Maybe you have seen this or maybe you haven't, it's not really anything new. Republicans have been trying to get rid of social security since Reagan. Bush may actually do it.
Quote:
President George W. Bush repeatedly has emphasized that one of his foremost second-term priorities will be to transform Social Security fundamentally. Enacted in 1935 and amended many times since-including major changes in 1983-Social Security provides benefits to workers and their family members upon retirement, disability, or death. Since the program's inception, the size of those benefits always has depended on the earnings of workers over the course of their careers. President Bush wants to change the system so that the amount that each worker collects from Social Security upon retirement instead would hinge on the size of investments in his or her own personal account.
Although the President has not yet endorsed a specific plan, the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security put forward three proposals in 2002 that likely will form the basis for his plan to create private accounts. An analysis of those proposals showed that paying for new personal accounts while continuing to provide benefits to Social Security's current beneficiaries would require some combination of federal borrowing, tax increases, and benefit cuts amounting to between $2 trillion and $3 trillion over the coming decades.
President Bush and others who support private accounts argue that such dramatic changes are necessary because Social Security faces a financing shortfall, according to projections of the system's trustees. The trustees' latest estimates, based on economic and population assumptions they call neither optimistic nor pessimistic, show that Social Security will continue to be able to pay benefits in full until its trust funds are exhausted in the year 2042. After that, funding would be sufficient to provide about 70 percent of currently promised benefits. (The Congressional Budget Office, perhaps more realistically, recently projected that the reserves would last until 2052 and would be able to pay about 80 percent of current benefits thereafter.) Private account advocates also emphasize that while today's retirees generally receive far more from Social Security than they contributed in taxes, the so-called "rate of return" for tomorrow's retirees is projected to be substantially less generous.
Much is at stake in this debate. More than 96 percent of workers pay Social Security taxes and thereby are entitled to collect benefits from the program. More than 47 million Americans today receive checks from the Social Security system. Although the average monthly payment to those individuals is a modest $895, Social Security constitutes more than half of the incomes of nearly two-thirds of retired Americans. For one in five, it is their only income. Like past generations of Americans, today's workers of all ages will need Social Security to protect them against forces beyond their control-economic ups and downs, inflation, fluctuating investment markets, and possible disability or premature death of a family member. That insurance has been essential in even the best of times, and will be all the more important in an increasingly global economy with large and growing federal budget and trade deficits.
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This is very scary stuff for the younger folks out there like myself, who have been paying into social security ever since we had a job and are looking at getting nothing, hell, maybe even oweing the government when we retire. I do not have any specific numbers and I have been looking, (maybe someone can help me out) but I figure a good number of senior citizens today rely on their social security check for a significant amount of their income and privatization would pull the rug right out from under them.
-Ghost
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Knowledge is power.
07-26-2006, 10:49 AM
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