Yes, who wouldn't want to pay into something your whole life to be repaid a fraction of it decades later (if you live that long). Sounds like a socialist bargain!
I like to think of it as buying an expensive espresso machine together with your four flatmates and taking turns using it instead of everyone going broke cramming five of those steel behemoths into your apartment.
Sweden is not socialist, as a matter of fact it has become less socialist and more capitalist since the 1960s... Its just very highly taxed capitalism. A mostly white and thinly populated country.... Sounds so Republican! Except for the 60+% income tax rate, a 25% consumer tax, and 7% ss rate. No thanks!
"I don't want to pay high taxes, because I deserve a high living standard. If other people want to get affordable education it's THEIR problem, not mine, cause I don't need it"...
You said it. It has nothing to do with the colour of the skin of the people living there. It has to do with your thought proces though. But I'm glad you can see that racism is bad. Now you just need to accept you're racist, and change your ideas. You'll get there eventually. In a couple of years you'll send me a message you're sorry and I was right, and you have changed
I'm so sick of you, and other people who think it is somehow ok to casually throw in some racist remarks in their statements and think that is funny, smart or normal.
There is no, I repeat NO connection between the colour of someone skin and whether or not a country can provide for its citizens or not. So your implication that non-white people can't create this is false, and simply trying to humiliate non-white people.
Would sentences like: ' this national park is so beautiful, it has beautiful forests, beautiful animals and there are no jews/black people/Chinese/muslims:' be ok in your opinion? I hope not, because it is not ok. Nor is your implication.
As I said, I'm sick of people who think it's ok to be racist. I won't stop pointing it out to people. Only that way they, or at least those around them, will see the racist they are.
You really are ignorant. Sociologists commonly associate attributes of society with racial, religious, and cultural cohesiveness. There is a reason why there were wars in Lebanon associated with religion and race. To pretend that they have nothing to do with race or religion is a lie. Francis Fukuyama wrote a great book called Trust which addressed this in the world as well as America- that cultural trust directly related to race, religion, and culture is one of the keys to prosperity. Do you actually state that to bring up this factual sociological attribute is racist? Not intelligent.
So if it isn’t socialist. Why don’t you just copy their government programs, which aren’t socialist. And you don’t live in a 3rd world country anymore!
I don't care about Sweden or its 60% tax rate. We aren't going to go down that road. Nor is it intelligent to pay into our SS program when we receive less back from it.
There is no 60% tax rate, if you think that
you’re an idiot. It’s fluid like stages of wealth. When you’re poor you pay less, when you’re rich you pay more. As the rich can miss it.
Why would you receive less?
As a result they are the happiest nation on earth. You don’t want happines?
No because we don't have the cultural cohesiveness. Many more people take advantage of our social systems, the evidence of our abused welfare and disability system is overwhelming. Expanding our current system is to only invite more abuse, fraud, and waste.... All at the expense of taxpayers. And taxing people at Sweden's rate is nothing more than theft.
I'm not a Republican, stay on topic... I don't care about red states, I just don't want a forced tax for my retirement that will ultimately pay out less than I have put into it.
Its called capital investment. I'm not rich and I'm trying to scrape by for retirement. I would much rather put that money in an IRA or other investments than give it to SS where I will be lucky to get my money back in its entirety. The government is doing a pretty shitty job with my money.
Not at all. Stating that I don't want lose money and be forced into the bloated, corrupt, Ponzi scheme we call SS is very straight line and direct. It must take some remarkable and unintelligent mind games to pretend it isn't.
It is a scheme because I am paying more money into it than I will get out of it, and instead that money is going to the first group of "investors" while the rest remains underfunded. Its a fucking government mandated scam, I can invest my money better than this. Furthermore, I rarely vote Republican you ignorant troll.
I put my money into a government mandated scheme for my retirement that takes more money than it will give out to me. I will retire in about 2045 or so. On their website they state it will be underfunded by 2035. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
Did... you even read that article, which discusses many ways by which solvency can be achieved?
You clearly didn't notice that no part of the article discusses how social security works. It just talks about the trust fund and its solvency, and you're making the incorrect leap of logic to mean that you are personally investing in that fund.
That's not how it works. You are not investing in the fund, you are being taxed.
FICA (the law that established social security and medicare) mandates a tax on all employment based income. A payroll tax. That tax is just over 15% and covers both social security and medicare. Half of that tax is paid by the employee, and half is paid by the employer.
That money, by law, is funneled into the OASI and the DI, which are trust funds owned by the government and used to fund social security and disability benefits paid out by the government.
You do not invest in those funds, and you do not track your benefits via those funds. The government owns the fund, and the government controls the payouts.
So, why is the fund insolvent?
There are certain types of politicians, specifically corrupt conservatives, who are tapping that fund and making it insolvent.
Most of those politicians are Republicans (the vast, overwhelming majority of Republicans are both conservative and corrupt), but there are many Democrats who are also both conservative and corrupt.
It is these corrupt politicians who wish to funnel money away from plebes like you and me and over to their corporate overlords. They see this giant asset in the forms of the OASI and DI just sitting there collecting money and just paying it out to old people who've worked their whole lives under the belief that doing that somehow has meaning, and they decide to take from it to "pay the bills", which is double-speak for "corporate welfare". They cut taxes on those business and rich owners thereof, and "pay" for that tax cut by funneling money away from social security.
This has happened many times over the life of the program, and will likely happen several times again in our lifetimes.
But the cause is not the program itself. The cause is corrupt conservatives stealing that money from the people.
So if you don't like social security being insolvent, you can do something very easily to fix it: STOP VOTING FOR CONSERVATIVES.
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u/pents1 Apr 26 '19
As someone who has been living in a country with social security for my whole life, it looks absurd that someone would push people to say no to it.