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you don't have to pay SS if you never join it.

Citation? I really do not believe that is the case. You can't file taxes without an SSN or ITIN, and the IRS won't issue an ITIN unless you do not qualify for an SSN. You also cannot renounce your SSN once it is assigned. Even if you have an ITIN (which is primary for illegal workers), you aren't exempt from paying the taxes.

"In short, the payroll tax is mandatory on every worker, regardless of whether he or she has a Social Security number." -- Cato Institute (full disclosure: the link lists a short list of exempted workers, mostly government or people making far less than an amount that could be used to survive)

As far as I can tell, the only way to mount a Constitutional challenge to the SSN requirement would be to mount a multigenerational strategem: conceive a US citizen child, resist years of incredible pressure from all of our entrenched institutions (government, public school, social "programs", etc), never claim the child on your tax return, and then convince the child to sue the government when their first prospective employer will not let them work because the child refuses to obtain/supply an SSN. The endgame could also come when attempting to file income taxes, but filing taxes is normally concomitant to employment.

I am morally opposed to Social Security from a libertarian standpoint, but they closed the religious opposition loophole by requiring that any religious order claiming SS exemption must have been formed prior to 1951. Perversely, they still claim that Social Security is "optional". It is optional in the sense that it is optional to receive benefits (one must apply).

For me, retirement is still decades away, and I recognize that I may revise my perspective later; however, I am planning to protest Social Security by never applying for benefits. Money isn't everything, and my principles matter more to me.

For example, I have refused to participate in any 401(k) or traditional IRA because of the RMD provisions. I am saving for retirement in a taxable account, merely because I vociferously disagree with the RMD actuarial death table provisions. It is a perfect example that government-provided monetary "considerations" almost always come with strings attached. The fact that I will have less saved for retirement means less than the princple of the matter.

In summary, as an SSN-branded indvidual my options are negligible. My only recourse is to protest the system by refusing to participate in the "benefits" the government tries to give me (deductions, credits, incentives, OASDI payouts, etc). They can force me to give them money, but they can't force me to take what they offer. It is small consolation, but that is all I have. I will not be beholden to the government.

Natrually, I fully expect that most people will not share my perspective and will think I am exceedingly foolish. Such is life.

An aside: it took me nearly a year to find health insurance that did not require an SSN to be provided... it also costs much more than I would pay with a typical plan. This is just another example of how hard it is to function in the US outside of the "system".

Also, I learned a LONG time ago working on some very HUGE databases...you can not depend on SS as a primary key

Absolutely. This is why one should always use semantically void primary keys. Haha, it's the only way to fly.

What if record keeping was good enough (nevermind the privacy issues etc) that your taxes, no matter how complex, could be computed for you without any effort of your own?

Would you be happy or ...perhaps just a nice sheep in the flock getting fleeced on a yearly basis?

**start vignette**

You (looking like a sheep): "Baa. Baa."

Uncle Sam: "This won't hurt a bit, we need just a little bit more to fund Senator [enter favorite name here]'s pet project."

You (looking less like a sheep not much coat left): "Baa. Baa."

Uncle Sam: "Oh it turns out that prescription drug for the older sheep is going cost a bit more." Buzzing sound heard in the background.

You (looking a bit naked): "Baa. Baa."

Uncle Sam: "Remember that Social Security thing? Well it turns out you sheep haven't been getting it on enough and the older sheep just keep getting older and older. So just a bit more if you don't mind."

**end start vignette**

Losing the ability to see how much the government is taking of your hard earned money is NOT a good thing, because if they could they would take more and more... they would.

Everytime I have to read the instructions for any section, I get so mad. I often scratch my head and re-read things multiple times because it is far too complicated. To see all the rules that they make up to give each little interest group their piece of the pie is amazing. Can you imagine trying to do your taxes by hand? omg, shoot me.

Getting mad at tax time is important!

I could go on for a while... but I'll spare people who have read this far more diarrhea of the mouth.

I think you get the picture.

hmm? what is it going to be? You want to be a sheep?

"Baa. Baa."

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/52.html
http://www.taxfoundation.org/
http://www.socialsecurity.org/
http://www.atr.org/

First off, a little hisotry. SS was called SS and not a pention due to the bad blood towards pensions in the 30's

Social Security gives a crapy ROI (Return on Investment) It gives 2% after inflation has been taken into account http://www.socialsecurity.org/reformandyou/faqs.ht ml#2
someput it at worse. Here's an SS calculator:http://www.heritage.org/research/featur es/socialsecurity/
I could get a better ROI at a bank using FDIC CDs than using SS.

To those that still don't want SS to be privatized (or eliminitated), let me ask for this compromise. Allow for me (make it optional, not mandatory) to invest half of what I pay to SS in any way I choose. I would still be paying into SS, but I would still have some control over the other half. If you want, you can stil put it all into SS, but don't require it.

I have yet to see a private charity that disburses 99.2 percent of what it brings in.

That is not quite an accurate assessment. See Robert Genetski's essay to understand why. Summary: the SSA is actually extremely efficient at disbursing benefits, but some expenses are outsourced and are not accurately reflected in the efficiency figures you see generally bandied about. When accounting for all costs like the very low returns, the overall program's efficiency fares very poorly.

And if private charities are so hot, why did we need SS in the first place?

Statements like this without discussing the context of the Great Depression carry no weight. While it is impressive to say for example, 4 hospitals in New York reported 95 deaths from starvation, mortality surveys result in summaries that say "There was no sharp rise in deaths from starvation and disease. On the contrary, the world death-rate declined in the 1930's, and life expectancy continued to rise." As for people freezing to death, in the late 20th century in America, the CDC reported an annualized rate of 1,552 deaths from hypothermia over a 9 year period. As late as 2003, we simply expect about 600 deaths from hypothermia per year. If you want to refute the League of Nations' morbidity tables that show no statistically significant increase in malnutrition and hypothermia related deaths, then please share the source material you reference for your claim whose sum total of these deaths exceeds the per capita rate in the ten year periods immediately before and after the Great Depression.

While the nation suffered hardships, and there undoubtedly were some people who passed away because the economic impact mortally affected their nutrition or sources of heat, it was not noticeably more than any other period, and the records say it was actually less.

If the rationale for establishing Social Security was because people were starving to death and freezing to death, then we did not "need" Social Security then, and we don't need it now. It was a political football from its genesis to its current form today. You can cry all you want about "heartless extreme right wingers", but the simple fact of the matter is that as a nation, we simply lack the out of pocket funds to pay for its future liabilities as currently constituted. Billions of Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Europeans via their central banks are floating the entire American financial house of cards, which is the only reason Social Security even stands today. Dude, you have not seen heartless yet. The day Mr. Market comes to collect rent, interest, and back penalties, you'll see heartless that will take the breath away of even the spawn of Sauron and Darth Vader.

The choice is as stark as it is simple. Either let social welfare programs' fiscal demands continue to erode the nation's financial standing, and one day figure out how to deal with the aftermath of a collapse worse on senior citizens than the Soviet Union's. Or figure out today how to restructure the nation's finances to a sustainable footing while we still have the thin resources to even contemplate doing so.

Changing the indexing of increases in benefits is good. The problem is using wage or price inflation to adjust. Not surprisingly, the system was changed to wage inflation in an era of large price inflation. Now, with booming productivity and the subsequent large rate of wage increases, this seems like a bad idea. If you think that this is unfair to change the rate of increase, please explain to me why I deserve 50% more in benefits, in real terms, than today's retirees? Read more about it here.

Another idea is private accounts, which make a great deal of sense in terms of rate-of-return(ROR) on investments. For someone like me (age 23), this could be a difference of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Read more about it here.

Finally, lefties should be interested in transitioning to a private system, because any temporary shortfalls will be funded by general revenues. Most people know that income taxes are progressive, but not so many know that payroll taxes are basically regressive or flat.

Read more about this here, here and here.

This thread is a bit silly in putting "crisis" in quotes. I doubt that the current system would be one devised by the right or the left if done from scratch todat. If it can be improved with changes, why not do it? Is the status quo ROR of 1% so precious?

Actually, it was the Clinton adminstration that first suggested investing part of the Social Security Trust Fund into the stock market; he just wanted the investments to be controlled by the SSA. What Bush is suggesting is giving investment control to the workers themselves, but limiting them to three broad, index-based funds. This plan is nearly identical to the Federal Savings Program that government workers participate in. Furthermore, if people could have invested in a broad stock market index for 30 years, they *still* would have been better off with the "post-bubble-burst" investments than with Social Security. Check out this chart tracking the price of a S&P 500 tracking stock. It only shows 10 years, which hides a lot of S&P growth, but between 1994 and 2003 (the most recent bottom of the S&P), the price went from 45 to 75 (about a 5.25% compound annual growth rate). If you havn't paniced and stayed in the market you see that it's now at 105 (over 8.8% CAGR). **That** is why personal investment accounts is better than Social Security.

Also check out the other briefing papers which show that personal investment accounts are also better for poor people, minorities, and women than Social Security.

Actually, it was the Clinton adminstration that first suggested investing part of the Social Security Trust Fund into the stock market; he just wanted the investments to be controlled by the SSA. What Bush is suggesting is giving investment control to the workers themselves, but limiting them to three broad, index-based funds. This plan is nearly identical to the Federal Savings Program that government workers participate in. Furthermore, if people could have invested in a broad stock market index for 30 years, they *still* would have been better off with the "post-bubble-burst" investments than with Social Security. Check out this chart tracking the price of a S&P 500 tracking stock. It only shows 10 years, which hides a lot of S&P growth, but between 1994 and 2003 (the most recent bottom of the S&P), the price went from 45 to 75 (about a 5.25% compound annual growth rate). If you havn't paniced and stayed in the market you see that it's now at 105 (over 8.8% CAGR). **That** is why personal investment accounts is better than Social Security.

Also check out the other briefing papers which show that personal investment accounts are also better for poor people, minorities, and women than Social Security.

Actually, it was the Clinton adminstration that first suggested investing part of the Social Security Trust Fund into the stock market; he just wanted the investments to be controlled by the SSA. What Bush is suggesting is giving investment control to the workers themselves, but limiting them to three broad, index-based funds. This plan is nearly identical to the Federal Savings Program that government workers participate in. Furthermore, if people could have invested in a broad stock market index for 30 years, they *still* would have been better off with the "post-bubble-burst" investments than with Social Security. Check out this chart tracking the price of a S&P 500 tracking stock. It only shows 10 years, which hides a lot of S&P growth, but between 1994 and 2003 (the most recent bottom of the S&P), the price went from 45 to 75 (about a 5.25% compound annual growth rate). If you havn't paniced and stayed in the market you see that it's now at 105 (over 8.8% CAGR). **That** is why personal investment accounts is better than Social Security.

Also check out the other briefing papers which show that personal investment accounts are also better for poor people, minorities, and women than Social Security.

The meme that Social Security can be described as a Ponzi scheme appears to originate from an article written by P.J. O'Rourke for Rolling Stone in 1999, when congress was passing an act to preserve Social Security. You can read it here.

Four years later, it's still the best article I've ever read on the topic.

This has only worked because there have been more young working people than old people. The problem that is coming is that all of the babyboomers are going to be reaching retirement age soon and with the expected life expectancy going higher and higher there will not be enough young working people to support them all.

Right, please check out Social Security Privatization. Of course, you don't want to be in stocks for the 10-15 years before you retire!

cause here in Europe (at least in my country, which is Sweden), you don't have to pay for education. You pay for books (or lend them frome someone), and you pay for your apt and food, but not for your education as such.

No such thing as a "free education", or free healthcare for that matter. It's all paid for through taxation. Which simply means that those who don't study have no option but to subsidize those who do.

It's all about control. Will the Swedish government (taxpayer) pay for your education at a university that isn't an "approved" part of their system? Of course not... but your 4 years of tuition fees in the US will get you the best education money can buy, anywhere in the world.

When you graduate, you pay the taxes, and you lose control over your future. I mean that quite literally, for example the state-run pension systems throughout Europe are heading for bankruptcy.

European governments are living on borrowed time, just as the dotcom firms were during the bubble, spending money freely without thinking of the future. I will make very sure to move my assets out of Europe and into a "free" (as in speech, not as in beer) economy before the EU governments realise that their vote-winning health, education and pension schemes, or should I say scams, are actually built on sand.

At that time, the American system of "pay for what you actually use" will be proved to be the only sustainable model.

I mean, really, FDR promised us that Social Security #'s would never mutate into national ID cards...

That's what we get for giving Big Brother a new toy.

And to top it off, SocSec is a pyramid scheme.

Even if this is true, so what? I couldn't care less about the number of people employed by the government. What I care about is how much of my money they spend. As I said previously spending is at the highest percentage of GDP since World War II and Gore's proposals would substantially increase it.

Bush wants to cut taxes big time for the richest people, he's explicitly admitted that.

Correct in a very narrow sense. You left out that he also wants to cut taxes for the poor and the middle class. He wants to cut taxes for everyone, without requiring them to jump through bureaucratic hoops to prove that they "need" to keep more of their own money. Gore's repeated statements that half of the benefit goes to the richest 1% is a flat-out lie. In fact, Bush's tax cuts actually make the tax structure more progressive, since the rich get a lesser percentage cut than the poor. Of course, from the liberal perspective the possibility that any rich person might in any way benefit automatically renders the plan unacceptable, regardless of its other merits.

And I can't believe anyone seriously would be willing to try the Social-Security-in-the-stock-market scheme.

I can't believe anyone wouldn't. Over the long term, stocks have consistently outperformed other investments. But if you're paranoid about stocks, there's always CDs, bonds, or money market funds, any of which would produce far greater benefits than Social Security promises and would not require huge taxes on future generations. (See Cato's Social Security Calculator to estimate how much you could make with privatization, or more directly, how much you are losing with the current system.) And you're conveniently forgetting that Bush's plan is voluntary; you would be free to continue to throw your money at Washington and hope they hand you some of it back, while I would be free to accumulate real assets instead of unenforceable promises from the government.

Asked about the President's plan to put approximately one-quarter of Social Security funds into the stock market, Greenspan said, "Let me just say it's not so much a trade-off of benefits versus costs. I'm frankly just hard-pressed to find any benefits there are in doing it."

Bzzt! Thanks you for playing. Greenspan was referring to Clinton's "scheme" to have the government directly invest Social Security money in the stock market. That was a horrible idea for too many reasons to count and it died a quick and well deserved death. For Greenspan's comments on real privatization, see http://www.senate.gov/~gramm/policy/grnspan.html, in which he is supportive of transitioning Social Security to a market based system.

Rather than give some unknowledgable bureaucrat the authority to say who can and cant use what ad system and when, why don't you organize a boycot of websites that use doubleclick. The liberal media would love to cover it. You will either see a competitor to doubleclick with a privacy agreement rise up, or websites will yank 3rd party ads off of their website. Most webmasters would prefer to see them go anyway.

Just because something is 'bad' (drugs, medical bills, salary, investments), it is not going to get better with government regulation. The internet is where it is because the government stayed away from it for quote some time. Good!

And remember... faceless corporations are an easy target for FUD because they seem inhuman or uncaring. But behind that faceless corporation are thousands of employees and investors... people with families, people who hire others, VC firms that feed other businesses, a replenishing fountain for the economy. In this case, our 'faceless' corporation supports hundreds of thousands of websites, which in turn are our new foundation of free speech and communication.

Don't create a 'golem' by unleashing an Imperial Federal Government with the power to control what DBA's can or can't store. You will never get the monster to go back to where it came. Vote Libertarian.

The Second Amendment is our *last* option and should not be taken lightly. What is needed is focus on individuality and self reliance instead of "What can the government give me?" mentality that has become so prevelent in today's society. One of the things I do like about Bush is his first step on privatation of Social Security with a whimpy 2% going into individual choice investments. That may not seem alot, but to the younger /. readers, that could means a lump some of cash at retirement yielding in the upper six digits besides SS payments. If you really want to see something that scares the beejeebers out of a socialist, check out Private Social Security Calculator.

Browne has everything to do with freedom. Browne wants to get the government out of your life, in all aspects. He is completely right-wing. He is the most right-wing candidate out there. His stance on drugs is right-wing: "Get the government out of it. Quit spending your tax dollars fighting a war that puts hundreds of thousands of nonviolent people in jail." His stance on abortion is right-wing: "The government has no place to make these decisions - get it out of the way." Should the government fund hospitals and clinics? No! Let private industry compete to offer you the best hospital or clinic. Let you choose which one to go to.

He is also planning on cutting social security calling it a big mess when in reality the administration costs of running it are a fraction of private insurance companies pay. Social Security also pays out worker's comp and disibility. Where will these people go?

Social Security is a big mess. Why don't you read this study (take time to read the whole thing) and think about what it would mean for you to take all your social security taxes and invest them yourself, and make, say, 18% returns on your investment. Then, if you die at 66, guess what? Your family can inherit your savings. Under Social Security, you can work all your life, "saving" hundreds of thousands of dollars with the government, die at 66, and your wife and kids not see a penny. That's a bad investment, my friend. Read that link above. You'll be surprised at the numbers.

Furthermore, Browne is not going to dump people out on the street. If you're dependant on Social Security, you'll continue to get it until you die. Browne is not going to crap on these people - he's got a plan to take care of them.

Browne is great if you're already wealthy or on your way there and aren't living on the wrong side of the tracks or on hard times and simply don't care about the working poor. Its like Forbes and his flat tax, a scam to keep rich people from paying taxes.

Browne is great if you believe you can manage your life better than the government. If you prefer the government to be your nanny, protecting you from bad decisions and responsibility, vote for anyone else.

Browne is about people having freedom and taking responsibility for thier actions. And, by the way, if you read that article I linked to above, cutting things like Social Security will help the poor get richer.

Why don't you go read through Harry Browne's website. Read up on his ideas and his plans for implementing them before you spout off about things you aren't sure about.

wish
Vote for freedom!
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