Thought the US had already been bankrupt for years.
It’s not a matter of “we need to do this” or “we need to do that.” I’m simply telling you the mathematical facts of what will happen. It the flow of money stops but no new job holes only so many pegs can fit into a hole. Expect mass bouts of looting and or civil war. Economy is really a semi-trivial issue, The species is really a lost cause for several other reasons as well.
It’s a lot more than just a voting block, i’ve encountered plenty of libertarians and conservatives who enjoy the fruits of social security (not to mention any number of other government entitlements). People like social security, not just Democrats. Hell, even James S. Saint feels it is owed to him.
Oh wait, by “democratic politics”, do you just mean the electoral system in general?
No comments on my post anyone?
Well, if you can’t afford to feed everyone, you can’t afford it regardless of the fact that the household still needs to eat. We can’t afford social security anymore. Either there are better and cheaper ways to house and feed everyone (which is what i hope) or some people are going to go homeless and hungry. It may not be right or just, but it is what it is.
We’ve been living in debt for some time, but that’s not bankruptcy.
Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell.
I want to know what are the rates of petrol and diesel in US for retail consumers in dollar terms?
With love,
Sanjay
Diesel is in the area of $4 a gallon at the moment, regular unleaded gasoline is about $2.60 a gallon. Obviously, these prices fluctuate by the day.
Okay. What are minimum wages in US?
Upf, I am asking this because I want to compare prices of commodities and purchasing capacities of the citizen of different countries, excluding the currency rate difference.
With love,
Sanjay
Yeah, I just meant the electoral system in general. Had to capitalize the D because it was the beginning of a sentence. And the voting bloc for Social Security doesn't break down neatly along party lines. If it did, it would be reformed right now while the GoP is in power. But of course the old-people bloc is important to the GOP, and when it comes to other entitlements, the rural-poor bloc benefits from them and is important to the GOP as well.
In short, entitlements [i]create[/i] a voting bloc. If the State decided tomorrow to give left handed people 100-dollars a month for whatever reason, and this went on a few years, it would be hard to repeal. People wanting to cut costs saying "Um, this is completely arbitrary and unjustified, we can save hundreds of millions per year by cutting this entitlement" would have a sizable bloc of left-handed people voting against them motivated by the interest to keep their 100 bucks.
That data should be easy enough to look up, I wouldn’t think you’d have to calculate it from scratch.
The real problem (which makes it completely different from the household analogy, by the way) is that when you are dealing with a nation, 'afford' and 'everyone' are constantly shifting goalposts. Give 50 million people money to buy food, and the price of food and the value of the currency you are giving them both change. So does the value of an hour of labor. Set up a criteria for who gets free food, and that criteria will be continually expanded as new classes of deserving and needy are discovered/created.
I think the first step is to stop saying ‘we need to provide for our poor’. No, we don’t need to. Rather, it would be nice if we could. Can we? Probably, but accepting that it’s not a need but a ‘it would be nice’ keeps the mind open to rejecting methods that are going to harm the country more than they help, and settling for realistic, not ideal-alternatives if that’s all we have.
You should distinguish between SSI and SSA. SSA is a prepayed plan by those receiving the benefits. It is not a handout, but a repayment for a forced investment. SSI is more of the hand-out, feed the poor type of thing.
So how much is being spent on which?
SSI ~= $50 million
SSA ~= 1.3 trillion
If SSA is the way you described it, then the amount paid should be zero.
?? “amount payed”?
Well, if we’re just paying them back funds that they paid in, the cost to the State should either be zero, or negative as we presumably invested the money while we had it.
No, no.
SSA taxation is much like buying government bonds, except forced to do it. The agreement is that the government will begin paying the people back at a specific rate after the government took the money interest free. The people lose the interest that they would have earned from any bank. But if, and only if, they live long enough, they can get that interest back. It was always known to be a scam, but still … it isn’t a hand-out.
SSA has always been a forced investment into the government and their bank (FED).
I don’t disagree with any of that, but I’m talking about the cost to the State. If the State is just paying back money that the people paid in, then the net cost would be zero, or negative if the State invested it properly. BUt that is not in fact the case- SSA pays out more than it takes in, that’s the whole reason there’s a problem. Or is that where the SSI component comes in?
My point was merely that SSI is a different program specifically to take care of the disadvantaged/poor/migrants/mice/whoever. SSA, whether wise or not, has always been merely an investment plan, not a give-to-the-poor plan.
The proposed idea, due to banking scam games, was that the government would invest SSA funds (behind the scenes) toward securing the future (often in terms of paying other countries, bring in migrants, paying off FED schemes, and so on). So the people paying into the SSA scheme were agreeing that their money would get returned to them with the bonus (“interest”) of it lasting for the rest of their lives even if they had not paid very much into it. The people were allowing the government to use their money (unsupervised) as long as the pay-back was a fixed rate guaranteed to them after they came to a specific age (used to be at 64. I think now at 62).
The people have been purchasing a type of retirement plan. The fact that the governors of the financial scheme have been extremely unworthy and in fact truly satanic, is another issue. By now their mismanagement of the funding scheme has led to a situation wherein they spent money that they already guaranteed to pay back to the people and now must pay those people anyway. So yes, now they are paying out more than they are bringing in because if they stop paying out on their promise, they lose all faith in all transactions and the dollar loses faith throughout the world (just as planned).
If your numbers are right (which they are not) that’s chump change. If the nation is in debt because of that, wowwee.
If companies paid their employees a living wage there wouldnt be some many people on food stamps. Of course humans have their priorities up their ass, society wastes time and energy on building fancy cars, condos and yachts rather than anything important. To them it’s more important to spend 200g on a automobile than eat a decent meal to rid their body of toxins.
Well if “we” in this case refers to society in America, then it’s false that we can’t afford to feed people. Because we have a class of billionaires who’ve leveraged everything under the sun to their favor as part of some sick game to see who can have the most shit. I suspect that it would be possible to attenuate a bit of that without harming anyone, while at the same time being able to see to it that everyone could eat. I’m not advocating for a welfare state, but if we are to have any regard for the welfare of our state, then we can’t ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to the accumulation and consolidation of wealth that’s the way things are here.
I mean if you want to say, “people being able to compete to see who can hoard the most resources is more important to me than making sure everyone has food and shelter”, then no problem. Who am I to tell you whether or not to be a humanitarian and care for your fellow people? It’s alright to have whatever opinion you want, but America isn’t broke and it’s not impossible for us to feed and take care of our poor.