<p>Ok…we are talking about two different definitions of entitlement, Bay. </p>
<p>I am not disagreeing with you, Bay.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with your definition…which is correct. Your definition of entitlement doesn’t interest me that much.</p>
<p>I am looking at how the word, entitlement, is used to change policy. Just like the word, welfare, to describe something is used to change policy.</p>
<p>Or to continue, the way the words fiscal conservative are used to try to change policy.
If I am thought of as a fiscal conservative, I can spend all the money I want.</p>
<p>Anyway, welfare is bad. SS recipients are just receiving welfare. Therefore, SS is bad.</p>
<p>“Since SS is <em>not</em> a separate fund, any surplus is spent as part of the general budget. Thus, the only way to keep it balanced is to never fall negative.”</p>
<p>It depends, right?
We don’t really need to keep SS balanced. We don’t need to have a balanced federal budget either.</p>
<p>“A far better idea would have been to keep them separate but purchase treasuries with the surplus. It’s too late now.”</p>
<p>Maybe it would have been better to keep the money separate.</p>
<p>Your thoughts are not coherent. The federal budget does not need to be balanced. However, the increase in debt needs to be at or below growth in GDP over the long run - the reasons should be simple to you. Over that level and you’re spending wealth you don’t have. That’s fine (and sometimes very necessary) in the short run. Unfortunately, that is not the case for us, since we’ve been over that bar for decades. The surplus in the late 90s would have needed to sustain for another half decade.</p>
<p>SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are 40% of the budget and growing. It makes sense that they will have to bear a not-insignificant part of the cuts. SS does indeed need to be balanced, since there’s no way to “save” the surplus. Thus you’re looking at 30-40 years of large negative draws on the budget, which is unsustainable in a globally competitive economy. It means less investment in infrastructure, education, conservation, etc. In other words, everything that people are complaining the government is investing less in now, except on a structural level.</p>
<p>I’m not sure you comprehend the sheer size of our fiscal crisis. Our outlay last year was $3.6 trillion. We collected $2.3 trillion (which is near our historical % of GDP taxation, not recession lowered). Does that sound like a single tweak to social security will ensure its viability to you?</p>
<p>Collective, I am out of your league so bear my ?s. Which two generations are you referring to? The Baby Boomers and the pre-boomer gen? Or is it the Boomers and Gen X? </p>
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<p>Why is it too late to implement this idea down the road instead of continuing the status quo?</p>
<p>My definition of welfare is money that is recieved without effort.
Not social security which is recieved after a payer has paid into the system.
Not unemployment which is recieved after someone becomes unemployed when being covered by unemployment insurance.
Not disability, which is recieved after the worker has paid into the system, but cannot work any longer.
Welfare doesn’t have requirements except being broke.</p>
The “system” is just paying taxes to the government, though.</p>
<p>If instead of a separate FICA tax that seems to give you a sense of some sort of ownership of the benefit, we had higher Federal income tax rates to generate the money that is used to fund SS, would you feel like you had a right to get paid?</p>
<p>ucbalumnus - your data points may be correct but they have no relevance to zoosermom’s points. </p>
<p>Today you don’t get SS if you never worked. You get more SS if you worked longer. Welfare has conditions (Bill Clinton tried on that) but essentially you get it by not working.</p>
<p>Of course the first recipients of SS had not paid in. Would you expect to skip the first generation that did not have the opportunity to participate?</p>
<p>We absolutely must find a way to fix and preserve social security. There is no other palatable option. The problem is, so many people’s bodies outlive their brains. Even people who thought they did a good job planning cannot plan for all eventualities, and some are living for many decades after they retired.</p>
<p>And we don’t want to see our seniors homeless and starving. We also may not want to take in every distant relative who shows up at our door. It is not our custom as in some countries, to have several generations of a family packed into one house while everyone watches after and provides for each other.</p>
<p>As much as the libertarian side of me says that we need to take care of our own families and provide for ourselves, I am certain that we need to do whatever it takes to preserve social security for those who need it. I expect to pay into it for 45 years, the majority of it at the max, and I doubt I’ll see a cent. But I don’t want to see the elderly impoverished, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life nursing whatever elderly people I am related to…because they have slid into dementia and bad health, and ran out of money.</p>
<p>Because social security provides roughly $610bn of annual revenue to the federal government. That’s slightly over a quarter of tax receipts. Our national debt figure against income suddenly looks a lot worse. Even though our budget gap looks slightly better (since the SS deficit gets moved off the books). And besides, with SS now running an annual deficit, it doesn’t actually do any good. There is no surplus to buy bonds with, no surplus to hide how poor the national budget is.</p>
<p>It would have been a great measure 40 years ago to dissuade politicians from treating the SS revenue as free money… but in the current economic state would do no more than be a potential destabilizer of our currency and invaluable safe-haven status. And the latter is the only reason our debt is still manageable.</p>
<p>SS has to survive in some state because the social trauma would be too vast. My argument is simply that every cut we make now ameliorates the pain down the road. I’m perfectly fine and acknowledge that my generation will have fewer benefits. I simply don’t think that the current situation where the elderly will “get theirs” and force much sharper cuts to every succeeding generation is reasonable.</p>