Your thoughts on Social Security

United States, of course.

I'll bite first.

Here's some of the problems I have with SSA. People say that if I die, my family is paid death benefits. Somewhat true, except that I'm single with no wife or kids. If I die tomorrow (at age 48), the money I contributed is gone. I can't "will" it to my mom or dad or whomever. I can do that with a private plan.

When my grandmother died, my grandfather didn't get her Social Security checks along with his. Why? Because if you received more than your spouse in Social Security pay, you don't get squat except for the continuation of your check. If you don't receive more than your spouse in Social Security checks, you get the amount that your spouse got. Not theirs plus yours. If you die and leave a child as a survivor, they receive your Social Security check until turning 18.

In these cases, the gov't gets the windfall. It is what it is -- a Ponzi scheme.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Social Security Zone".

I gotta jump into this one but... there's dinner, too, which calls trump.

Don't move. Sit right there.

I'll be bacck!

I'll be here even if it looks like I'm not. Still an hour away from supper myself.

The story of America was largely unchanged between its founding and the latter part of the 19th century. In fact, this same thing could be said about the world as a whole; horses & steam were the engines that moved man about. Sails still moved ships and ships were still often made of the same stuff the horse carriages were, wood.

Families stayed together. Most people lived entire lives never going further than 20 miles from the place where they were born. Even with the advent of the iron horse (steam locomotive), there was not any real mass migration away from the nuclear family setting unless that whole family was moving west or south or... whatever, as a whole.

Things change in life faster than our concepts of it do. Nobody liked those gas-powered velocipedes, either. They were noisy and less than reliable. The horse did not feel threatened... except at the intersection.

\\\ Ahhh oo-ga!!///

Poor horse.

Now, let’s conceive of a nation without Social Security...

John Doe was born in 1948. He grew up the son of an ironworker outside of a small town in Ohio. He would eventually join the US Army, serve in Vietnam and come home to marry his high school sweet heart.

He went to work in the same iron mill as his dad and eventually bought a home nearby.

Now here we are, suddenly, in the year 2011. John is getting on in years.

He lost his wife to cancer several years ago. His kids have long since moved out of what is called the ‘rust belt’ of America. They have their own lives and in the current economy, struggle to keep their bills paid. But there is no SS and dad can no longer expect his private retirement check as the steel company has exhausted its entire fund due to inflation that easily exceeded interest rates paid into it.

What to do?

The argument that SS was never meant to be a source of income doesn’t hold ground because when it was created, there was no concept of what lay ahead. If you today ripped SS payments out from under those getting them, some small fraction might find relatives to help them. Another small fraction might find a church or mission willing to give them a blanket and daily meal.

The great mass would fall between the cracks and simply die because our society is no longer geared to the concept of that kind of existence. We walked away from that with the industrial age in one hand and the electronic in the other.

There is really, honestly, no backtracking on Social Security. There are tens of millions of people who paid into it and now expect our government to fulfill its half of the obligation. Privatizing the program would fail the moment our economy hit a moment like it is experiencing right now... and all those billions of invested dollars lost, of We the People’s money, would create an atmosphere ripe for dissention the likes of which have not been seen since the years just prior to the US Civil War.

We are locked into, and on a path that is inalterable unless we are ready to finish the division of this nation down political lines that would not otherwise have to arise. We cannot abandon those who paid into a program under a certain understanding with their own government, and just say... sorry, it doesn’t work anymore.

One can blame an opposing political slant, the course of human events or just curse the Arabs or the Chinese all day long... but it changes nothing.

We have to finish what we began and honor promises made or there will never be another promise that is taken seriously.

The problems with Social Security are many, but I'm going to start with a few of the most obvious.

When the program was designed the average life span was about 67 or 68 years (I can't recall exactly, but that's close). With the retirement age set at 65 under the plan, that meant that the payout would likely rarely exceed the payin.

But now average life expectancy is about 80 years, and it is not uncommon for people here to live much longer than that. So now we have have people drawing benefits not just for a few years, but sometimes for a few decades.

Another problem is the sheer size of the boomer generation. It was the single largest generation in our history. This generation is on the verge of retirement (with some already there), and the sheer number of retirees drawing benefits for 15-30 years will put a massive strain on our budget, particularly when you couple that with Medicare.

The biggest problem with the program however is that the funds were never set aside by the government and sunk into some sound investment vehicle where it could be growing at a decent rate - a rate at least competitive with a private sector retirement product. But nooooooo... the federal government absconds with our SS dollars the second they hit the treasury and stick a worthless IOU in a filing cabinet somewhere in the dark bowels of the Treasury - gathering dust instead of interest.

I am all for a sensible privatization of SS, perhaps something akin to what a couple of cities in Texas have or what they have Chile.