RINOs and Elephants, oh my

[WAKWIB]

SA- So essentially you just said that SS, and I guess we should throw Medicare into that, pay for themselves....and a wad of other things.

So then to eliminate those "taxes" (SS and Med. withholding from paychecks) eliminates a constant revenue stream to Uncle Sam.

 

Which I suppose then get replaced with some other TAX like a higher income tax to which we get no real-dollar return on investment.

 

I'm no economist, but if I put money in a envelope to pay for one thing, I shouldn't be dipping into it to pay for something else, and than go rob someone to replace the money in the envelope.

 

 

[packsaddle]

WAKWIB, I can't believe that you are only just now waking up to the reality of the massive deception we've been playing on ourselves with regard to the SS and Medicare systems. Your money was spent as fast as it came in and more besides, borrowed against the futures of our children. You have already kissed your so-called investment goodbye and if you thought you ever had a chance of recovering any of it, I'm sorry for your blindness. But I can't respect the expectation that our children should shoulder the burden of others' lives once a those others have decided not to support themselves anymore. I consider that to be a selfish and self-serving expectation.

 

To answer your question, the moochers are those of us who have already gotten more return than we ever put in and, even though we have the resources to live on our own, continue to collect. The way to correct this and to start a modicum of fiscal responsibility is to terminate those systems. If, at some time in the future, we have the resources to squander on individuals who cannot take care of themselves, then we can decide to do that - then. But I think is it immoral, even obscene, to shackle debt that WE incur to our children. They should not pay the price of our consumption. If the remedy is painful, so be it.

Any true conservative who values personal responsibility and self-reliance ought to agree.

I'm not kidding myself. I don't expect this to happen. I expect the mass of so-called, 'conservatives' to rationalize our way into even longer-term, deeper debt...or else ruin...or both. As I mentioned earlier, I doubt that we have the backbone. So please, show me I'm wrong.

[WAKWIB]

I'm not as blind as I come off. Just try to simplify things.

I don't think that folks who have paid into the system are immoral for taking it out when the time has come. It was, to a point, loaned to the government. The government is the one who needs to pay the piper. I wonder if the liberal icon FDR thought this through when SS was developed.

I'm not drawing from it yet. Frankly, I have my doubts I'll live long enough to draw much anyway. But it was money I earned, and money I expect back for my wife and children. That's the moral thing to do. Where does the money come from? Cut useless spending in the gov't. would be an area to investigate. Not everything the gov't spends money has value.

[scoutingagain]

"I'm no economist, but if I put money in a envelope to pay for one thing, I shouldn't be dipping into it to pay for something else, and than go rob someone to replace the money in the envelope. "

 

Well the government has been doing just that for 200 years or more.

 

To be fair, investing in US government bonds would have been considered about as safe an investment as you could make. If they had litterally kept the money in cash in an envelope somewhere, the money would have lost substantial value. They had to put it somewhere where there was little risk. But there is no money other than what we currently collect and borrow to pay for these programs.

 

And currently we're borrowing about a third of our revenue. Imagine what your financial situation would look like in 10 years if you borrowed 33% of your income for the next 10 years and spent it all like a drunken sailor. You'd have a great time for 10 years and then at somepoint someone would start asking for their money back. To pay it back, if you could at all, your next 10 years or more would be pretty bleak. Financially at least. That's what we've done for the last 10 years. Now it's time to pay up or as Pack notes just pass the buck to our kids.

 

There is no possible way to balance the budget in 10 years without all of us making significant sacrifices. We should accept less Soc. Sec., accept a military whose job it is to defend our shores and not be the world's police force, and generally accept a lower standard of living to pay for the excesses we've allowed our government to engage in.

 

That would be the conservative, personally responsible thing to do. As Gunny note, and I agree, I think there is a large portion of the country ready to do that. They're willing to do their share and some maybe more. But I'm not sure folks really understand the depth of the issue and how much needs to be done. If one looks at the numbers, the math is pretty sobering.

 

 

SA

 

 

 

[scoutingagain]

Unless of course Dick Cheney's right and deficits don't matter.

 

SA

[WAKWIB]

I totally understand everything that has been said by Pack and SA...well, the part about our gov't being bankrupt anyway.

Apparently the current administration does not.

Rolling out a gigantic health-care bureaucratic complex doesn't sound like sacrifice and belt-tightening to me.

I guess it's just the new flavor of the day, like Social Security was in the '30s.

[Beavah]

Everybody understands, WA. They just hope you don't.

 

The SS Trust Fund was raided by LBJ to pay for Vietnam & da Medicare startup (remember Guns & Butter?). Since then, every dollar you've paid into SS has gone to pay folks currently receiving SS or for things like agriculture subsidies or a new destroyer. So it's no different from welfare for seniors, eh? You pay taxes, current senior citizens get paid. My dad was one of da early ones into the Ponzi scheme. He made out like a bandit.

 

As benefits keep going up and da numbers of workers compared to senior welfare recipients goes down, the tax burden on our kids and grandkids to support the senior welfare system gets higher and higher.

 

Not much different than the last 10 years of war & tax cuts. Who ever heard of fighting two simultaneous wars while cutting taxes? Ah, that's OK, we don't need more military personnel, we can borrow money for mercenaries and run da National Guard and Reserves ragged. "Hey, you young fellas gettin' your Eagle Scout badges, we want yeh to go fight for us old folks' liberty and safety. Oh, yah, and yeh can't expect us to pay for it, so we want you to to spend da next 30 years after you get back earning money to pay for the war too." But don't worry, we'll wave flags for yeh! After all, we're patriots.

 

The health care bill in many ways is not much different than the young folks demanding that they get some sort of benefit for all their tax dollars/hard work. Why should they pay for free health care for seniors when they can't afford it themselves? On top of both fighting our wars and paying for their own ammunition by mortgaging their working life.

 

That may be why Obama got most of the young vote, eh? About time someone offered 'em a slim government benefit, instead of just expecting 'em to pay for da rest of us.

 

Of course those young folks don't get out to vote as regularly as da seniors. Too busy working. Much easier to vote when you're livin' off the dole.

 

Beavah

 

[packsaddle]

Don't think you'll get very far if you ever run for a public office in Ft. Lauderdale or maybe Palm Beach or Boca Raton, heh, heh. But I agree.

I rationalize my decades of contributions to the system by balancing it against what my mother received. By the time she died, if I amortize it over the time she was retired from her job, she got just about exactly what I (and my employers) had contributed over my working life up until then. I could have just handed it to her and done away with the bureaucracy to save some money. But that's not how it works.

 

To respond to another suggestion, I suspect FDR understood the actuarial aspects of what he started. Like all predictive models, it would have been impossible for him to predict very far into the future all the things that have happened. So he did what he thought was right at the time. That I can forgive. I can't forgive agenda-driven deceptions or selfish people grabbing what they can get regardless of the harm to others - harm in this case to future generations. Beavah's right...LBJ probably wasn't the first liar in the Oval Office but he sure cost us big with the ones he perpetrated on us.

 

I can't say for sure that things would be better today if Barry Goldwater had been elected instead. But I think it would have been. Too bad.

[scoutingagain]

I suspect Goldwater would be considered a RINO by today's standards.

 

SA

 

 

[WAKWIB]

I rationalize my decades of contributions to the system by balancing it against what my mother received.

 

That's how I roll with it.

 

[packsaddle]

WAKWIB, yeah it doesn't really change the mess but at least I don't feel as badly about it.

SA, I agree. I suspect Goldwater might even have been considered 'liberal' on some topics. The irony is that he largely got punctured by the 'Daisy' ad which LBJ's campaign used to imply that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuclear holocaust. And then, years later, we bet the ranch on a war of choice based partly on a similar deception. We never learn I guess.