Tatar wrote:
Many of the people supporting abolishing or limiting SS would have agreed with socialist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin when he paraphrased the Bible - "he who does not work, neither shall he eat".
The difference is his words were directed at the middle classes who made money from moving investments around instead of people who couldn't work, such as the elderly. For some reason people think money grows on trees and their investments increase in value by magic. They are of course made by people going to work. The very same people who they want to deny social security to and force to work for longer.
Wow comparing America's Libertarians to Lenin supporters. Quite a stretch there. Yes you could find a quote from almost any despot in history and I would probably find some form of agreement with it, even if not is the same context it was meant.
We can go around this all we want but the bottom line is that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that is going to collapse. The SS fund is starting to go on the curve of more funds out than in. But it is worse than that. All of the SS trust fund is held in US Treasuries which means the trust fund is imaginary. It is merely the US government shifting money from one pocket to the other. No one wants to buy US treasuries anymore so there are only two options to pay SS as the incoming revenue continues to fall. The first is to sell the treasuries into the market at well below face value, ouch! The second is for the Federal Reserve to buy up the treasuries since the US government would have to further raise taxes in order to pay for Social Security, which will not happen. The second will almost certainly be the result, our government will just monetize the Federal debt held in the SS trust fund putting further downward pressure on the dollar.