perfidy

Slacktivist looks at the social security trust fund one way. I look at it another.

Contributed to a trust fund? Did you really? Hmm. I guess you can look at it that way, and you can also look at it this way:

You're Abe, and you have a son, Ben. You set up two accounts, one for "regular stuff", and one for "retirement". You're worried about the retirement account, so you put extra money in it. But your regular bills are pretty high, so you "loan" the extra cash from the retirement fund to the regular fund, and then you go ahead and spend it anyway. Then you go back to Ben and let him know that he "owes you" the extra cash you put in the retirement fund.

So how much did you really save with that little sleight of hand?

As a not-quite-young-anymore person, I've been in the workforce 20 years, and I've paid plenty of taxes, both regular and social security.

This generation of workers (along with the previous) have _voted_ themselves benefits far in excess of what they've produced. I agree on the nature of the paper -- the government better damn well pay it back, or financial systems all over the world are going to feel the shockwave.

But don't paper it over with an "I paid into this" attitude. You didn't. You didn't pay for the government you got over the last 20 years, you won't pay for what you're getting over the next 10, and as a whole, the citizens of this country have simply decided that screwing over the next generation is the very most important thing to them.

So what to do? Wage-indexed benefits have got to go. You can't attempt to sustain a "20% of average wage" standard for benefits in the face of a 3-to-1 worker-retiree ratio. Convert social security into a truly pay-as-you-go system, on a year-by-year basis. Stop the theft of the surplus by the general fund. Means-test benefits; it's social security _insurance_, not "my check is in the mail". Begin computation of cost-benefit ratios for drugs and employ a harsh test -- the drug is not on an "approved list" unless spending those same drug dollars on less high-tech medicine can't save more lives. Weight these tests towards children and the young. They're paying the bills.

The greatest generation was followed by the greediest generation whose myopic gaze falls upon the desert of its works -- castles made of sand, a loving gift to their progeny...