Part of the recovery process for people who have lived large parts of their lives in immoral and unaccountable organizations is learning how to accept responsibility for what we did under their auspices. Many of us have great mistakes with family and friends for which we must atone for years and even decades. But that need to bear our own burdens obtains more broadly as well, for voters and countries can throw the innocent under the proverbial bus just as easily as religions. The first step in solving such problems lies in recognizing them.

I am posting this largely as a reply to summer, which is unfairly narrow because she is expressing views that are practically ubiquitous among those over about 50. I want to state up front that I hold summer in the highest regard. Her judgment and empathy on this site are invaluable. I am using her last post on the topic to organize my thoughts and apologize for doing it at her expense.


-------------
> Are the liabilities unfunded because Congress kept
> raiding Social Security funds?

Medicare is a bigger problem than social security. It isn't a case of "raiding funds" so much as having never paid for the benefits in the first place. The unfunded liabilities are presently, and conservatively, about $240,000 per capita.


------------
> I refuse to believe that I haven't paid enough in.

This isn't a question of what people feel they are owed, it is a matter of arithmetic. Your shortfall is $240,000 and rising.


------------------
> It seems that legislators have no idea of
> how to manage it.

Who said legislators wanted to manage social security or Medicare? They wanted to be elected and re-elected. They knew what voters wanted--spending now, taxes in the indefinite future--and provided it.


-------------
> The mismanagement of SS funds is NOT my fault.

In a democracy, voters are responsible for the people they elect to rule over them. If those rulers deceive them and are rewarded for doing so, the electorate by definition bears the blame.

Put differently, if you and I are not responsible who is? People who were not alive when we spent the money?


------------
> I am definitely in favor of whatever fixes are
> needed to keep it going.

You miss the point. Social Security is not going to be "fixed." Young people are going to spend their lives paying for what has already been consumed. And when that imbalance is finally rectified, many decades from now, people will dance on the system's grave.


-----------
Finally, a note that may bring this home. You mentioned that you are 62 years of age which, in a financial sense, puts you on the fence between generations. You are therefore not going to get what you expect. Taxes and eligibility ages will rise, copays and other charges will increase, benefits will decrease, and perhaps the government will eventually allow inflation to erode the value of the dollars you receive.

The "silver lining" for people of your age and mine is that we won't be hit anywhere near as hard as those younger than us. What is a great disappointment for us will be a tragedy for them and, frankly, a moral failing of historic proportions.




"Your estimated benefits are based on current law. Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time."

--The small print on your annual Social Security statement



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/24/2019 05:04AM by Lot's Wife.

I wish I could be as eloquent as Lot's Wife. The debt the country has acquired and has expanded since the 1980's bothers me greatly. Us boomers are handing down a nearly impossible situation to the following generations. I have been reading articles stating that debt can expand forever with minimal consequences that somehow justifies our current financial state. That makes no sense to me. We either collapse as a nation or there is a major reset in my opinion.

It is my opinion the mental capacity of many of our senior politicians is seriously lacking. The bureaucrats who rise up through meritocracy are the ones holding things together the best they can. Unfortunately they are being listened to less and less in favor of catchy slogans and irrational promises from those seeking reelection.

The rise of religious extremism is troubling as well. The religious right crave power at any cost.

It will be painful to cut SS and Medicare benefits. I don't see how that can be avoided. Those who did not save sufficiently for retirement through excessive consumerism or inability to save due to health or low paying jobs will suffer. That will be a significant generational problem. Tying this to Mormonism, the payment of tithes to the corporation seriously impairs members from saving for the changes that will occur in their lives. We know of one Mormon in her 60's who recently had to sell her house so she could continue to be an active member and pay for basic necessities. I believe half or more of all Boomers are in her predicament - especially those who were active Mormons their whole lives.

“Put differently, if you and I are not responsible who is? People who were not alive when we spent the money?”

Why not? They’re choosing to be born here. What could be more American than blaming the victim?

I'll take the blame. I used a lot of taxpayer money to try and fix my health issues. How i repay the public for saving my life i have no idea yet. Can one man fix the mess? Probably not. I think possibly every citizen has to become responsible and accountable all at the same time. This is very unlikely.

What i have sensed is that the government will copy religion and try to take it all. Does anyone really think they will be honorable in the end? They'll take your entire retirement if they can. Just try to live as independent of any corporation(big brother) as possible is what i think the solution will be. Do citizens really need big brother? No, but they don't ever want you to figure this out.

LW, I don't mind you quoting and responding to me here. I figured you would want to. Here is the entirety of my post for context:

Are the liabilities unfunded because Congress kept raiding Social Security funds?

If I took the money that I paid into SS and put it instead into a mutual fund that mirrors the stock market, I would be looking at a tidy sum. I've been working since I was 16. I am 62 now. Compounded interest, anyone? I'll have worked more than 50 years by the time I retire. That's a lot of years to have savings grow. This would be true even if the government took out 5% or 10% of my savings to pay disability to those who are eligible (which would be fine by me.)

I refuse to believe that I haven't paid enough in. I'll have been teaching for 28 years total by the time I retire, and I'll get more from my teacher's pension (which is fully funded, thank you very much) than I will from SS.

The mismanagement of SS funds is NOT my fault. I am definitely in favor of whatever fixes are needed to keep it going. Perhaps moving forward, citizens my be better off if they are given the ability to self-direct the investment of their funds. It seems that legislators have no idea of how to manage it.

____________________________________________________________

I do stand by what I have said, that by the time I retire I will have paid more than enough into the SS system to deserve my modest payout. If my (very sound) teacher pension system has the ability to get it figured out, our government does as well. Our legislators have chosen otherwise.

I fully expect that my SS benefits will be reduced at some point, and I have planned accordingly.

I think Australia has a self-directed type of SS system, similar to our 401k. Perhaps the U.S. needs to gradually move towards that.

Medicare is a whole other ball of wax. I didn't start paying into that until later in life -- I can't remember exactly when. I suspect that a Medicare fix will have to involve changes to the entire health care system (which I believe are inevitable.)

Thanks for your patience, summer. I'm going to insert some comments into your text. I'll then reply to one or two of Eric's points.


----------------------
> I do stand by what I have said, that by the time I
> retire I will have paid more than enough into the
> SS system to deserve my modest payout. If my (very
> sound) teacher pension system has the ability to
> get it figured out, our government does as well.


There comes a time when it's too late to "figure things out" or, alternative, when "figuring things out" is to surrender. The educational pension funds, Calpers, Ontario, others, don't have to fix anything because they had a clear mandate from the start and accumulated enough money to meet their obligations. The "solution" to the governmental problem at this point is default, including a massive transfer of wealth from future taxpayers to the Treasury. We shouldn't lose sight of what is happening since sweeping it under the rug will only preclude an early stop to the hemorrhage.


--------------
> Our legislators have chosen otherwise.

No, voters chose otherwise. When social security was established in 1935 (?) to eliminate extreme poverty among the elderly, the median life expectancy was 65.5 years of age--which meant that the country picked up the tab for several months. The system was solvent. But everyone assumed that the established tax rates were set in stone no matter how far life expectancy stretched and no matter how wealthy taxpayers became. So now social security that was funded for months is expected to cover, at the median, retirement of 13 years--and the target isn't the ultra-poor but the comfortably middle-class. Voters were NEVER willing to increase their contributions to cover the roughly 20X expansion in benefits that came with longer lives.

There are three main drivers of the federal disaster and all of them are middle-class entitlements: social security, medicare, and the mortgage income deduction, which in economic terms is an idiotic transfer of wealth from young people and renters to older people. We decry welfare moms while the middle class insists on extracting uneconomical and unfair subsidies from the young and the richest profit from the carried interest deduction, tax attorneys, etc. If you look at any billionaire, the probability is high that he pays a lower tax rate than a single mother who works as a secretary for $50,000.

The system is entirely unfair--and yet it is what voters have always wanted. Can you name three national politicians who were elected on a credible promise to hike taxes and cut benefits to save social security or medicare? You can basically count them on the extended fingers of a closed fist. And the closed fist belongs to American voters. The bottom line is that we live in a democracy and we must own what we did.


-----------------
> I fully expect that my SS benefits will be reduced
> at some point, and I have planned accordingly.

Wise. Guessing from your age, you will get 50-75% of what you were promised. I will get zero or perhaps somewhat less. My kids and grandkids will pay many tens of thousands each and get nothing. Largely as a result, their standard of living will be lower than ours because their inheritance is both substantial and negative. They start out adult lives yoked with debt amounting to about three times the average family's annual income.


----------------
> I think Australia has a self-directed type of SS
> system, similar to our 401k. Perhaps the U.S.
> needs to gradually move towards that.

That can happen, but only after our children pay off the $240,000 that each of us has already accrued through our political choices. Politicians knew that we wanted retirement benefits that were supposed to last 6 months to last 13 years but were unwilling to pay 20X the cost. So they gave us what we wanted. We feel we deserve it, that we have a moral right to those unfunded years of government largesse, but we do not. In no moral universe is it right to consume our children's wealth.


------------
> Medicare is a whole other ball of wax. I didn't
> start paying into that until later in life -- I
> can't remember exactly when. I suspect that a
> Medicare fix will have to involve changes to the
> entire health care system (which I believe are
> inevitable.)

I agree with that. But politics during both the Obama and the Trump era indicate clearly how much willingness there is to pay more for the healthcare we have come to expect. People perceive this--their right to promises that were always lies--as a moral imperative. But that is no more than willful delusion. We chose, and choose, to believe a pipe dream, as if investors in Bernie Madoff's ponzi schemes have a moral right to have society pay not only what they lost but the returns they expected on those losses. We chose to make those investments. We should pay for the resulting losses. Saying the state owes us recompense when, in this case, the state is kids and the unborn, is the height of selfish irresponsibility.


----------------
Erik brings up the social safety net. He's right. Americans love to think of themselves as independent, government-skeptical self-sufficient people: the modern day Marlboro Man with his horse, his Stetson, his rifle. But that is utter nonsense. The middle class is addicted to entitlement spending, and the upper class cherishes and preserves its very low tax rates. Let's call it what it is, socialism for the wealthy. The rigors of pay-for-it-yourself capitalism are reserved for the poor, the infirm, the handicapped--and the unborn. Imagine how we rugged individualists are going to look to historians in a century's time.

The situation does indeed resemble Mormonism. Never, never underestimate the willingness of people to believe a lie that serves their interests. It isn't just in religion. It is in personal affairs, in politics, in life. Tell me why someone else's money morally belongs to me and I will believe that with more fervency than all the facts in the world.

If the money that my employers and I paid over the years (currently $165K starting from the early 70s) had been invested in the stock market and bonds, it would be more than enough. Even without any interest whatsoever, it would cover about seven years of monthly payments at the current rate, taking me up to age 74, not that far off of the average lifespan. Plus, I still have about 4.5 more years to pay into the system, bringing my total even higher. I believe that I have less than half of that invested into my pension fund (with payments that are shared equally between my employer and myself,) and it is completely solvent. Go figure.

To me, the big lie is that the average Boomer did not pay enough into SS. We did pay enough.

I rented until I was 46, so I keenly felt the loss of the mortgage tax deduction. I did enjoy it for 15 years after I bought my condo, and it was very helpful during the beginning stages of my teaching career. Having my condo paid off is a part of my retirement strategy.

One other factor is the huge wealth transfer to the younger generations that will happen as the Boomers die off. IMO we will be passing on a great deal more than our parents passed on to us.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/24/2019 06:53PM by summer.

Summer, you are asking the impossible. You are looking back at a system that voters established and perpetuated and saying that if it had been set up differently your money would have been sufficient to pay for your benefits. But that's not how it works. If society establishes a system and the according rules, society is responsible for the outcome.

I can't invest money with a bad manager and then, when I lose that money, go back and demand that someone make me whole--much less go back and say "make me whole plus all the money I would have earned if you had been Warren Buffett." That is not how anything in finance or public policy works.

No one ever guaranteed you or me or anyone that we would get what we were promised. In fact, we have always been told explicitly that we may not get it back. Then voters come along and say "I feel like I paid X dollars and that means I am entitled to 2X dollars and I don't care about whom that hurts." The Greatest Generation, the Babyboom Generation, and some of the Millennial Generation have used their voting power to produce an outcome to which they have no legal or moral right.

"Subsequent generations be damned" is not a responsible reply to that fact. At some point people have to recognize that we don't get make other people pay for our mistakes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 01:58AM by Lot's Wife.

“One other factor is the huge wealth transfer to the younger generations that will happen as the Boomers die off. IMO we will be passing on a great deal more than our parents passed on to us.”

So always look on the bright side of death!
Just before you draw your terminal breath.
<whistling>

Who knew dying could be such a big favor? Okay, I’m kidding. Don’t cremate me, I want the worms to have a good meal.

While I’m here, I’ll shovel some woo into the mix. Since the planet moved into a new energy after 2012, the old systems can’t be expected to work like they used to. We could get lucky, but making things work in the real world requires more than luck.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of all this. Money is going to change big time because there’s no way around it. But so what? Money is a mind game. The last bailout demonstrated that. They’ll just change the game.

Summer,

Do the kids who got a free education from you and the system have any obligation to ensure your ss?

Seems to me if we get a benefit there is an obligation.

> Seems to me if we get a benefit there is an
> obligation.

Apply that principle both ways, and think about the problem of proportionality and the incidence of risk.

I don't think it will happen.

I worked in Social Security for 30 years, developed this viewpoint early on, and still believe I am correct.

Do away with the "tax cap" (the earnings level at which you stop paying Social Security tax, obviously the higher earners). Voilá, problem solved. Can you imagine, if Jeff Bezos paid 14% on his income into the SS trust fund?

As I said, I don't believe it will happen. If Congress had the huevos to enact this law, the howls of outrage from the rich would change the Earth's rotational axis. But I think it would fix the Social Security problem.

Catnip, I agree with you. The tax cap has got to come off. It would go a long way towards solving the problem, although I believe other steps need to be taken as well.

catnip, that would not "solve" the problem. It might render social security solvent now (and hence should be done), but it won't come close to eliminating the debt that we bequeath to our progeny.

A good study finds that doing what you suggest would reduce the problem by about 30%. That is ballpark correct.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32896.pdf

<<No, voters chose otherwise.>>

True. But corporations choose our candidates. Particularly after Citizens United.

RichardtheBad (not logged in) Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> <>
>
> True. But corporations choose our candidates.
> Particularly after Citizens United.


The entire thing is just a show for the masses. Every four years its the same drill.

Citizens United was in 2007. Social Security was established in the 1930s and blew up decades before the invidious supreme court decision was reached.

I would also note that while corporations wield vast power in the United States, that doesn't really apply to the national debt and the unfunded liabilities. In fact, corporations, banks, and industry associations have for decades been among the most vociferous advocates of reform. They fear that the demise of the social security system will do grave harm to the economy and hence that it should be repaired through tax hikes and benefit cuts. In this instance their interests coincide with inter-generational equities.

The bulwark supporting the middle-class entitlements is--wait for it--the middle class. Challenge someone's "right" to other people's money in most cases and everyone will concur; question it with regard to social security and medicare and you'll be hit with a ton of bricks. Corporations aren't the problem in this instance.

I am adding this because I believe it is germain to the stated subject

There is a deeper agenda to sexual repression in Mormonism. One of the most beautiful and deeply emotional acts that two human beings cam perform together has been relegated to an act of lust and perversion. It has been modified to represent a degenerate and dirty act instead of a beautiful expression of the love and caring of one human being for another.
Human beings are genetically programmed to reproduce. Yet in order to exercise unrighteous dominion people in power have denigrated this act of love into something base and dirty.
The purpose of this is to subject the mind will, and needs of the membership to the agenda of the hierarchy without consideration of the needs and wants of the member.
Ultimately this will led to the disintegration of the organization and its' demise

Interesting thread. Several points:

The death of SS, like that of Mark Twain, is greatly exaggerated. The earnings cap beyond which people don't need to pay SS on earnings will rise. I watched it rise my entire working life. I spent most of my life right at that cap, give or take a few thousand dollars. I felt like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. Every time I got close, the rabbit ran a bit faster. :(

Besides raising that cap, which I think is as close to a sure thing event as is possible, other things I think may happen is raising the currently quite favorable capital gains tax rate.

It was originally passed in the 1970s because of the reasonable complaint that the increase in prices for stock or other capital investments was inflation, not actual gains. The tax rates were cut on long term investments partly as a crude remedy for "gains" that were really just inflationary price increases. Now that inflation has died way back, there is much blather about "job creators", but that was not the original reason for passing the rates.

I don't really expect that to happen. Besides, half my income is capital gains, and I pay no tax on them (the first $37,000 is tax free. I saw how the game was played, and figured I'm going for capital gains!!).

I'm even less hopeful that a small SS tax will be placed on capital gains. I think all income, whether earned or capital gains should be taxed, and at a low and more or less equal rate. I think there is zero chance that will happen, but hey, a guy can dream.

To all the people who are convinced they have paid enough into the system to fund more than they will get from SS: not that I doubt your testimony, but I'd prefer real numbers that I could check myself, as opposed to someone's moral certainty that they paid enough. People who have paid into something have a pronounced tendency to overestimate what they've actually put into the system, compared to what they are likely to take out.

You might be right, but I won't believe it without seeing the numbers (not that you should post them here. You'll just have to realize people like me are going to be highly skeptical).

I did post my numbers -- currently $165K, with approximately 4.5 years to go in the workforce. I got the number directly from SS. That number represents my contributions combined with those of my employers over the years. You can get your number as well. Mine just arrived as a statement of benefits, but you can also pull it from the SS website.

I believe that my contribution is likely fairly typical for someone of my age who has put 40 years of full-time labor into the workforce (along with additional years of part-time labor.) Some will have paid less into SS, and some more, and their eventual payout will reflect that.

I am putting that number out there to counter the argument that the Boomers have somehow "robbed" the younger generation. The Boomers have put a LOT of money into SS. If the $165K+ that I will have put in was annuitized, it would amply cover my eventual payout. If the money had been properly invested in the first place, it would more than cover it.

That the Federal government has mismanaged our money and spent with abandon, I have no doubt. But in my opinion, the Boomers (as a group) have paid our fair share into Social Security.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 01:19AM by summer.

Summer, this is ridiculous.

Having paid money into a system does NOT mean you are entitled to a certain outcome. Moreover, paying "a lot" does not equate with "paying enough." If there is a deficit in the accounts, you by definition did NOT pay enough. That is the simplest of math.

As for whether or not one generation has "robbed" another, what else would you call using your power (the franchise) to spend someone else's money? How much you paid is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether you took more than your investment and returns are worth and then forced someone else to make up the difference. You are implicitly saying that the unborn should finance your retirement, and in any other context there would be no conceivable argument with the proposition that that is theft.

With regard to BoJ's point that the "death of SS is greatly exaggerated," you'll note that I wrote above not about "death" but about gradual default comprising rises in eligibility requirements, higher taxes, and diminished benefits. Is not that what you are describing with your specific suggestions? Is it not de facto default? The question is on whom those greater burdens fall, and the answer is of course disproportionately the young and the unborn. I doubt you will dispute any of that.

On your other point about capital gains taxes, what you propose makes sense but I would observe that those taxes go into the general budget and hence would have only a small effect on social security. That is particularly true because most of the new tax revenues would accrue to people who are already well above the cap and hence won't have to pay SS duties on their incremental income.

I disagree with you. According to the numbers, I did pay enough, and perhaps more than enough into SS *if* the system had been properly managed. It hasn't been. As I pointed out before, I will get a higher payout from my (fully funded) pension system with far less of my money put into it.

I will not be spending someone else's money. I will be spending my own money that I put into the SS system, again, *assuming that the money is properly managed.*

Our country has no shortage of very highly paid financial experts. We have lots of accountants, CPAs, financial planners, investment managers, financial analysts, bond experts, etc. There are lots of people with this expertise working on Wall Street, the Federal government, and elsewhere earning a whole lot more money than I ever have or will. I do not manage the SS funds. I do not manage Medicare funds. I do not manage the Federal budget. Perhaps I should? -- because the "experts" have managed to make a mash of it, and line their own pockets in the process.

I realize that you disagree with me, but my opinion stands. Perhaps we can both agree that the massive Federal deficit needs to be addressed, starting now. I am resigned to paying higher taxes to do just that. But the rich will need to up their contributions as well.

Hey, I am fully on board for running the country on a solvent basis. The United States pretends it is a capitalist country that prefers small government but spends pretty much the same as a European "socialist" country. The only difference between the two is that the United States refuses to pay for all that spending and resorts instead to massive and continuing borrowing.

I understand that you disagree with me on the entitlements. But frankly, your argument is that "if social security were run as a hedge fund it would have yielded enough to pay for what I want." That would be fine except that the system was set up more like a bank or a very conservative annuity. Why? Because most high-risk investment funds fail within a decade or two and then retirees are left with nothing. So what Babyboomers are doing now is the equivalent of going to a bank and declaring that "I paid $160,000 and now you owe me $240,000 because if you had managed my money like a hedge fund there would be enough in the pot." No banker would take that seriously.

Two final points. First, putting aside the question of how the deficits arose, you are asserting that the unborn should assume the losses incurred by our generations. How is that ethical?

Second, and underscoring that ethical question, the logic behind the fiscal reforms on whose urgency you and I agree is the same as that behind the need to slash middle-class entitlements. Both represent excess spending by the Greatest and Babyboom Generations that must be repaid by future taxpayers. The only difference is that a "religion" has developed according to which the entitlements are sacred. So we arrive at a juncture where one form of debt owed by older people to younger people is immoral and the other form of debt owed by older people to younger people is not only moral but sacrosanct.

Can you explain that contradiction to me?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 03:08AM by Lot's Wife.

I'm not asking that SS be run like a hedge fund. I'm asking that it be run at least as well as my pension fund, which goes with a fairly typical, conservative basket of investments. Considering that I will have been in the SS system for about 50 years when I retire, is even a very small amount of growth too much to ask? Did our economy not grow in that amount of time? The broad stock market has historically returned an average of 7% a year. An investor could easily get an average of 5% a year with a conservative mix of stocks and bonds. How about a return of somewhere between 1-3% on my SS savings? -- and yes, that would be more than enough to cover my eventual payout. As I stated before, the SS system could cover most of my expected (average) lifespan on my savings alone, not counting for growth.

I would be in favor of taking a (very) long term strategy of turning SS into a self-directed plan. This would have to be coupled with a greater emphasis on financial education in our schools.

You realize, I presume, that the there was a ton of discussion about turning SS into self-directed plans in the late 1990s. What killed that evidently great proposal? The dotcom implosion and the Great Recession, which destroyed people's investments and reinforced the need for a governmental pension system. There is consequently no chance that the politicians, regulators, and most prominent financial experts will support what you propose now.

As for your arguments about reasonable rates of return, you are missing the element of volatility. People used to make the arguments you articulate but ceased, again in the 2000s Why? Because 7% a year on average is irrelevant if the market collapses and you lose your job and you have to sell your investments at a massive loss to keep food on your table and clothes on your kids. We used to understand that point; in the 1930s people did; which is why social security was set up the way it was. After the financial disasters of the late 1990s and the 2000s, the point has been reinforced. For tens of millions of people, that turtle of an investment, social security, is all they have left.

People who have means may lament that fact, thinking that "reasonable" managers might have outperformed the SS fund, but its purpose wasn't performance: it was stability. SS was intended to be a backstop for the poorest, not a risk-investment for the comfortable or wealthy. It was a transfer to the poor.

But no longer. Now the middle class looks at social security and asks why didn't I get more? Indignant not so much at the fund as at the reasons it was established, they demand compensation it was never intended to yield and insist that someone--anyone--bear the losses.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 03:27AM by Lot's Wife.

I'm going to add that your assertion that SS has failed is simply wrong. It has done more or less what it was supposed to do.

And the shortfall didn't arise from poor investments--it was basically a pay-as-you-go system. The shortfall arose because people stopped dying at 65.5 years of age and hence needed coverage for another 13 years. But--and this is the key--they insisted on getting that massive increase in coverage at no additional price. They refused to pay the higher taxes necessary to finance that temporal extension.

It is silly now to turn around now and say, "my heavens how did the shortfall arise? Who mismanaged my money?" It arose because people demanded free benefits. And now they expect to pass that on to the unborn. . .

Does this mean the General Authorities have a fiscal responsibility to drop dead?

My teachers' pension system did not collapse during the great recession. It continued its strategy of investments and payouts and continues to be fully funded and solvent to this day.

Even if a self-directed system lost half its value in a recession, it would still far exceed in value what people paid into the system. Plenty of people base most of their retirement strategy on self-directed savings and investments. As an example, my brother's investments took a hit during the recession, but have since recovered.

A complete lack of risk does not equal safety. It means that your investment will fail to keep up with inflation. Accepting a small degree of risk is not only acceptable, but necessary. This is why target-date mutual funds will keep at least some money in stocks, even as the target date approaches, arrives, or is exceeded.

> My teachers' pension system did not collapse
> during the great recession. It continued its
> strategy of investments and payouts and continues
> to be fully funded and solvent to this day.

Great. But your pension fund is run as a pension fund and not as a super-conservative cash-in, cash-out emergency fund. You are asking that an apple tree yield the same fruit as your banana tree.


---------------------------
> Even if a self-directed system lost half its value
> in a recession, it would still far exceed in value
> what people paid into the system.

If that were on point, people would still be advocating the privatization of social security. But they are not. Leading pols and financial advisors no longer think that privatization is anywhere near a good idea.

SS was designed for disasters among poor people, not for bad times among wealthy people with diversified portfolios. For example, assume someone has a house and a fairly low-wage job and 10,000 in a retirement fund. He and his wife and three kids are barely scraping by, but they are surviving and content. Then in 2007 he loses his job and only has his retirement fund. The fund, however, has lost 60% of its value. If given enough time, it will recover and move into the black. But our hypothetical homeowner has no time. He has mortgage payments to make and children to feed, so he has to sell his investments at the bottom to keep his family in food. Six months later he has to sell his home, very possibly at a major loss. By 2010, when his investments would have returned to the black, he doesn't own them anymore. So when the Fed cuts rates to zero and starts pumping QE money into the asset markets, driving up your portfolio value, he is stuck at zero, homeless, and without the resources to care for his family. THAT is why the suicide rate among middle-aged men has surged over the last decade.

But that's what life is like for poor people. They live on the edge and adverse economic developments can devastate them. Social security was designed to avoid that danger; it was to be a stable numerical value so that people who lose it all can avoid starvation. That logic does not apply to you with your very secure job and your significant, relative to your needs, balanced portfolio. So you are asking that social security be something it is not, namely a risk-tolerant investment vehicle for comfortable people with significant resources.

SS was never designed for you or me. It was designed for the poorest of the poor, and it was designed to last for several months. You are insisting that such a program must serve the financial interests of a very different category of people and pay for roughly 25X more benefits than it was intended to. That is not realistic. Moving to your system of privatization would have meant that a lot of old people who depended on social security would have been financially ruined in 2007-2009. We would be right back where the elderly were in the depths of the Great Depression.

That is not reasonable.


------------------
> Plenty of people
> base most of their retirement strategy on
> self-directed savings and investments. As an
> example, my brother's investments took a hit
> during the recession, but have since recovered.

And every bit of the risk your brother took was OUTSIDE of his social security account. He had resources, so he wasn't the focus of social security. Anyone who has a broad discretionary portfolio doesn't need a nominally constant fund that is impervious to market movements. Again, you are acting as if social security is supposed to meet the needs of the wealthy when it is not.


----------------------
> A complete lack of risk does not equal safety.

In finance, it does. Risk is measured by volatility, with zero volatility equaling "safety." For better or worse that is the definition.


------------------
> It
> means that your investment will fail to keep up
> with inflation.

No, risk comprises many different factors in finance. Inflation is a tiny piece of the puzzle.


--------------------
> Accepting a small degree of risk
> is not only acceptable, but necessary.

In finance, one chooses a point on the line between the risk-free rate and the ideal market portfolio on the efficient market frontier. Beta measures the level of risk the investor chooses. Younger, wealthier people--you and your brother--will opt for a larger Beta but the older and poorer one is, the closer to zero the appropriate Beta becomes. And for the very poor, the very old, and the infirm, Beta often should be zero. So you can't say risk is "necessary." In many cases, "risk-free" is necessary.


--------------------
> This is why
> target-date mutual funds will keep at least some
> money in stocks, even as the target date
> approaches, arrives, or is exceeded.

Again, you are thinking from the perspective of a relatively wealthy person with a particular risk-tolerance and you are acting as if everyone is basically the same. They are not. It would have been utter insanity for the very poor or the very old to have shifted their money from social security to a mutual fund in the middle 2000s.

With temerity, I submit that you understand basic finance as applicable to your situation but not the overall system or the rules applicable to people in different circumstances. That leads to erroneous conclusions about investment strategy and public policy.


-------------
All of this is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that your generation and mine will never get what the Pied Piper promised us in social security or medicare. The question is who should pay for our disappointment. I find utterly irresponsible the proposition that people who had no say in our mismanagement of our politics and our expectations should bear the burden for what we have consumed.

Just because I am hurt does not mean someone else must pay.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 05:20PM by Lot's Wife.

I do think some degree of risk is necessary. It doesn't have to be huge. I watched my mom go through retirement. She kept her money in very low-paying CDs and it was a strategy that did not work out for her. At least some retirement money needs to be kept in stocks as a guard against inflation.

Lots of people right now are getting experience with investments in the form of 401k and 403b accounts, and Roth accounts as well. I'm going to bet that most full time jobs offer these types of accounts. So people are already self-directing a significant portion of their retirement savings. This is not anything new to them. Even when I was working a retail job long ago, my company offered a 401k along with an employer match.

I'll compare my SS account with my pension account once again. For the SS account, I will have paid more than double the amount of money that I paid into my pension account, over double the amount of time. Yet my pension account, which is completely solvent, will pay out more to me than my SS account, which is not entirely solvent. For Social Security, this is inefficiency on a massive scale. I am saying that not only can we do better, we need to do better. Ordinary citizens simply can not afford to throw their money around in this manner.

I think it is time to reconsider and reconceive Social Security. You said at one point that you did not think you would receive anything when it comes time for you to retire. Where is the security in that?

Turning SS into something more like a 401k would pump huge amounts of money into our economy. IMO it would be good for the economy, good for business growth, and good for individuals as well.

I admit to some frustration here.


--------------------
> I do think some degree of risk is necessary. It
> doesn't have to be huge. I watched my mom go
> through retirement. She kept her money in very
> low-paying CDs and it was a strategy that did not
> work out for her. At least some retirement money
> needs to be kept in stocks as a guard against
> inflation.

To make the point that your statement is incomplete, everything you just said is incorrect in the many parts of the world in which negative interest rates presently obtain. In those countries you are PAID for taking no risk. Don't assume that basic personal finance is the end of the story: it assuredly is not, and in times of crisis the conventional rules no longer work. Diversification, for instance, doesn't work in a crisis: the correlation between assets and categories, which one would want low, goes to 100%. Please don't assume that the Charles Schwab/Merrill Lynch/Fidelity tutorials are universal truths.

Moving back to the United States and a more "normal" situation, what if a person is poor and has no retirement funds? What percentage of their holdings should be stocks to guard against inflation?


------------------
> Lots of people right now are getting experience
> with investments in the form of 401k and 403b
> accounts, and Roth accounts as well. I'm going to
> bet that most full time jobs offer these types of
> accounts. So people are already self-directing a
> significant portion of their retirement savings.
> This is not anything new to them. Even when I was
> working a retail job long ago, my company offered
> a 401k along with an employer match.

This is true of people in your situation. It does not reflect the situation of those who are poor, those who were in your situation but lost their assets in the Great Recession, or those who suffer a medical emergency and lose their resources. My objection is to your insisting on viewing everyone's situation through your lenses.

There are literally millions of families who were in your situation but were devastated in the 2007-2009 crisis and have nothing left. You can now express the same common wisdom that led them into that disaster, and it will work well for you now, but when the next major crisis occurs another tranche of hundreds of thousands or millions of American families will learn the limits of the common wisdom. Social security was designed to protect them and not for you and me.


-----------------
> I'll compare my SS account with my pension account
> once again. For the SS account, I will have paid
> more than double the amount of money that I paid
> into my pension account, over double the amount of
> time. Yet my pension account, which is completely
> solvent, will pay out more to me than my SS
> account, which is not entirely solvent. For Social
> Security, this is inefficiency on a massive scale.
> I am saying that not only can we do better, we
> need to do better. Ordinary citizens simply can
> not afford to throw their money around in this
> manner.

SS was designed to provide a minimal income for the elderly and the infirm. It was not designed for "ordinary" middle-class citizens. The crime lies in the way those basic principles were ignored, putting us in a situation where people making 100,000 a year think social security is for them.


---------------
> I think it is time to reconsider and reconceive
> Social Security.

I will address this below.


-----------------
> You said at one point that you
> did not think you would receive anything when it
> comes time for you to retire. Where is the
> security in that?

Do you know why I won't get anything? Because you are stealing it by insisting on getting more than your share of what is in the fund.

That is of course hyperbole intended to shock; it is not you but rather people older than you who are the primary problem. But the fact is that the reason I will get nothing and younger people will get even less is the the remarkable determination among middle-class Americans that they have a moral right to money that does not exist.

In the 19th century, you would probably have found me living and working on a family farm--think Norman Rockwell but without the teeth. Say that somehow our barn burned down. Would my husband have been justified in marching indignantly to the next town and demanding that they pay for our loss? I doubt there would have been any self-respecting homesteader with the gall to do that. And yet today that is what is happening--except that in this case it was middle-class voters who refused to cut benefits or raise taxes to pay for their entitlements. They literally started the fire that burned down the barn and are now demanding that some other town rebuild it because, dammit, I have a moral right to my barn!


---------------
> Turning SS into something more like a 401k would
> pump huge amounts of money into our economy. IMO
> it would be good for the economy, good for
> business growth, and good for individuals as well.

Summer, capital is fungible. If you put it into any financial institution--a bank, a mutual fund, a retirement fund, social security--it ends up in the same pool. There would be minimal economic gain from what you propose other than to drive up asset prices and thereby aggravate the appalling maldistribution of wealth.


----------------
I said I would come back to reforming social security.

What would I do? Reassert the original principles. Social security is a program for the poor and no one else. Everyone pays into it regardless of income level, the money is invested conservatively, and the benefits are paid to the poor. Those benefits start to shrink when a person's assets reach a modest level of (making this up on the fly) 100,000 and cease altogether at a slightly higher level of 200,000. It is NOT a program for the wealthy or the middle class and the payments are meant to ensure the poor do not suffer egregiously. I would do the same thing to medicare.

As I said above, the United States is far more socialist than it likes to believe. SS and Medicare and the mortgage interest deduction and other things have become guaranteed income for the middle class, sacrosanct, dependent neither on the efforts of the contributors nor market fluctuations. People demand that the state (and future taxpayers) give them what they want no matter what happens.

The Marlboro Man died recently. He was predeceased long ago by his self-sufficient and responsible country.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2019 07:35PM by Lot's Wife.

So the unborn show up and get the benefits of an advanced society at no cost?

> So the unborn show up and get the benefits of an
> advanced society at no cost?

Unfair, isn't it? Those little parasites! They should have been forced to pay taxes before getting the protection of the police, the firefighters, free immunizations, and the right eventually to attend kindergarten: taxes, just like you paid when you were an infant.

>>Do you know why I won't get anything? Because you are stealing it by insisting on getting more than your share of what is in the fund.

I realize that this is hyperbole, but it does reflect the current attitude among younger people. The truth is, I will probably get back in Social Security roughly what I put into it, assuming that I live an average lifespan.

I feel that I've made my main points, so I will let the matter rest for now.

The young people are right. We are borrowing and spending and forcing them to repay the loans. There is no way around that fact.

Yes, let's postpone further discussion for some other time.

It could go either way. It's a shame that Roosevelt didn't listen to George Washington who said we shouldn't leave debt (no matter how noble it is or what sacrifices were made, or wars fought) to the younger generations. I've been reading a biography about Doc Roosevelt which explains how we got into this current predicament of SS, and his problem was that he wasn't an intellectual. He didn't read books, didn't care about facts at all, and wasn't intelligent. It was 1933 and his plan was go for the soft sell to the american people, feel their pain, empathize with the widows, and basically try a bunch of new programs and see what sticks. When people would try to tell him the facts, he would resort to his feelings, and tell a stories he'd heard of some poor person in Appalachia.

So we got into this mess because of bad leadership. Old Doc Roosevelt was a quack.

But anyway the only thing that's going to save us now is immigration. The gallop poles have told us that there are uncountable masses wanting to immigrate into this country from the 3rd world. Congress just needs to let in a slow trickle and hopefully they'll get jobs and pay the shortfalls into the system.

It seems unfair to blame the Baby Boomers for the current debt and lack of equity in their own savings. Financing and debt pay to capitalize infrastructure, much of which didn't exist before today's young were born. And those young people will continue to benefit from that infrastructure. Much of the wealth that was spent by the Baby Boomers and their offspring was used to raise their children in vastly improved conditions than they themselves grew-up in. Those same children or grandchildren are claimed to be the victem's of spending of the Baby Boomers when in truth, they are beneficiaries of that spending. The Baby Boomers didn't leave the kids at home while they went out and partied on their kids future income. They spent that money on those same kids. We've all heard stories of previous generations, some of which told us stories about their walking ten miles to school, barefoot in the snow, or of the family with only one car and barely enough food to get by, which was the norm of those times. Today's youth have it much better. Hunger in the US is nearly non-existent. Even the homeless (or nearly homeless) in many cases have their own cell phones. Everyone gets emergency medical care whether or not they can pay for it. But the lack of equity is caused by socialism in America, taking funds from some people and giving that money to others.

No one ever saved or taxed their way out of a recession, or out of poverty. Industry needs to continue rolling forward to keep money flowing in the economy. Flowing money feeds people, pays their wages, creates work for them, builds their houses, and pays for their entitlements. If we tax it all away or reward those who can work but who choose not to work, we end up with wholesale poverty. If everyone has a fat bank account, who would hold the debt? Having equity means that someone else owes you something (credits and debits). You can't have equity without debt existing somewhere. Someone has to own the debt for the corresponding equity to exist. It looks to me like we've given it all to China. A better margin on Twenty trillion plus dollars per year could go a long way toward propping up your retirement if we didn't give it all away. We can pay for entitlements after we generate more wealth and quit giving it away. Proping-up the economy and stopping the unnecessary bleeding of the wealth of our economy in to China is a worthy goal and there is a lot of opposition right now to the only guy who is succeeding at doing just that right now. Today's lower-income elderly can be taken care of with Social Security funds if the economy stays strong and generates more wealth.

Steve, this is wrong on several counts.

The United States has not invested the money it borrowed on future taxpayers' tab. A quick inspection of our highways and bridges and public education indicate that clearly. Or look at the national accounts and explain why a consumption/capex ratio of 6 as opposed to the 3-4 that characterizes other advanced economies is proof of a tendency towards investment. It isn't. The fact is that Americans borrow to consume. Period.

As for China draining our wealth away, those bonds are denominated in dollars whose value the United States controls. Washington has defaulted on its national debt several times in the last 120 years, as have all the other advanced economies, through both overt renunciations and through devaluation. China has claims on a lot of American wealth but no way to enforce either the claims or the value of the remuneration.

And regarding the possibility that Beijing may decide not to buy American paper, the effect would be self-immolation for the demand-side reasons you applied in the previous paragraph. China's savings rate is too high (roughly 45% of GDP), so demand is too weak. Demand is accordingly imported through a capital account surplus. If China were to shut off the flow of capital to the United States, it would interrupt the stream of demand, the economic growth rate--already decelerating--would fall sharply, and political problems would explode. So Beijing has no choice to buy US debt even though it knows fully well that it will be repaid in currency that is debased to one degree or another.

Living standards are falling in the US and will continue to do so for decades due to a failure to invest and an astounding increase in combined household, state, and federal debt. There's really no debate over that fact.

This foreign debt is not a good thing for the US and is also bad for our foreign creditors. Hejemeny is wrong, even when you are the beneficiary of it. Americans do spend more than they should on luxuries. But those problems are relatively small when you consider that we should be investing in our own country here in the US and not barrowing to pay for living expenses. And we do mis-spend. We need efficiencies and independence on all levels that we are too fat and happy to even look at. People are feeling the pain at retirement time because the value of their money is being manipulated by all of these factors and spread around the globe in attempts to build a world government. But I don't think it's the average person who should be blamed (other than as you point out, we elected bad leaders). The politicians have looted our money while building some worthy public projects at times. We need efficiencies and to put our own country first, while treating other countries with fairness and honesty. As you say, even China knows they're going to be paid back in devalued money.

Thanks for this post. Very enlightening. My pre-boomer parents are living on a reverse mortgage and SS with my mother working a part-time job.

I realized long ago that they would have it better than me if I live to be as old as they. It is a pay it forward socialism. But this accounts for much of human history and the proficiency at which we humans take over things and squeeze them leaving less to future generations of ourselves.

And yet the enlightenment of modernity was built with a common vision of making things better for our progeny.

EB, my friend. You mention that history has always been this way. The truly sad thing is that you are basically correct.

For the vast majority of human history, the rate of economic growth has been very slow and the distribution of wealth terrible. Then came the 20th century with its two world wars, which inflicted terrible suffering and required that societies pull together. They did, and after the second world war governments changed their systems to distribute the fruits of conflict more equitably partly because they genuinely thought they owed it to their peoples and partly to stop communism from sweeping across Europe and Japan. The result was a massive improvement in living standards and the strengthening of the middle class and democracies (since there is a close relationship between the middle class and the viability of that sort of government). Unfortunately, the rich world has moved most of the way back to the old pattern. Increasingly it appears that the 20th century may have been an anomaly.

On a different note, there's a religious element to all of this. Religion is a system of belief that is unrelated to underlying facts; it often asserts that the facts don't matter because there is a higher truth. But that also describes the ideologies that hold countries and policies together. If you go to Japan, Germany or the US, you'll find one or more ideologies that explain why the status quo is essentially "correct" regardless of the underlying data. If that is not religion, I don't know what is.

Facts are nasty things. They are like gravity: you can deny them for a time while things get worse, but ultimately they bring you crashing down.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> you'll find one or more ideologies that explain
> why the status quo is essentially "correct"
> regardless of the underlying data.

> Facts are nasty things. They are like gravity:

Angels defy it all the time. :)

This article appeared fortuitously in The Atlantic today.

It is well worth a read and, probably more importantly, short. The point is that "Boomers have bent the gravity of politics toward themselves and their needs" throughout the wealthy world. The result has been a massive shift in resources from young to old, with the result that in the UK there is now more poverty among young working people than the elderly--and that is before considering future tax burdens.

When politicians try to persuade the Boomer Generation that something has to be done to reduce harm that their deficit-financed entitlements are inflicting on their children and grandchildren, the reaction is impulsive, harsh, and brutal. Almost immediately it "becomes wrapped up in assertions of 'just deserts'—I’ve worked hard all my life and paid my taxes—" and a complete unwillingness to examine the facts. As a British politician (himself a Boomer) and the author of a couple of books on the topic says in frustration, "When we have all this power, we shouldn’t be surprised when younger people are rather resentful. . . I’m surprised they aren’t angrier.”

This is a serious moral issue. The belief that "I deserve everything that has been promised to me and everything I can persuade politicians to give me" is irresponsible especially when your age group is by historical accident much larger than other cohorts. That sense of entitlement is the stuff from which tyranny of the majority stems. Recovery from religious cults should entail a willingness to question other ideological presumptions as well, especially when the fate of tens of millions of human beings is at stake.


https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/britain-election-boomers/602680/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/27/2019 11:49PM by Lot's Wife.

I think that these positions of the elderly of today are rightfully from a few causes. Many of them as young people saw the elderly of their young days, living in poverty. As they plan for an upcoming time when they see themselves likely to become incapable of working any longer, they want to survive, preferrably not in poverty. Having paid in to Social Security, they want it to serve the purpose they were told it would serve. As people live longer, they are planning for a longer period of infirmity. The money of their day is de-valued and they know it. They don't know how they will survive that de-valuation of their money. That two-dollar haircut is now twenty-five dollars. So they feel the need, just to survive, to hoard their money and to get all of it they can. Then even if they have more than a lifetime of their money stored in a safe place where they can get to it, they don't spend anymore than they absolutely have to, leaving most of it un-spent in many cases. The young will eventually inherit what their parents don't spend. I don't see a problem with this. That inheritance will likely come to them at a time in their life when they are a little older and wiser, and need to start taking their own retirement years more seriously. If there is nothing left to inherit, than these elderly still planned wisely and took care of themselves. I wouldn't want any of my parents money that they should have spent on themselves anyway. The alternative is that I would have to support them. In general as a generation, I can't fault the elderly of today for the condition they left society in for us, except for allowing our politicians to waste too much money on things that didn't help anyone other than themselves (the politicians) and on foolish endeavors like trying to build a socialist world government after the fall of communism. But no one could have predicted back then what to watch out for. Societies like people, live and learn.

A few quick things:

On a thread about money and Boomers and everyone else, I'm disappointed that I didn't see the typical Boomer refrain to everyone else's demands: "how are you going to pay for that?"

Student loan debt forgiveness, medicare for all, free college, a living wage, shelter for the homeless and a better safety net for those on the verge of losing everything, stiffer consumer protections from predatory capitalism and banking, and, the big millennial concern, a Green New Deal, --the typical Boomer refrain to these reasonable, civilized demands, demands made to the richest country in the history of the planet, demands that many less wealthy but civilized countries in the world feel duty bound to provide, is a sour, pinch-faced eye-rolling, "and how are you going to pay for that?"

And nowhere on the thread (it's a big thread, I apologize if I missed it) is the obvious solution to EVERYONE'S concerns discussed: stop spending 700+ billion dollars a year, and that's just the official number, invading, bombing, controlling, torturing, tormenting, meddling and murdering other people "over there", people overwhelmingly of colour, by the way. Stop spending money on murder and start spending money at home on your own people.

Why is that so radical?

It's not radical in the least. It's normal in fact. The fact that the point can't even be raised in public, even just to be discussed, shows just how not normal America is. There's only one (sometimes two) candidate in the Primaries, for example, who dares bring this up, and the weight of the entire establishment comes down on her HARD. Why is that? Why cannot it even be discussed, considered? That is extremely bizarre.

America is wealthy enough where everyone can have their needs met with comfort and surplus, if Americans can first agree to stop murdering everyone else.

Solution:

1. Cut the war budget in half (to begin)
2. Stop printing money for the too-big-to-fail banks
3. Tax Billionaires and even 100+ millionaires out of existence
4. (And while we're at it, why not eradicate the CIA and ICE and Homeland Security?)

That's how you pay for it. Boomers will get all the promises they feel were promised to them and the rest of us can begin cleaning up the hellish mess left behind in the Boomers' wake. But first you have to decide to stop murdering everyone else on the planet.


There is a problem with information flow in America, so that needs to be rectified so that a conversation CAN begin. So:

Solution:

1. Make Google, facebook and Internet flow public utilities, subjecting these to America's 1st and 4th Amendments. (It's insane, just for an example, to ask Zuckerberg to be the censor-god of facebook.)

There you go. That's how you pay for it and that's how you can begin seriously discussing how to pay for it. You're welcome.

God Save America,

Human

An implementation such as that suggested by "Human" would lead to the United States becoming a third-world country within a few short years. The tent and sidewalk comunities like those currently found in Seattle and Sanfrancisco are just a small glimpse of that future. Several societies in the past have tried to abolish personal property rights and it always ends-up like what we see in Venesuela right now. Quite truthfully, a large percentage of the people in third-world impoverished nations right now would choose to legislate-away your personal home and right to eat more than one small meal per day, to feed and shelter themselves to at least that same level. There are more of them than there are of us. Should we arrange for that kind of a vote? If we quit spending $700 Billion a year as we do (and that's not on murder) everyone in the US has their investment and bank account values go to zero, right along with the value of the dollar itself, as we default on our payments of the national debt and are forced in to bad agreements due to a lack of national defense. A kleptocracy is not the answer. Everyone who posted above would be the victems of the resulting collapse in the US dollar. One or two people bring this up in the primaries each time and they promptly lose the election, which is why few if any of them bring it up. It's not popular and won't work.

This issue turns quickly from inter generational relations and moral accountability, in to partison politics. For that reason, I will refrain from proposing a solution here. I think it'safe to say here that anarchy is not a reasonable proposal. The best direction would be to examine closely and objectively, who should pay for it and to focus not on forcing those changes, but to examine the repercussions or good results of each and every one of the changes that are proposed, based on human nature and on how others are likely to respond. Give them something of value in exchange for something of value in return and you might get a lasting result. Take away something from them and give them nothing of value in return and the results will probably be not so good. Some people may not realize that the implementation of their desired plans would lead to their own demise and to the demise of their own loved ones. The integrity of the dollar is what sets its value in the eyes of everyone who values it. If you take away that integrity for whatever reason, then all value is lost in one swoop. Then the whole world ends up like Venesuela. So those who make and keep their agreements are rewarded with more. Those who won't make agreements or who won't keep their agreements are given less, until they learn how to play fair with others and to produce something of value that they can trade. Then again, I think that's where we are now. I think they call it capitalism. It's not always fair but it sure beats societal impoverishment.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2019 10:19AM by azsteve.