Regardless, it’s still a “government check,” which is the claim I was responding to. And I’m sure some of those gun-owning, Social Security recipients are also happy to accept Medicare and would be none too happy to lose their benefits.
There is no government check to the patient for Medicare. The payment is made directly to the provider.
This is so much poppycock.
Many gun owners live in red states that are the principal “takers” of federal spending. There are millions of gun owners who are elderly receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits and you bet your bippee they would be afraid of losing them. Then there are gun owners among the millions of veterans receiving military pensions and probably among those receiving disability checks and I’m sure they value the government function that keeps those coming.
For crying out loud, it does’t matter HOW the payment is made! The point is the government is the one making the payment. But we’re supposed to believe that “gun owners” don’t care about losing any of those benefits because they “value freedom” more than anything.
You are the one who said she was responding to the claim about “government checks.”
Who’s “she”? I was responding to YOU.
Let me break it down for you, since apparently this is really complicated stuff. The original comment I was responding to was this:
To which I replied:
To which you responded:
To which I replied:
To which you felt the need to clarify:
I thought “government check” would stand in nicely for the full range, but I guess I should have been more clear and quoted more fully: “government checks, subsidies and such.”
Why you’re getting caught up in whether or not the payment is literally a paper check or a direct deposit to the recipient or his medical provider, the point is, the government is providing the funds. And the claim that “gun owners” as a group would freely relinquish those “government checks, subsidies and such” so that they could take up arms against a “tyrannical” government strikes me as absurd.
I support gun ownership but lets face it this guy and the Atlanta airport guy are idiots and should follow the theory of just because you can do something does not mean you should.
Which doesn’t prove much as to whether they’re the “takers”. Guilt by location, lol.
I’m guessing the majority of legal gun owners paid SS on their earnings and fell for that canard, the one about the “lockbox”. Sounded so much like a savings account, I can’t blame them for getting twisted off at the reality of it just being a transfer payment.
If people thought the lockbox stuff had to do with SS being a savings account, they weren’t listening very closely.
In fact one of the first acts of the new president - after the lock box guy was defeated - was to try to privatize SS. When that didn’t work, he just started “borrowing” from it. Once you take several billion dollars away from SS funds, you can then say See, the system is going broke.
Wow this thread has gotten ridiculously political. No longer about whether/how guns on college campuses would work.
Do the moderators on this forum ever shut down these types of discussions?
There is no “canard” regarding SS. It has never been called a savings account or an investment program. It is basically an insurance program to provide a protected income in old age or in disability. It has always been billed as one leg of a three-legged stool of retirement savings: SS payments, personal savings, employer-provided pensions. You can go back years and years of Money magazine or personal finance columns in every newspaper in the country and find references to the fact that SS is not and never was an investment vehicle but rather old-age insurance that returns based on what you pay in, but also guarantees everyone who has worked at least a minimum income.
The reason efforts to privatize SS failed is that most people aren’t so gullible to think that Wall Street is going to look out for them and make sure they don’t put their life savings into investments so risky that they could end up dead broke and too old to work.
Higher payroll taxes were instituted to create surpluses to anticipate the baby boom generation. They worked, surpluses occurred. As by law, the SS program invests contributions in U.S. Treasury bonds. The government then has this money to draw on for other spending purposes. And that was done. But the obligation of the federal government to pay interest on the bonds and to honor the debt they represent to the SS program remains. Social Security is not bankrupt and is not going bankrupt.
The government has a simple solution to repaying the surplus SS money that was borrowed to pay for tax cuts, or war effort, or other perceived priorities. It can raise taxes or cut elsewhere in the budget.
yes, usually when someone on the liberal side starts to complain.
@soccerguy315, you have no way of knowing that. At all.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Yes, moderators have been known to shut down discussions. No we do not do “when someone on the liberal side starts to complain.” Unless you are a moderator, it is best not to make assumptions about our actions. In fact, you are not supposed to be discussing our actions at all per Terms of Service.
Most of the discussions that drift over towards what some consider the “P” word are really just a matter of philosophical disagreements - glass half-full, half-empty, etc. kinds of things. That some view our SS system as solid as a rock (given the government’s power to fund) isn’t hard to fathom, not if you squint just right and ignore that a promise to pay isn’t a guarantee not to take back (means testing, if you’re wondering what I’m speaking of.) Times get hard enough and the net payout may very well come as a shocking surprise to someone who listened to several decades of demagoguery about the issue.
In answer to someone up thread that feels that deficit spending has been robbing the country’s trust fund, here’s an observation: the crime didn’t end with a new hand at the tiller… no, matter of fact, it sped up.
Yes, it is all a matter of perspective. Some view “government checks” as payments of the government’s money. Others recognize that most of that money was earned by the taxpayer, submitted to the government, and then returned in some cases, to those who worked for it and paid it in.
We’ve had this discussion before. Some at one extreme see all income as belonging to the government, who gets to decide how much of it the earner can keep. At the other extreme are those who see all income as belonging to the person who worked for it, some of which the government takes away. People prefer the perspective that works best with their values.
People do think this…I used to think this. SS has not been robbed…there is no crime. It’s simply this: the SS trust fund buys bonds sold by the U.S. Treasury. When the treasury spends the money produced by bond sales, it is not “robbing” the trust fund…the government spends the money with the full faith and credit that it will meet its obligation to pay interest and return the investment when the bonds are redeemed.
Isn’t this how corporate bonds work?
If corporate bonds are redeemed, the company is obligated to pay them even if it depletes their bottom line, even if it puts the company in the red.
If deficit spending is projected to go up over the next 10 years, supposedly because the SS trust fund starts redeeming U.S. bonds to cover retiring boomers, that’s not the result of the policies of the current president. That’s just the way bonds work. The government sold the bonds and used the money for tax cuts and foreign war operations and the health needs of veterans and a Medicare drug program (in increasing demand) and the interest on bonds sold continues to accumulate and these debts cannot all be laid at the feet of the current president.
Fulfilling the government’s obligation to SS at the time when the bonds have to be redeemed to pay retirees should not be seen as a negotiable line item in the budget. It is owed and it should be paid with no talk of benefit cuts, increasing the retirement age or any other shenanigans that attack the program.
If revenue has to be raised through tax reform, then that’s what it means to honor a national debt…but it will not be that taxes have to be raised because SS is “broke” or “bankrupt” or some other misrepresentation of facts.
I want to respond to this, but due to the post after yours, I will refrain. Much like you, I’ve been around awhile though. I’ve seen the demise of a fair number of threads.
There used to be a politics forum that had lots of good discussion, but that went away. So now we are left with a blurred line. No worries. Things are pretty calm in this thread. 
And back to the original discussion, I would love to hear if parents in Texas and other campus carry states take this issue into consideration when helping their kids select which colleges they apply to.
Do any parents on this forum have kids who live in a campus carry dorm? Any comments, positive or negative?
Along with an enormous amount of other things, unless the money was earmarked for just those that came to your mind. I’m not sure as to his shoe size but I’m thinking they must be pretty darn large.
Mars and Venus and all that.
Given corporations haven’t the power to tax, and as such are prone to a terminal condition, you need another foil. City of Detroit, states or cities with enormous underfunded pension obligations seem more suitable.