Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: No Shit. That's practically common knowledge.

[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="I need clarification"] Yeah, but what about money already owed to retirees? That's not a government hand-out, or of questionable value. The whole point of social security is in the title of the program. I don't want to work until I'm 95, I doubt you do either. And since the government forces my employer to withhold a certain amount of my income to pay into the current social security system, I'd just as soon the government guarantee those funds. As bad as the feds may be at bookkeeping, at least there is some guarantee. I trust them more than I do Ken Lay, personally. Anyway, I'm not against giving people the option to throw away their retirement money on the Wall Street roulette wheel, but then we shouldn't make paying in to Social Security mandatory. And since that's impossible given the current system (we working people pay for current retirees, assuming our kids or grandkids will be paying for us), maybe bankrupting it isn't the best idea.[/quote] Good grief, I read that twice and was unable to find any personal attacks. You feeling ok? The fact is that social security was premised, as you noted, as a pyramid scheme. Like any similarly corrupt idea, especially given the fact that human population levels do not grow exponentially, it WILL break down eventually, no matter how much we compromise prosperity and economic efficiency to prolong it. The trick now is to make it a graceful failure rather than a catastrophic one. Starving it chunk by chunk is a good start, I think. People survived before it was around, and will do so afterwards...given the choice to sink or swim, most will do the latter. [/quote]