Court: Feds can take Social Security

USA-P talks about the few who would be irresponsible while ignoring the failure that is SS and the damage it causes.

Leftists are known for their distrust of and contempt of their fellow man. You are living proof.

You've nixed repealing SS. You've nixed modifying SS so that people can invest their own money (even a 2% solution as proposed by Dubya). You've nixed allowing people to own their retirement fund thus allowing them to bequeath it to the charity/person of their choice. There's simply no reasoning or compromising with him. He wants the full 12.4%, and he would actually like more of your money so that he might do more social engineering.

USA-P is not alone. He and many others (all leftists) want the SS status-quo rip-off because it allows them the power to act on their contempt. The others who want it are or the under-educated, math-challenged. Being dumb doesn't give you the right to take my money from my family and damage the US economy by restricting investment.

As a result, we have people wasting 12% of their annual income, each year for their entire working lives. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost saving and investment. Hurting both the individual and the businesses in which he might invest, as well as family and charities who might be the beneficiary of his largesse.

Not to mention the hit that Liberty takes under this system and the expansion of government spending as it steals SS funds.

USA-P and others who have argued in favor of SS status quo, you've not been able to address our points. The arguments are with us. All you have on your side is the brute force that comes with a majority vote in Congress and the hired guns they use to enforce it. Eventually we will win. Stupidity and socialism can't last forever.

Rick
 
Nonsense. The average citizen, and more, is up past his eyeballs in debt. He's obsessed with having the new toy, newer, fancier wheels, 4x the square footage actually needed to live comfortably. We no longer have to work for years to save for something. Now, it's instant credit approval at interest rates that just a few years ago would have gotten someone arrested for usury...loansharking. These people are going to invest for the future? Bull.

That may be true, but that does not give anyone the right to force them to participate in the SS Ponzi scheme at gunpoint.

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. --Robert A. Heinlein

SS was never more than a feel-good vote-buying measure that gave the government a new till to reach into in order to cover deficits. Every single red cent that has been put into the SS till has been borrowed by the federal government, and there's nothing but IOUs in the till. Every year, the SS contributions from current payers go towards the checks being cut to SS recipients that same year. Whatever is left is borrowed by the Feds in exchange for an IOU, which is basically just a promise that future taxpayers will pay back the debt when it becomes due. That's the very definition of a Ponzi scheme, and its eventual collapse is a mathematical certainty.

Some time in 2016 or 2017, there will be no more surplus left after paying the SS recipients with the SS contributions of the current wage-earners, and then the SS Trust Fund has to call in the IOUs from the federal treasury, to the tune of five hundred billion dollars per year. Because the ratio of contributors to payees will remain upside down (and actually get more upside down every year from then on), even the IOUs in the till won't cover SS running expenses after 2030 or so, at which point SS will no longer be able to maintain benefit payments. (That is, if the Feds are even able to repay the IOUs starting in 2016, which they will have to do with the taxes paid by your kids and grandkids.)

I don't expect to ever see a cent of money from SS when I retire because I paid attention in college math. Anybody who is currently in their mid-30s or younger and who relies on that ridiculous Ponzi scheme for retirement benefits is living in a dream world.
 
So as a 25 year old recent master's degree graduate...

Can i just ask the government to cancel my student loans AND my future SSI benefits, and ill start my own retirement account????

I'd totally take that deal.
 
"In your 30 years have you ever seen a single advocate for the taxpaying public in regards to SSI awards?"

That's the job of the Administrative Law Judge => a lawyer with a SSA contract. I know, you want the taxpayers to fund a second lawyer for each case, but one should be enough. One is all I want to pay for. And yes, I've seen thousands of claimants lose at every level. The initial levels are done by state employees contracted to SSA. SSA has it covered at every level and they even review the ALJ's decisions.

Thousands... Actually, my first two years with the agency I read 37,000 SSA disability claims. At least half of them denied.

Unless you've got a clear-cut case that meets the hard numbers in the listings, it's harder than you think to get approved for SSDI or SSI.

John
 
John, perhaps I've been too hard on you. Working for the agency you'd have to think the system is fair or you'd go nuts in short order. From the other side, one sees 'way too many people who get approved on appeal in large part because they have a good lawyer who knows how to massage the numbers. There are lots of advocates willing to help people sign up for free government money.

(paragraph deleted)

But I still think it better to have a system in place where We the People have someone whose job is finding contrary evidence and arguing against the SSI claim. I've not heard any plaintiff's attorney's opinion about the veracity of your argument nor the invalidity of my own so the subject is still open as far as I'm concerned.

People still seem to be making the totally unfounded claim that citizens, once freed from the chains of the SS tax, will all of a sudden require the knowledge and will to invest for themselves.
Nope, but I think the claim that if you somehow attach consequences to maladaptive behaviors then the behaviors will change remains valid.
 
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The government wasted the money they took for SS tax.

Why in the heck you worry that letting people waste their own money would be any worse is beyond my realm of comprehension.

How much money would the government have if it had invested 12.5% of what it stole from the working people?

The simple fact the government can't invest the money they steal to cover the upcoming retirement of the folks it robbed shows me the government program should be destroyed.

And statements about not wanting to let people have their money because they will waste it seem very similar to statements about how guns cause crimes and pencils cause spelling errors.

SS is not a choice. It done by force and therefore is wrong.

The simple fact that the money disappears when someone dies shows me they don't have my best interest at heart.

And what else is government for but the interest of those who fund it and allow it to exist?
 
I'll just say that it's going to be rather difficult for the .gov to take my social security to pay for my student loans because SS is not going to be there by the time I retire anyway.
 
Some argue that Social Security is even worse than a Ponzi scheme in one respect, in that investors in the latter at least have a legal right to their money returned (even though in practice they are most likely to lose it when current contributions dry up). But those paying into Social Security have not the slightest legal claim on the money they pay in, according to the 1960 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Flemming v. Nestor: the court explicitly ruled that paying into the system does not make receiving benefits a "contractual right."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme


It might not be a ponzi scheme, but it is a scheme none the less.
 
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