Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire FOX News: Baby Boomers Could (sic) Force Economic Catastrophe

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Excerpt:
"We know we can't pay all the Social Security and Medicare benefits that we promised. There isn't enough money in the world to do that so we know we're going to have to make cuts," Biggs says. "But politicians are afraid to make the choices to do that."

The two programs need tens of trillions of dollars to pay all the benefits promised. And analysts say that when all the boomers are collecting benefits, the government would need one of every three dollars earned by those still working just to support social security and Medicare. Charles Blahous, a trustee of Social Security and Medicare, notes that younger Americans are " going to have a much, much higher share of their paychecks going to the federal government to support not only the federal budget in general, but specifically entitlement programs for the elderly."



And amongst the political class, there is precisely zero incentive to do anything about it.

Gotta love the baby boomer generation. They gave us:

Hippies
Free love
Dope
Political Correctness

And their final contribution to the country....Bankruptcy!

To be strictly fair, now, they didn't start it (they hadn't been conceived when SS was begun). They were around at the time of the big Johnson and babyBush expansions, though.

They're just the demographic that's gonna blow it up.

And they and the "Greatest Generation" are darn sure not going to fix it.

Ya can't fix a problem when ya don't even know what the problem is.

Get back to me when Corporate Welfare is front and center.

Not all of us gave that to the US.

I gave 3 sons that work and pay taxes...


and I payed a lot of taxes myself.

I think the problem is, we gave benefits for all those who did not earn it.

The Government took my money and said they would give it back when I retired... so where is it.


Frankly I, like so many of us did not have a choice

Bottom Line here. John Moses, I plan on living a long, long time. You might want to get a second (or third) job to help us old fogies out there, youngun'

AND HOW OLD ARE YOU?
I WAS THERE FOR THE HIPPY THING
DIDN'T GET MUCH FREE LOVE, LOVE ALWAYS COSTS
SURE WASN'T MUCH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
AND I PAID IN A YEAR AGO ABOUT 50K JUST IN INCOME TAXES NOT TO MENTION THE MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY ETC.
And in the process paid and educated three kids not of my own by blood.
so, quit complaining and pay me.

It' the same problem that every Ponzi scheme has. But this one has the added twist that the participants didn't have to look for suckers to sign on later - they discovered they could extract their "contributions" forcibly.

From the article


When the money runs out, and it will, we'll 'jerk' that widow back to $450 a month.

rufus, i suggested to a stockbroker i know i could simplify his life, i asked him if he would consider a direct deposit between his account and my account in stead of having it filtered through the govt.

Hey, 3 out of 4 ain't bad!

I've thought about this and honestly, I might be happy if the federal government became nothing more than a safety net. That is to say, keep the social security and medicaid programs and basically get rid of everything else.

I rather them do away with it all, but if the did away with everything except those two programs, it would be alright. Of course, they'll never do that. They like the power too much.

100% correct, of course.


No, they spent it immediately. What they actually said was that when you retired, they'd take more money from your neighbors and hand it to you. They knew you'd convince yourself of the other version, though, because the fiction of "give it back" sounds reasonable and virtuous, while the truth of "we promise to rob somebody else in your name" would make you a party to theft.


Gone, just as sure as if it had been burned.


100% correct again. But you do now. What are you going to do?

No money for you old farts. You hear me!

Just joking with you guys.

I agree. Those who have not paid in or wearing us out on other programs. No one should be denied this money in their golden years.

Live it up fellas, I'll keep paying it in, but I'm afraid I'll be living out of a garden and raising chickens to make it by the time I'm 67 or 71 or whatever the age for my group is now.

They keep raising it in hopes the 40 somethings will die before we can draw anything.

And just who is surprised by all of this? It sure as hell isn't all the politicians that got their big piece of the pie and went home. The ones in power now don't give a rip either. Things are soon going to be every man for himself and I'm not looking forward to it. In another very few years there won't be enough Doctors or health care facilities either, then what? Do I loathe the government? I sure as hell do and for good reason. Ken

I'm sure Blahous (SocSec/Medicare trustee) isn't even considering the possibility that young people who currently pay a lot in taxes may not find it worthwhile to work hard to earn as much money in the future if the government starts taking more of their money (higher percentage of their income). My wife and I have talked about that if taxes get too bad (and we're blessed enough to pay a "not insignificant" amount in federal taxes even now), we will significantly scale back how much we work and get a place out in the country so we can live with a minimal amount of money (grow our own vegetables/fruit/etc., raise our own livestock for meat and eggs to supplement wild game consumption, install solar panels and windmill, etc.). I think with raising our own food and hunting we could probably live with an income not much above whatever the government sets as the poverty level. We would want to keep a cell phone and internet access, keep at least one vehicle running, and of course pay our property taxese, but that could all be done for a rather limited amount of money income - basically live like my great-grandparents did but with internet access.

If taxes increase very much, I predict a lot of people will be either (a) moving off the grid to some extent or (b) moving to another country, and government will have little left to tax.

And (don't take this as a substantive criticism if you're in the habit...) an important part of maintaining the whole charade is the use of frankly inaccurate terms, like "paid in". It's been used several times already just in few posts.

None of us have "paid in" to anything when it comes to SS.

Interesting. Then how would you phrase it?

Paid taxes that went into a black hole, not a lock box.

Well, Razorback's "black hole" thing is a good start.

My short answer is that you were robbed. This is true of any confiscatory tax. You don't "pay" a mugger, do you?

For some non-confiscatory taxes, arguably like tolls or tariffs or some other taxation-in-fee thing, one could reasonbly be said to "pay", because you decide to hand over that amount of money as part of something voluntary.

But SS and Medicare and so forth aren't that kind of thing.