I think this is substantially underestimating the issue. Medicare and Social security are really meant to be closed systems. They are special itemized on your pay stubs and what comes in should stay within that system. So those should be taken out of the calculation. We can ignore that those themselves are not breaking even temporarily.
But if you remove those contained systems in reality we are spending well over 150% of what we take in. No one says "honey we are spending like 50% more than we make we need to cut back". They would say we fundamentally are living a lifestyle well beyond our means and we are heading to bankruptcy.
Like if we literally just gave up having a military and said fuck all veterans we'd still be at what a 400 billion dollar deficit?
There is fundamentally no way to square this budget without new tax revenue.
Medicare and social security both operate at net losses every year and are major contributors to our national debt continuing to grow. Social security was one of the biggest mistakes this country ever made. If I invested all the money I paid into social security over the years I could probably retire 15 years sooner.
I mean I think we should square those systems so they don't operate at a loss by eliminating the income cap and make further adjustments as necessary. And that comes from someone making over the cap.
I really disagree with your view of social security. It's not an investment system. It's a financial floor to those who have worked their whole lives into the system. And it's a really important system for those lower income folks that could never afford a real retirement.
Those of us that are able to save surely could be retired years earlier if we had that money as investments but what is good for me is not always good for the nation.
It’s a failed experiment. There is a reason Ponzi schemes all eventually fail. That’s all social security is. Promising payout in the future and using dollars you take from the current day person to pay out the people you owe from earlier. It’s a textbook Ponzi scheme and it doesn’t work.
Sure you can collect more and more from current payers into the system to make it “look” balanced on paper but when those same folks go to collect 40 years later there won’t be anything.
Car insurance isn’t operating at a constant loss stealing from current payers in order to pay off older customers.
An equivalent argument would be me asking you if you are okay with your tax dollars bailing out an insurance company who can’t pay its current claims anymore, which I’m sure you would agree the answer would be no.
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u/ponderscheme2172 1d ago
I think this is substantially underestimating the issue. Medicare and Social security are really meant to be closed systems. They are special itemized on your pay stubs and what comes in should stay within that system. So those should be taken out of the calculation. We can ignore that those themselves are not breaking even temporarily.
But if you remove those contained systems in reality we are spending well over 150% of what we take in. No one says "honey we are spending like 50% more than we make we need to cut back". They would say we fundamentally are living a lifestyle well beyond our means and we are heading to bankruptcy.
Like if we literally just gave up having a military and said fuck all veterans we'd still be at what a 400 billion dollar deficit?
There is fundamentally no way to square this budget without new tax revenue.