*McLame as usual. Man that guy will never be president. http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060518-114132-2456r.htm "The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment -- even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents. 'There was a felony they were committing, and now they can't be prosecuted. That sounds like amnesty to me,' said Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who offered the amendment yesterday to strip out those provisions of the immigration reform bill. 'It just boggles the mind how people could be against this amendment.' The Ensign amendment was defeated on a 50-49 vote," the Washington Times reports. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended letting illegal aliens get Social Security. "If this amendment were enacted, the nest egg that these immigrants have worked hard for would be taken from them and their families," said McCain.
And those racist bastards want to make English the official language of the country too. Thank god for heroes like McCain who understands the value an illegally obtained paycheck (and passport, and ID, and voter's registration card ... oh wait this has nothing to do with him being from AZ and needing illegals to help him win re-election...). /sarcasm (in case it wasn't evident already)
Social Security is a flawed system to begin with. It only works when people work right up to their last years and die. It also requires a large amount of present workers in relation to those collecting benefits. Years ago, our population stated its shift towards more retired people who live longer. As it stands, the system can not survive without radical changes in either the the system itself or the population. One idea would be to create a worker program for foreigners, like those from Mexico, and allow them to participate in the system. When social security was invented, in Germany, the average life span was 65, thus the program worked just fine.
Social Security sucks, I'll be glad when it withers away and dies. All it did was create generations of senior citizens dependent on the government for their retirement and thus, a loyal voting block - probably its intent anyways. You get what a 4-5% (less? I forget) return on the money you put in? If you invest the same amount in the stock market or even a mutual fund, you will do a ton better than that.
That's not guaranteed. History is littered with stocks that fell, went all the way to zero and so forth. It's all in the timing. As to social security, the original intent (Germany) was to get old people off the job before they died, because they were dying while working and injuries of others happened. A government study was done to find out how long people were living. The data showed just over 65 and thus, social security at age 65 was born. It was never meant to support people for 20+ years. The United States adopted it at a time when the concept was still valid. However, over time our lifespans have gotten longer, medication and treatment better, yet the same old concept is in place. You also have to look at a big demographic of contributors to the system--manufacturing workers. The demographic has been fading for decades due to Globalization.
*Truth is, you could put your money in high interest yield account, and still get more money than SS. I tend to think something similiar to this (below) would be good. **I would like to sell all the federal owned land off (bit by bit) in the west. They own 80% of it, and the majority of it shouldn't be owned by them. Determine market value and start bids from there. If oil companies see an interest they'll make high bids. Pay-off SS for the current retirees, and let the tax and program desolve...having some reasonable cut-offs. I'm willing to part ways with it, if I get to keep that part of my check. ***Medicare is a bigger issue, but I think we should handle both now, and stop delaying. http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/1554.html SOLVING SOCIAL SECURITY AND ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AT THE SAME TIME When I mentioned to Interior Secretary Gale Norton at the White House Christmas Party last week that she was the key to solving Social Security and US energy independence - both at the same time - you can imagine how much her eyes widened. "I am?" she responded with wonderment and her beautiful smile. We all know that Social Security will soon be sinking under the titanic weight of some $26 trillion in unfounded liabilities, with far too many young folks paying for far too many old folks. Beyond that, the program is a preposterous rip-off, paying retirees a negative rate of return for all the money they put in over the years, when inflation is factored in. The argument for privatizing Social Security, transforming it from a Ponzi scheme ripping off young workers to pay for retirees, into actual retirement accounts personally belonging to individuals and growing exponentially with the magic of compound interest, is unassailable. Except for this one little multi-trillion dollar problem called "transition costs." Robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul Ponzi schemes always collapse when you stop robbing Peter, and this can’t be allowed to happen because the geezer Paul vote would go berserk. In other words, there can’t be any cut in benefits. Social Security reform proposals to cut benefits, raise taxes, or increase the retirement age are politically suicidal: it is impossibly stupid for any Republican to advocate them. Social Security checks have got to keep arriving for everyone in full for as long as the transition takes. Pro-privatization think-tanks like Cato that seriously study this problem estimate the transition cost would be around three trillion dollars. It can be argued, as does Cato, that this is a "one-time cost" which should simply be absorbed by the taxpayer as it would eventually save ten times that long term. But politicians can’t electorally afford to think long term. Adding trillions of dollars to the already astronomical federal deficit is a hard, hard sell. But what has this got to do with energy independence - which means in the reality of here-and-now, not in a far-off future of hydrogen fuel cells, producing our own oil? For the fact is that we are and will continue to be for some time an oil-based economy. Either we produce our own or we remain dependent on spooky foreign sources such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Those are the facts, ma’am. But how can we produce more oil when we’re running out of it? It turns out that we’re not - and we’re not talking about Alaska’s ANWR (although it certainly should be drilled). We’re talking about hundreds of billions of barrels of oil right here in the continental US, untapped and available. It’s in a form of deposits called oil sands. There are trillions of barrels of recoverable oil in oil sand and ultra-heavy oil deposits throughout the world. (Think of how laughable, in the light of this, is the eco-freak claim that "we’re running out of oil.") Conoco is right now shipping by tanker 120,000 barrels a day to its Lake Charles LA refinery extracted from Venezuela’s Orinoco Heavy Oil Basin. This one single deposit contains over 1.6 trillion barrels, 275 billion of which is recoverable with current technology - which is more than the total reserves of Saudi Arabia (267). Over a million bpd will be produced within a few years. The largest petroleum deposit in the world is the Athabasca Oil Sands in northern Alberta, with 315 billion recoverable barrels (close to two trillion total). Production via a number of producing consortiums currently exceeds 850,000 barrels a day, one third of Canada’s total. While US oil sand deposits are dwarfed by Canada’s, there are nonetheless scores of billions of barrels right here - over ten billion in just in one area of Utah known as the Oil Sand Triangle. (Note: we are talking about real oil here, albeit ultra-heavy like molasses - not "oil shale" which is stuff that will become oil in a few million years.) One of the catches (yes, there’s more than one) is that these deposits are on federally owned land. But this catch needn’t be a problem - for Gale Norton, it’s an opportunity. Sitting down? The Federal Government owns one third of the United States. One-third or 650 million acres. 86% of the entire state of Nevada, 70% of Utah, 65% of Idaho, on and on. Subtract jewels like Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and many other places of national heritage that everyone wants kept public, and you still have a half-billion acres that could be... yes, sold. Sold, becoming private property, to pay for the privatization of Social Security. Ah, I can see your mental calculator whirring. To raise three trillion for SS privatizing by selling a half-billion acres, that’s $6000 an acre. That’s a lot for a patch of desert in Utah. But a lot of those patches have a billion barrels of oil underneath them. This is the free market solution. The Feds have no Constitutional right to own all this land, none whatever. But there’s no Constitutional authority for at least 80% of what Federal Government does now, so let’s not go there. Let’s stick to talking dollars and practical sense. Yet we also have to talk politics, because standing in the way of this double solution are - you guessed it - the eco-fascists, the "environmentalist" Sierra Club crowd that hates private property. What’s needed is to explain that these folks are blocking the path to guaranteed continued Social Security checks, and thus launch a stampede of thundering geezers to trample the eco-freaks underfoot. The one viable argument the Sierra Clubbers can make is that extracting oil from oil sands requires ecological rape. Oil is not drilled out of oil sand deposits, it is open-pit strip mined, then leached out with chemicals resulting in vast lakes of polluted waste water. Athabasca is an incredible ecological disaster. What’s needed is a low-cost environmentally-undamaging method of oil sand extraction. A lot of companies are working on various methods. I myself own such a company. Pretty soon, one of us is going to figure out a proven way to get all that oil out of the oil sands cheaply and cleanly. But there’s no need to wait until we do in order for the Double Solution to Social Security privatization and energy independence to be launched. You can expect a number of Washington think-tanks such as Heritage and Cato to begin working with Secretary Norton, and many other folks both in the White House and Capitol Hill on a conservative-libertarian solution to two of the largest problems we face.
*Similiar idea.... The problem and solution Social Security is inherently unsound because it's a political program – run by politicians for political purposes. It will never work. And no attempts to fix it, reform it, or refinance it can make a silk purse out of a politician's ear. Only a purely libertarian solution can make things right: Shut Social Security down – completely, immediately and for good. End the Social Security tax tomorrow morning and stop making Social Security payments tomorrow evening. Anyone under 50 can have a better retirement putting 10 percent of his income in the bank instead of 15 percent into Social Security. And what happens to those who are currently dependent on Social Security and those too close to retirement to build a new nest egg? Have the government make a one-time purchase of private annuities – secure, non-political annuities that guarantee the same income Social Security is paying now to senior citizens. How will the annuities be paid for? Sell off assets the federal government shouldn't own anyway – power companies, pipelines, unused military bases, Western lands, oil rights, mineral rights, and the hundreds of thousands of federal buildings that serve no constitutional purpose. This approach doesn't appeal to politicians, because it takes tax money and power away from them. But the only alternative to it is to resign yourself to having more and more of your income taken from you and poured down the drain.
I agree with the McCain thing, but why call yourself pro-immigration? If your 100% pro-immigration, why not let all the Palestinians move-in...maybe the Sudanese, Serbia & Albanians, Algeria (hell...how about half of Africa)? Or maybe half of China....they'd all come.... Are you saying your 100% pro-illegal? 100% no law? In an analogy, my difference is I want a nation that's not a whore to the world, rather it picks and choses safely and has reasonable standards. Thus it follows it's law. Whores end-up with diseases...Ameica's immigration policy should wear a condom and choice wisely. Perhaps you would only allow the illegal immigration from Mexico, because they're not as blow-up crazy like extremists in the middle east (and elsewhere), right? Any open-border country (ie those that don't have real smart laws concerning this) almost inveriable end-up liberal bendover states that make them extremely suseptiable to attacks or infiltration. Look at the bendover status of Europe...a country that can lose itself without a single shot. That's how the third world nations fight wars... they depend on the weakness of tolerance...massively immigrating and demand 'rights', and once it's given ...the country is theirs. Or in more extreme situations you have people come -in and kick you out of your house, then you have military conflicts e.g the Serb/Albania conflict. France will be heading in that direction most likely or does the fire riots not prove anything to you? Did you know that many of the 'pro-immigration' (ie pro-illegal) rallies were advertised similiar to this: 'crush the border'? Suddenly I feel the idiocy of John Lennon's 'Imagine' arising...in the only way possible.
I don't agree that selling land in the west is the answer. By doing so, you will be increasing foreign ownership of our land. It's already an issue, there's no reason adding fuel to the fire. It also solves nothing. When the concept of a program is no longer valid, throwing time and/or money at it will resolve nothing. You could remove politics from the issue and the program would still be broke, because of the shift in the population's makeup. The best thing we can do is to tell people in their 40's and below to start saving for retirement, like they should have to begin with. Putting money in a good yielding account is a nice idea. While it won't necessarily grow your money in the core sense, it can help you stay above the inflationary curve, which is averaging 3% annually--providing the Fed does their job right.
You could have reasonable restrictions on foreign ownership. The reason cities are so dense (and expensive) in the west is because there's barely any land to build-on. I can literally go south of the bay area and pass hundreds of miles of forbidden federal/state owned land. It's silly how we're forced in this concentration, much less our federal government owning so much. In ending it, we'll some how have to please the people in retirement or just right before it... for one, there's no feasible political way to just let it go completely without a plan. It's been noted many times (by senators) that the moment one party really wants to get rid of SS (or medicare) they'll lose votes big time. Note: Neither party is resolved to put an end to it, despite the republican bs 'privatization'. The economic ramifications of cutting this cold-turkey would be beyond comphresion. As of now, there's 539 billion dollars given out to 48 million recipients. That number could easily be a trillion when it comes to it's final fiscal pressure, if not more (especially with our 100-200 million immigration path by 2020). Now, we can loan out shitloads of money for a war and just put in our debt, but we can't suddenly not put a trillion (per year) dollars back into the system...that just doesn't work. My method could be done reasonable, and slow...a method of cold-cut killing of the program would amount to suicide. Frankly, they could just raise the age level up (by justification of higher age standards) and that would extented it quite a bit. Not that it makes it any more right. Obviously some people must plan not to have it, but the idea a 'no-plan' won't extremely effect us economically or socially--is just silly. We need to have a workable plan, not one that would just waits till it's death. Damn you early era liberals! And especially you 60's medicare hippies!
The problem with restrictions as you suggest is we just don't run that type of system. I am glad I never planned on having SS. That was one of the benefits of going the entrepreneur route when I was in Jr. High School many many years ago. Let's be frank here. The reason nothing will be done is because politicians are too scared of stepping on toes and more intent on beaming the appearance of being fair. Perhaps the best policy is to saturate the mass media with the idea that SS is broken and there's no hope. Let it run its course and die. Really the government is in a no-win spot. Someone's got to be hurt. As usual, it's the uneducated American that will take it you know where. We could always privatize it. I mean, what could go wrong.
For security reason we do...although that gets a bit silly at times. Even big time oil deals are looked at now-a-days. To some point we can't get too investment scary. Foreign markets deal with us economically in big manners..every day. Trillions on forex, much less our stock/bond markets. Forbidding government involvement would be a good thing. Allowing only US companies to own oil rich areas would wise too (doesn't mean we wouldn't allow foreign investment in trying to find it). Selling the land slowly and judicially would be wise ie review whose buying and debating our choses. It's started, but depending on our future, we might not have everyone prepared...nor will our economy if there isn't a feasible plan to deal with the fiscal imblances. Most likely. With a no-plan deal, we'll lose many jobs domestically and foreigners will deeply feel the stink. Sincerly I worry more about medicare in our future...that will be a very dangerous thing, because it may lead to nationalization of medicine..which is retarded.