to underfund the military, and 9/11 never happened, and there were no natural disasters, and everything went along as it was in 1998, there would have been a budget surplus by now. Bill Clinton, looking at these numbers, declared that with this surplus, we needed to "fix Social Security first". So he assembled the Commission to find out what was the best way to do it.

The Commission looked at various models, and used these models to extropolate the long term effects of each plan given the future of the aging population as we knew it. Their conclusion was that the best way to handle it was to use half of the money from SS contributions (the contributions are split evenly between employer and employee) to pay for current SS payouts and the other half invested in individual accounts which were owned by the taxpayers. The major advantages being that this half of the money was not in government accounts where it could be stolen by politicians, that individuals were essentially forced to save 6.2% of their income on interest bearing accounts, and that existing contributions would allow payments to existing and near future beneficiaries with only slight adjustments in payments based on inflation rather than arbitrary schedules. This plan is available in a summary version from the Heritage Foundation, it is called "The 6.2% Solution". It's about 30 pages total, if memory serves, and is an easy read. Certainly easier than the CSSS report which is several hunrded pages.

So in 2001, the CSSS released it's report to then President Bush. He went on a national tour to try to sell it. But partisan politics got in the way, it was labeled "Bush's Plan", and he failed to explain how it worked or where it came from in a way people could easily understand. The Democrats, never wanting to miss an opportunity to take a shot at George, and certainly not wanting the newly seated Republican to get credit for fixing what is quite possibly the biggest and most threatening financial problem the federal government has ever seen, threw out scare propaganda about people loosing everything they owned in the stock market (let alone that people had the majority of their retirement money already privately invested in the stock and bond markets, and that the SS accounts had a federally backed stop loss provision their 401K's did not have, backed by the FDIC much like the Bear Stearnes bailout a few weeks ago), and touted it as "Bush's Plan" so it could be sunk in the media.

And so now we are discussing what to do about saving Social Security again. Except now we are 7 years further down the rabbit hole and considerably closer to the bankruptcy deadline. And yet the subject is rarely if ever brought up with any of the presidential frontrunners today. Every day that goes by makes turning this particular ship around in tighter and tighter quarters more of a challenge, and yet noone is giving the order. By the time this next election is over, someone is going to have to do it, and the price of doing it will likely cost that leader their popularity, at least in the 4 to 8 years to come. But presidents are more concerned with how they will be remembered in 4 years than they are in the long run anyway. Clinton went against this by optomisticly projecting his budget plans into an unknown future over a new administration and prematurely took credit for a surplus that never materialized without having to actually do anything, but I'll give him this: at least he got the ball rolling. It was his own party and an inarticulate president that let the air out of it, possibly to the demise of all of us. But after all, politics isn't really about what is good for the people anyway, is it?

The problem with raising the age is that age demographics are generally disparate.

One critique often given of SS is that the poor pay for it all their lives... and yet their average life expectancy is as such to never see retirement.
But on the other hand middle class people have constantly growing life expectancy.

My thought is this:
Raise the retirement age... but lower and make more accessible the early retirement age... and then make the penalty for early retirement greater... like down to a minimal base pay.
This will still be appealing to low income workers (with a lower life expectancy and with low-skill jobs where the are easily replaced and where they open up positions available to just about anyone) and unappealing to most medium-to-high income workers, who will expect to live longer and who have jobs that require more skill and promise greater benefit through continued work to retirement age.

__________________
"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money."

-George Carlin

LOWER the age. Peoples pensions and portfolios are crumbling. Make the age 62.

That would only cause the problem to get worse faster.

__________________
"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money."

-George Carlin

You've got to be joking, right? Social Security is not Fixable as it is, because the Government is managing it? They've mismanaged it from its inception. Did you know that Social Security was supposed to be a temporary program when it was enacted?

It would be far wiser today to stop social security for everyone under the age of 35. You would do far better if you took what you paid into social security each year and placed it in bonds, ira, mutual funds and the like, then you ever would waiting on the government to do it for you. Somewhere along the line, we all got this idea that the government was much better at managing our own lives than we are.

Look at it this way. Say you have to put as much as you put into social security each month into an IRA. Now let's say that you have a pension available from your work as well. Now at my age(37 next month), I would be able to take about 1700.000 per month from my IRA. Add to that another say, 1,500.00 dollars per month from my pension. Without Social security, I would be making about 3200 dollars per month. Now I ask you, do you think the government can do better than that? Millions of people on Social security right now would tend to confirm that they can't.

I'm saying right now, the Government should divorce itself from Social Security entirely. They pass a law that you must in some way provide for your own retirement, and they give people graduated lump sum payments as a buyout to their social security--provided they put that money into an ira or other retirement account and leave it there. The law would mandate that you pay into that IRA whatever percentage you would normally have to pay social security. Believe me--you would end up in a far better financial situation then relying on social security. Then the goverment would have only to take care of the people who are on it now and eligible for it after the cutoff date and they can let go of that trillion dollar albatross around our necks called Social security.

Putting a major band aid on Social Security is not that hard if you don't think so hard about it.

Eliminate the Tax Cap. Presently any income over around $96500 is not taxed for Social Security. Remove the Cap and make ALL income Taxable towards SS.

Also when you retire your benefits are based on your net worth. So if you made 200 million i your life and have a house that is paid off worth 1 Million and still have a few million in the bank and stock etc you would not get as much SS as a person that made $50000 a year all their life and has a moderate house and 401k or savings account.

Just doing away with the Cap would increase the SS Bank by millions maybe Billions in teh next few years.

I agree with fundamentally altering social security.

Government isn't great at planning retirement.
But neither are most people. And nothing is going to change that.
What conservatives call "lazy" is the norm in human nature. As is short-sightedness.
People who are good with finances in general... are great at managing retirement (within some margin of error). Not so much with the rest of the population.
Without social security, most poor workers would never be able to retire... despite most likely wearing their bodies out earlier. And does a person who worked all his/her life deserve to die when no longer able to work because of simply being normal and not all that great at risk management and long-term planning?
Also don't underestimate the importance of social security for the disabled. It's impossible to plan for getting disabled at a young age. You'd have to be independently wealthy.

The fact is that if we are to completely get rid of social security, we'd still need some sort of program for the disabled and for those whose investments go bust at the wrong time... and even those who make bad investments. Otherwise we risk loss of... well... sociaal security. We no longer live in a communal agrarian age.
To keep this at a minimum I see two possibilities:
1. a government default where people automatically save some amount of money from their paychecks and it is invested in an IRA, automatic enrollment in 401ks... supplemented with a government disability insurance for all citizens that pays out a minimal amount to those who are disabled, funding to organizations that provide services to the disabled, and an emergency insurance for those whose 401k investments and IRAs are lost in economic disaster near retirement.
2. A government disability/old age insurance that comes out of general funds rather than a social security tax. It pays one flat (amount not percentage) minimal living value, indexed to inflation, for any person that is disabled or reaches a certain age. There is no pretense that one can live anywhere near how they live pre-retirement without their own savings. In addition fund organizations that provide services to the disabled and elderly.

Those are two plans that put a larger focus on personal savings but provide necessary safety net, without raising all the complexities and ethical dilemmas of social security. They're far more honest about what they are and come out of general taxes rather than the extra ss tax. And they should be less expensive (either all people get the equivalent of the minimal social security payment or only those who are disabled get it).

They won't. Psychologically speaking, retirement savings does not come naturally. And when people fail to save enough (as even many responsible and well-off people do), it creates dire social consequences.
In some way or the other the government must at the very least nudge people into saving and investing properly (by automatic enrollment) and provide aid for those who could not be reasonably expected to save (the disabled and people who reach retirement age at a very bad time).

I can see the point of defaulting to IRAs, but I don't think it's enough.
We still need a program for the disabled and the unlucky.
I still would not call this "government divorcing Social Security" because it still has involvement in dictating that people do save for retirement.
But when we get into private savings, I think people should be able to opt-out. People should be allowed to work unto death or seek other methods of saving.
For an extra twist, they should have to renew their opt-out however... so that if they reach an age of realizing the folly, they will return to the default of IRA contribution.

__________________
"Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money."

-George Carlin

Or maybe we could raise the Social Security retirement age to 100 or more. The result, of course, will be that almost nobody will live long enough to collect. But it will restore solvency to the system. Eh?

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993