>> ^Tofumar:
BansheeX said: "First of all, I can't believe someone just defended welfare and Social Security. Like, seriously, can't believe it. I just vomited in my own freaking lap."
If you "can't believe someone would defend" our social programs, then you should probably put down your copy of Atlas Shrugged and get out more. Most people across the American political spectrum support the continued funding of these programs in one form or another, to greater and lesser extents.
So, I guess that means you'll need to take some Pepto Bismol with you. You should also take along a copy of Baker and Weisbrot's "Social Security: The Phony Crisis," but you'll have to stop wretching long enough to read it.


Yeah, just reference a terrible book full of utopian expectations and a distorted view of our economic situation without addressing the numbers themselves, or any of the numerous logic and moral cruxes with the system itself, which I've explained to you in great detail above. That book hilariously assumed we have a trust fund. We don't. It wrongly assumes that our economy has been growing and will continue to grow, and that we can expect this growth to fund the system indefinitely. However, it hasn't grown. We've had a borrow and spend economy that is increasingly dependent on foreign creditors who are eventually going to pull the plug when they figure out that lending money to over-leveraged americans who won't be able to pay it back is a terrible investment. When the gold standard was abolished by Nixon in 1971, it gave the government the power to print money at will to fund whatever it wanted without having to follow a budget or propose tax increases in order to fund psychotic wars and deleterious socialist programs that the ignorant and manipulated populace is too dumb to oppose. People pay indirectly through inflation (an incremental misdirection that causes average folk to blame products themselves and not the fed) and eventually economic depression. The fed has been creating bubbles to avoid a recession for a long time and to create the illusion of steady economic growth. In reality, we've gone from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation, we've gone from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, we've gone from a trade surplus to a trade deficit, and when the US Dollar collapses, products that were once going to non-productive Americans with false prosperity based on debt will start going to the producers themselves, the Chinese of the world. But hey, as long as your pretty numbers are going up and your confidence in the system is retained by government and corporate propoganda, the unlimited credit card strategy of growth seems infinitely sustainable, right? Do yourself a favor and start listening to truly smart economists who aren't blinded by these things and whose predictions have actually come true.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rhJaVEWAG24
http://youtube.com/watch?v=emvMqjtcO7o
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ywLt1AebjMY

Greenspan converted the tech stock bubble losses into a bigger real estate bubble in the late 90s order to delay that recession (people WANT constant growth, so they elect people who stave off a recession without realizing that what they're doing is frosaking small immediate pain for larger future pain). The real estate bubble just started its collapse. The stimulus package is another political move in which the government is borrowing more money that ultimately does more harm than good Americans because it comes at the cost of more inflation and eroding international trust. It is attempting to solve over-spending with more over-spending.

The stock market "grows" nominally every year, but that's when it's priced in dollars and the value of the dollar is being debased with inflation which is also much higher than the fed is letting on with its fudged CPI measurements. So if you have 8% annual inflation and a 10% gain on the stock market, it's really only gained 2% legitimate growth over the year. If you price the stock markets in something which can't be debased, an asset like gold, the markets have been declining for the past decade. People need to wake up to this. This is how the system works, it's intentionally confusing so that the average person like yourself just thinks everything is okay.

@moonsammy

Social Security *is* mis-used and it *is* horrifically broken. It isn't, however, an unnecessary burden to this country - it does a lot of good and has allowed several people that I know personally to subsist without reverting to begging their community or family for money. Perhaps this makes me biased, but I don't care - I see a benefit to the social security program in this country, warts and all.

You're seeing someone in need of money to sustain themselves, but you're not questioning the government's role in how they became that way, which is key to understanding this issue. If these people you know personally to have benefited from SS were to have retained that income throughout their life instead of having it taxed away from them, they likely would have been far better off financially and not in the situation you now use to justify Social Security in the first place. With a little self-responsibility, they could have invested that money in a personal 401k and benefited the economy and themselves far greater than if it had been taxed away from them. The minute you begin to use the argument that some people are not responsible enough to do this for themselves and need the government to step in and force all of us to do something for the "greater good," that's the moment you've forsaken liberty and entrusted a greaseball politician with your future and your children's futures. I don't trust someone else with my money to keep their promises. I don't make much money and would love to opt out of social security and take charge of my own money and retirement. But you know what, moonsammy, the government won't let me. It assumes that we are all children in need of taken care of from cradle to grave, and that we cannot spend our own money as well as they can, that we cannot choose teachers for our children as wisely as they can, that we cannot protect our property as well as they can, and they're wrong. It's an appealing concept to people, to go through life with a guardian angel called the government, but our forefathers distrusted men and government immensely because of the tyranny they had just defeated. The constitution limits the power of government explicitly. Come election season, the false promise works to greater effect than the truth. Obama will be elected, but it won't stop the greater depression of 2010 and China's subsequent rise to superpower status. Start buying your gold.

Regarding your links: wow, you're surprised I didn't read a libertarian think tank's website about the current plight of a social programs? I try to get my information from non-partisan sources.

They do cite sources underneath, you know.

I'll admit to not being a professional economic or historic analyst, but I'm pretty sure that being poor during the depression sucked massively, and that a social safety net would have been *really* useful back then.

Except you don't realize what caused the depression. It was the same government interference you trust to solve the problem. I'll also say that no it wouldn't have helped. SS would have collapsed. It would have been an incredible tax burden to those who managed to retain work. And the 25% who had no work had no income from which pay the SS tax. So many retired people wouldn't have gotten their checks, and the government would have had to borrow or inflate the money supply, debasing the purchasing power of the dollar. And remember as well that SS is a forced dependency, so no one would have had the savings that they had actually accrued in absence of SS after the depression hit. It would have decimated everyone.

I guess the thing that bothers me the most when people go around posting things about Ron Paul being idealistic, as though trusting a bunch of corporate-bought slickos to follow their own rules or genuinely care as much about you and your family as you do to be any less idealistic. Government is a necessary evil to protect people's rights, but it has no business in many of the affairs it is assuming today. The constitution held up fairly well, but time and human stupidity just proved too much. When we went from "only Gold and Silver" to central bank IOUs with nary an uprising, that was the end. The USA was the last stand on Earth. God help us all.

@moonsammy:
Ron Paul has said he is not going to just abolish it, you can't do that because of those who are currently dependent on it. But he does want to phase it out. There is a lot of misunderstanding about Social Security. A lot is from an ignorant optimism in our current economic situation, and also from the well-intentioned but flawed socialist ideologies you espouse. Right away, I can see you failed to catch the point about what causes mass poverty in the first place. Your concern is wholly placed in addressing the problem, assuming, erroneously, that poverty is the product of greedy rich people who will stop at nothing to collude and hoard all the wealth in the world, and not the result of government intervention in the free market through the federal reserve's inflationary control over the money supply, high taxes to fund do-good big government agencies and programs like SS, and government intervention via managed trade agreements and acts like Sarbanes Oxley.

Most wealthy people spend or invest their money, either through employing people, philanthropy, or consumption. A yacht or a car are both products produced by workers either in this country or another. It is more likely to be from this country if inflation, taxes, and government regulations are low, because then there will be no incentive for the producer or consumer to go overseas. Much of the time rich people spend their wealth on employing people for their business, buying products themselves, and it generally fuels the production means of the consumption ends. So in the free market system, the money is transferred naturally through production and consumption, which is good for everybody. In the socialist system, someone who has worked hard to earn wealth is getting their wealth stolen from them by the federal government to be redistributed to someone poorer which you claim is more fair. Money that would have ultimately gone towards someone else's income/productive effort is simply taken and transferred. On the most extreme hypothetical scale, everyone's wealth is redistributed to equality, removing most incentive to work harder and get more than the person next to you. So greed and wanting more fuels production and consumption, which inadvertently has the effect of helping everyone far more than stealing and redistributing would have. Social security and the income tax are both in the same destructive boat, because they are taxes on production, not on consumption. That isn't to say the free market is capable of eliminating poverty completely, or addressing the needs of a small percentage which is incapable of working. But in that scenario, you have voluntary stuff easily footing the bill through local churches and non-profit organizations.

That's really the whole point of social security - it isn't to benefit the lazy and the worthless that are such a plague upon us upstanding citizens, but to preserve some degree of dignity and humanity amongst our fellow countrymen who have, totally or at least largely through no fault of their own (none of us are perfect), become unable to adequately maintain themselves.

This shows me how little you actually researched before responding. Social Security is payed and received by everyone. It's a "retirement" program. Even Donald Trump can get an SS check when he retires. Don't pass this guilt trip garbage on people, this is what gets them trusting in the government in the first place.

In terms of your suggested alternative to the social security system: I'd love to see that be practicable. Unfortunately it is almost certainly too utopian to have a real chance.

Oh, you mean like all those years before it was implemented?

Until all corruption, greed, and prejudice is eliminated from our society there will *always* be people who are unfairly screwed over in life.

And politicians are incapable of these things, so we should entrust them to legislate the market in our best interest? We should trust them to spend money more wisely than the people who worked for it? That's stupid, that's exactly how we got in this position. Big business in bed with big government, legislating under the do-good pretense of taking care of people. Of course there are always going to be people getting screwed. But far more people get screwed with your system, making free market capitalism the better tradeoff. It's the same short-sighted argument from gun control advocates. Since gun violence exists, we should work to ban guns. Yet when these bans are implemented gun violence actually increases. The criminals get them on the black market and don't think twice against citizens they know are defenseless. Meanwhile, the gun-law advocates finally figure it out: guns actually prevented far more crime than they caused through coercion, and that didn't show up in the statistics. They took a knee-jerk reaction to media stories covering gun crimes in schools, and the immediate emotional outcry overpowered actual reason.

Here, you claim that SS isn't in trouble financially or a tax burden on the economy. Just do some research:

http://www.socialsecurity.org/quickfacts/

http://www.socialsecurity.org/reformandyou/faqs.html

>> ^Tofumar:
What? Ron Paul is the most ideological of all the candidates. It's not "logical" to want to entirely defund Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, despite their widespread popularity. In other words, he's running on a promise to do these things--and many more which are just as silly and destructive--in spite of the "true opposition to his policy."
So, explain to me how it is that everyone else just has their political blinders on, but RP is really the only "logical" one. Because, frankly, you seem to have it exactly backwards. I mean, even the Republicans, with their dastardly foreign policy and love of corporate welfare wouldn't think of proposing the elimination of Social Security. Do you know why? Because it's a good program with good effects that is very popular across ideological lines.


First of all, I can't believe someone just defended welfare and Social Security. Like, seriously, can't believe it. I just vomited in my own freaking lap.

Here we have a system of retirement whereby money is forcibly being taken out of your paycheck and promised to be given back to you in regular installments after you retire. The problems are numerous. In the event of a generational population bubble, the system will have to pay out more than it’s taking in, resulting in all-out collapse or all-out inflation. Most people paying into the system today will not receive their promised money when it is time to retire. It has zero potential for investment growth, and due to inflation, the money you get later has considerably less puchasing power than it did when it was appropriated from you. The congress can and does raid the fund to pay for other things. It also feels like a tax if you’re poor and would rather spend the money on a better life. And last of all, if you die before retirement, the money can be transferred only to your spouse and no further. It is truly an illogical system and one that is difficult to abolish because of the massive dependencies it creates. So what is the alternative? What is it that Ron Paul advocates? It’s simple: people keep the fruits of their own labor and take responsibility to invest or do with their compensation of labor as they see fit. Of course, the liberals then come out with "but what about all the poor?" not realizing that it is inflationary Keynsian fiat economics, overregulation of the free market, socialist welfare programs, and high taxes to fund wasteful government that work in tandum to create the problem of poverty in the first place.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0501a.asp

Historical context of Social Security: passed in FDR's socialist New Deal programs. FDR and Hoover, of course, are widely criticized for turning what should have only been a recession into a depression. FDR also used an executive order to make ownership of gold illegal, a psychotic tyrannical order that was unconstitutional on two counts. The government was embarrassed and instead of blaming itself, blamed American citizens for "hoarding" and trying to protect their wealth with a non-inflationary asset. FDR is also the guy who refused to warn ships in Pearl Harbor of an impending Japanese attack so that he could use their deaths as a political device to rally Americans to go to war.