There is so much erroneous crap around the Social Security trust fund.
First, the trust fund really got it's start after the Greenspan Commission finished in 1983. Before that, Social Security basically did not have a trust fund. It was more-or-less spending everything that came in, as designed.
This broke down when GenX was much smaller than the Baby Boomers. There would not be enough money coming in from GenX and what would be called the Millennials to pay for the Boomer's retirement.
The Greenspan Commission's solution was to increase Social Security taxes so that Boomers and GenX built up a large trust fund which would pay for the Boomer's retirement.
The trust fund was never intended to be permanent. It was always supposed to be spent by the time the Boomers die. We're on-track for that, and the fact that the trust fund will be depleted around the time that the Boomers have died off means everything is working to plan.
The trust fund has always been invested in special US Government bonds. There were not new, special bonds created later by some president you hate to "loot" the trust fund. There was never any cash to loot.
The government can not default on only these bonds. If the government defaulted on these bonds, that would make all US government bonds be considered worthless. Because if you break a promise to one bondholder, no other bondholder can trust you to keep your promise to them. Even if Mitch McConnell pinky-swears.
The money is not "gone". It was never a big bank vault full of cash. It has always been invested into special US government bonds.
The debt does not "come due" at some specific point in the future where it all suddenly has to be paid back. Each bond has their own maturity date, and a constant stream of bonds are "coming due" at any particular time.
It was never "your money". Social Security is not a savings plan. You don't have a pile of cash with your name on it. The money you paid went into the pool that paid current retirees (or the trust fund to pay current retirees later). When you retire, people younger than you will be paying you. This is a good thing for the majority of people, because you will be paid significantly more than you paid in, including interest on that money.
No, you can not accomplish the same thing with a 401k with "safe" investments. It will not make enough money, because the return on safe investments is terrible.
We now return to your regularly scheduled lying about Social Security so that you blindly follow attempts to end it.
Adapting (insulation, etc) a large share of buildings looks easier (to me) than, say, replace all gas vehicules by electric ones, or reduce people moves drastically, or cover landscape with wind turbines & solar panels, or
You need to design the building from the ground up to be more energy efficient in order to get the kind of savings you are looking for.
For example, the m^2 of the South-facing windows is relevant...and you want more in winter and less in summer. To do this, you need to design the building and/or landscaping to deliver it.
So no, this is not a "just add a bit more fiberglass" situation. The savings you want only comes from rebuilding every structure.....or changing every heating system to use electricity that you then generate without making CO2 and hey we're back to solar and wind power again.
So is everyone just ignoring the riots from the last set of regulations that is crippling the poorer people of France?
Yes. Because they're French. They riot about everything. "It's Tuesday and my baguette was too soft!!! To the barricades!!"
Usually it's some small portion of the population who are greatly affected, and the majority either ignores them or gives them a small concession.
And did I really see someone post about democracy when these regulations were forced down the throats of French citizens?
So it turns out "democracy" does not mean "do what every single individual wants". Because people disagree on what to do. So they create governments to debate these disagreements and then chose a course of action.
So...you define "easy" as "rebuild most structures in the country to be more efficient". You don't get big savings without energy efficiency designed into the architecture.
Largely because "MODERN" nuclear plants keep not living up to the hype when they actually are built.
For example, pebble beds were supposed to be a wonderful panacea.....and then they were built. And the pebbles jammed. The graphite wore off the pebbles much faster than expected. The graphite dust caused problems. Heavy metals appeared in the coolant loop, and nobody could figure out where they came from (other than they must have come from the fuel).
Also, breeder reactors = nuclear weapons factories. Sure, you can say "but we won't run them like that!", but they can be run like that. So there's some proliferation and treaty obligations that enter into the mix with those designs.
Household expenses don't scale linearly. This is why "households" are a thing: it's advantageous for a family to pool its resources.
Which is why it was a bad idea for you to try to cut the median household in half.
E.g., it's easy to dismiss "status symbols" as unneeded, but that can be a big deal for your kid in high school.
Status symbols are easy and relatively cheap to get. There's someone selling a used or knock-off version of everything.
But at $30k for adult + child, we're not at the "status symbols" level. We're at the "needs food and clothes" level. Where an extravagance is having a car that can actually get you to work reliably.
What supports were still in place after Obama left office? Which act of Congress or the Trump administration removed them?
Ironically Trump's tariffs are probably the only thing that can save GM
According to GM, Trump's tariffs have cost them $1 billion.
Now if Trump really turned up the dial to the point where you CAN'T build a car anyone can afford to buy unless its all domestic sourced
BMWs and Toyotas are built in South Carolina. Almost every "foreign" car in the US market is built in the US or Mexico. By corporations that are based in the US (ie. Toyota of America is a US corporation, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota). Tariffs won't apply.
But the retaliatory tariffs do apply when GM tries to export to China, which was a good chunk of GM's business. Which is also why GM just announced they are closing US plants and expanding factories in Mexico.
Illegal immigrants are, by definition criminals, and can easily be coerced into worse crimes
[Citation Required]
Mostly because the rate at which all immigrants commit crime, legal immigrant or not, is lower than the native population. If they could be so easily coerced, that couldn't be true.
assuming they are not already stealing identities and other crimes which may be necessary to support their illegal presence in this country.
It's generally not required. Employers will happily pay in cash. Saves on payroll taxes. 'Cause we don't dare prosecute employers for tax evasion.
but illegal immigration is bad for both the person and the country
[Citation Required]
The US has been using undocumented farm labor for about a century. Including the times most MAGA folks consider our "golden age". The Bracero program was an attempt to reform this, but it didn't play very well politically.
We're pretending this is a new and troubling problem because one party sees political gain in fear-mongering on the subject, and another party sees political gain in supporting undocumented workers.
The fact is we need a large pool of migrant workers for unskilled farm labor. Because we need a large workforce for a relatively short window of time in a particular area, which gradually moves North with the various harvests. So you can't be one of these workers and just live in your particular location, you have to migrate....or starve. And it works pretty well when the workers can go back to their home country for the winter, since it's a cheaper place to live.
Farmers will not pay enough for native USA'ians to be those migrant workers. Poor people currently from Central America will do the work for the wages the farmers will pay, so that's what happens. Other times it was workers from other countries. And we refuse to prosecute these farmers for employing undocumented workers, largely because it would mean prosecuting virtually all of them.
So, we play games about "cracking down" on immigrants to show just how tough we are, while ignoring all the people currently working the fields or the guy paying those workers.
And then you go vote, based on this game, feeling good about how tough we're being. Those children definitely needed to be in cages, and ooh! Apples are on sale!
because older people want to have someone to take care of them
Grandma and grandpa are also going to reach a point where they can no longer care for themselves, even with a massive retirement savings. Or no savings, for that matter.
It's not a matter of want. It's a matter of physically being unable to do it. Unless you want to start embedding crystals in everyone's palm, we're going to need younger generations to care for the older.
Let's say you continue through your life and you have a wife and children. And then you find out your child has cancer. There goes that retirement savings. Because it turns out private health insurance isn't actually all that great when very expensive diseases pop up. There's lots of ways to forbid someone from renewing their policy.
Almost everyone's life will have some major "shit happens" moment that severely derails their financial life. If you're lucky, this moment will happen when you're young enough to recover. Most people get severe illnesses after they're older, so most people do not have this luck.
I also started in 2010 with a salary around 40K a year
Congratulations, you started on 2nd base. Lots of people do not make 1) a salary, or 2) wages that equal $40k. They also have far higher expenses than a young single person in what appears to be a relatively low-to-moderate cost-of-living area.
Everyone is completely bereft of personal responsibility? In the richest country in the history of the world, people can not be held responsible for their own future?
You know what? Shit happens. I'm glad you've managed to be lucky so far. Not everyone has. And hopefully, it won't take your own bad luck for you to realize this.
A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
People do not retire from a first-world country to an impoverished third-world country. So this comment is particularly stupid.
History has clearly shown they will badly mishandle any money that are given.
Let's compare track records: Social Security Trust fund - still exists. Still profitable. Sure, there's conspiracy theorists claiming it's all gone or stupidly thinking the general fund's debt is relevant to the trust fund. And yes, it's going to be exhausted after the Boomers, but that was the plan all along. It was only created to shore up the Boomer's retirement because GenX was too small. GenX will probably be fine, as long as the generation after the Millennials don't do another baby-bust. So far, so good on that front.
401k's, banks, etc: So, remember 2008? When we had to save all of private savings from oblivion via bailing out the banking industry? Oh, you were planning to invest in Real Estate? So, remember 2007?....
History does not back up your claims about the proficiency of private investment versus public investment.
It's interesting you weren't at all interested in any stats to prove A. Or any evidence that GDP per capita is a relevant metric, and unable to be changed over the ~30 years from "today" to "deathbed".
So, your dismissive attitude will only allow the problem to get worse, and you will be impacted by the consequences, one way or another.
Yes, but when that poster ends up in the same place, his attitude will change. He will say, "Those other people were awful, but my situation is different because reasons."
I don't know how significant it was, but I voted for Clinton instead of Sanders entirely because the Republicans picked Trump and I knew the long term damage he would do and I didn't think Sanders had a chance.
Unfortunately, polling at the time showed Sanders beating Trump by a much larger margin. So next time you want to choose based on who can win the general, please pay more attention to polling and less to pundits.
This is what happens when you put the bean counters in charge. A car manufacturer needs to have "car guys" in charge that have a passion for making cool cars.
Maybe, maybe not.
For example, Volt vs Bolt. GM's car guys expected the Volt to be the popular one, because of "range anxiety". The car guys couldn't imagine people being happy with a car you had to "refuel" for hours. You can't drive it on a road trip!!
The opposite happened: The Bolt was more popular than the Volt. Not that many consumers actually go on road trips, and 200mi is plenty to handle the driving they do in one day. And a large number of the consumers that actually do go on road trips have a 2nd car in their household.
So car guys do miss sometimes. Though beancounters miss far more often.
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton had one _projected_ balanced budget (if you included SS accounting tricks), but it never happened.
Nope
But please, keep lying. I'm sure someone will not bother doing a simple google search and believe you.
There is so much erroneous crap around the Social Security trust fund.
First, the trust fund really got it's start after the Greenspan Commission finished in 1983. Before that, Social Security basically did not have a trust fund. It was more-or-less spending everything that came in, as designed.
This broke down when GenX was much smaller than the Baby Boomers. There would not be enough money coming in from GenX and what would be called the Millennials to pay for the Boomer's retirement.
The Greenspan Commission's solution was to increase Social Security taxes so that Boomers and GenX built up a large trust fund which would pay for the Boomer's retirement.
The trust fund was never intended to be permanent. It was always supposed to be spent by the time the Boomers die. We're on-track for that, and the fact that the trust fund will be depleted around the time that the Boomers have died off means everything is working to plan.
The trust fund has always been invested in special US Government bonds. There were not new, special bonds created later by some president you hate to "loot" the trust fund. There was never any cash to loot.
The government can not default on only these bonds. If the government defaulted on these bonds, that would make all US government bonds be considered worthless. Because if you break a promise to one bondholder, no other bondholder can trust you to keep your promise to them. Even if Mitch McConnell pinky-swears.
The money is not "gone". It was never a big bank vault full of cash. It has always been invested into special US government bonds.
The debt does not "come due" at some specific point in the future where it all suddenly has to be paid back. Each bond has their own maturity date, and a constant stream of bonds are "coming due" at any particular time.
It was never "your money". Social Security is not a savings plan. You don't have a pile of cash with your name on it. The money you paid went into the pool that paid current retirees (or the trust fund to pay current retirees later). When you retire, people younger than you will be paying you. This is a good thing for the majority of people, because you will be paid significantly more than you paid in, including interest on that money.
No, you can not accomplish the same thing with a 401k with "safe" investments. It will not make enough money, because the return on safe investments is terrible.
We now return to your regularly scheduled lying about Social Security so that you blindly follow attempts to end it.
Part of that may be taxes.
You can sell a car to pay the taxes on the other prizes you won. It's pretty hard to sell a vacation.
Adapting (insulation, etc) a large share of buildings looks easier (to me) than, say, replace all gas vehicules by electric ones, or reduce people moves drastically, or cover landscape with wind turbines & solar panels, or
You need to design the building from the ground up to be more energy efficient in order to get the kind of savings you are looking for.
For example, the m^2 of the South-facing windows is relevant...and you want more in winter and less in summer. To do this, you need to design the building and/or landscaping to deliver it.
So no, this is not a "just add a bit more fiberglass" situation. The savings you want only comes from rebuilding every structure.....or changing every heating system to use electricity that you then generate without making CO2 and hey we're back to solar and wind power again.
So is everyone just ignoring the riots from the last set of regulations that is crippling the poorer people of France?
Yes. Because they're French. They riot about everything. "It's Tuesday and my baguette was too soft!!! To the barricades!!"
Usually it's some small portion of the population who are greatly affected, and the majority either ignores them or gives them a small concession.
And did I really see someone post about democracy when these regulations were forced down the throats of French citizens?
So it turns out "democracy" does not mean "do what every single individual wants". Because people disagree on what to do. So they create governments to debate these disagreements and then chose a course of action.
So...you define "easy" as "rebuild most structures in the country to be more efficient". You don't get big savings without energy efficiency designed into the architecture.
I'd hate to see what you think of as "hard".
Largely because "MODERN" nuclear plants keep not living up to the hype when they actually are built.
For example, pebble beds were supposed to be a wonderful panacea.....and then they were built. And the pebbles jammed. The graphite wore off the pebbles much faster than expected. The graphite dust caused problems. Heavy metals appeared in the coolant loop, and nobody could figure out where they came from (other than they must have come from the fuel).
Also, breeder reactors = nuclear weapons factories. Sure, you can say "but we won't run them like that!", but they can be run like that. So there's some proliferation and treaty obligations that enter into the mix with those designs.
Household expenses don't scale linearly. This is why "households" are a thing: it's advantageous for a family to pool its resources.
Which is why it was a bad idea for you to try to cut the median household in half.
E.g., it's easy to dismiss "status symbols" as unneeded, but that can be a big deal for your kid in high school.
Status symbols are easy and relatively cheap to get. There's someone selling a used or knock-off version of everything.
But at $30k for adult + child, we're not at the "status symbols" level. We're at the "needs food and clothes" level. Where an extravagance is having a car that can actually get you to work reliably.
If you have no kids. If we're going to divide the median household in half, you have one kid.
Median household income is just under $60k. You can save a lot on that.
If you're single.
Median household is not single, and has two kids.
Actually, no. The two electric motors and gas motor are connected to the transmission with a planetary gear system. So the power sources are parallel.
Those supports are being taken away now
What supports were still in place after Obama left office? Which act of Congress or the Trump administration removed them?
Ironically Trump's tariffs are probably the only thing that can save GM
According to GM, Trump's tariffs have cost them $1 billion.
Now if Trump really turned up the dial to the point where you CAN'T build a car anyone can afford to buy unless its all domestic sourced
BMWs and Toyotas are built in South Carolina. Almost every "foreign" car in the US market is built in the US or Mexico. By corporations that are based in the US (ie. Toyota of America is a US corporation, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota). Tariffs won't apply.
But the retaliatory tariffs do apply when GM tries to export to China, which was a good chunk of GM's business. Which is also why GM just announced they are closing US plants and expanding factories in Mexico.
No private company has the discipline to put the needs of long-term employees first for the decades necessary to operate a pension plan.
They did for a very long time.
Then we got to the 1980s, and "greed is good" became the only motto.
Illegal immigrants are, by definition criminals, and can easily be coerced into worse crimes
[Citation Required]
Mostly because the rate at which all immigrants commit crime, legal immigrant or not, is lower than the native population. If they could be so easily coerced, that couldn't be true.
assuming they are not already stealing identities and other crimes which may be necessary to support their illegal presence in this country.
It's generally not required. Employers will happily pay in cash. Saves on payroll taxes. 'Cause we don't dare prosecute employers for tax evasion.
but illegal immigration is bad for both the person and the country
[Citation Required]
The US has been using undocumented farm labor for about a century. Including the times most MAGA folks consider our "golden age". The Bracero program was an attempt to reform this, but it didn't play very well politically.
We're pretending this is a new and troubling problem because one party sees political gain in fear-mongering on the subject, and another party sees political gain in supporting undocumented workers.
The fact is we need a large pool of migrant workers for unskilled farm labor. Because we need a large workforce for a relatively short window of time in a particular area, which gradually moves North with the various harvests. So you can't be one of these workers and just live in your particular location, you have to migrate....or starve. And it works pretty well when the workers can go back to their home country for the winter, since it's a cheaper place to live.
Farmers will not pay enough for native USA'ians to be those migrant workers. Poor people currently from Central America will do the work for the wages the farmers will pay, so that's what happens. Other times it was workers from other countries. And we refuse to prosecute these farmers for employing undocumented workers, largely because it would mean prosecuting virtually all of them.
So, we play games about "cracking down" on immigrants to show just how tough we are, while ignoring all the people currently working the fields or the guy paying those workers.
And then you go vote, based on this game, feeling good about how tough we're being. Those children definitely needed to be in cages, and ooh! Apples are on sale!
because older people want to have someone to take care of them
Grandma and grandpa are also going to reach a point where they can no longer care for themselves, even with a massive retirement savings. Or no savings, for that matter.
It's not a matter of want. It's a matter of physically being unable to do it. Unless you want to start embedding crystals in everyone's palm, we're going to need younger generations to care for the older.
What you're missing is "shit happens".
Let's say you continue through your life and you have a wife and children. And then you find out your child has cancer. There goes that retirement savings. Because it turns out private health insurance isn't actually all that great when very expensive diseases pop up. There's lots of ways to forbid someone from renewing their policy.
Almost everyone's life will have some major "shit happens" moment that severely derails their financial life. If you're lucky, this moment will happen when you're young enough to recover. Most people get severe illnesses after they're older, so most people do not have this luck.
I also started in 2010 with a salary around 40K a year
Congratulations, you started on 2nd base. Lots of people do not make 1) a salary, or 2) wages that equal $40k. They also have far higher expenses than a young single person in what appears to be a relatively low-to-moderate cost-of-living area.
Everyone is completely bereft of personal responsibility? In the richest country in the history of the world, people can not be held responsible for their own future?
You know what? Shit happens. I'm glad you've managed to be lucky so far. Not everyone has. And hopefully, it won't take your own bad luck for you to realize this.
A high school student working less that 20 hours a week at minimum wage makes more than 90% of the rest of humanity.
People do not retire from a first-world country to an impoverished third-world country. So this comment is particularly stupid.
History has clearly shown they will badly mishandle any money that are given.
Let's compare track records: Social Security Trust fund - still exists. Still profitable. Sure, there's conspiracy theorists claiming it's all gone or stupidly thinking the general fund's debt is relevant to the trust fund. And yes, it's going to be exhausted after the Boomers, but that was the plan all along. It was only created to shore up the Boomer's retirement because GenX was too small. GenX will probably be fine, as long as the generation after the Millennials don't do another baby-bust. So far, so good on that front.
401k's, banks, etc: So, remember 2008? When we had to save all of private savings from oblivion via bailing out the banking industry? Oh, you were planning to invest in Real Estate? So, remember 2007?....
History does not back up your claims about the proficiency of private investment versus public investment.
This sounds lovely until you realize that the majority of the population is working low-wage jobs where saving for retirement is impossible.
And you also remember that people to not peacefully starve to death.
So no, you can't just say "oh, you gotta handle this yourself". Unless you want to see what people do instead of peacefully starving to death.
You've never seriously dealt with insurance companies.
You've also never read the fine print on just how long they pay, and just how much they pay.
It's interesting you weren't at all interested in any stats to prove A. Or any evidence that GDP per capita is a relevant metric, and unable to be changed over the ~30 years from "today" to "deathbed".
So, your dismissive attitude will only allow the problem to get worse, and you will be impacted by the consequences, one way or another.
Yes, but when that poster ends up in the same place, his attitude will change. He will say, "Those other people were awful, but my situation is different because reasons."
I don't know how significant it was, but I voted for Clinton instead of Sanders entirely because the Republicans picked Trump and I knew the long term damage he would do and I didn't think Sanders had a chance.
Unfortunately, polling at the time showed Sanders beating Trump by a much larger margin. So next time you want to choose based on who can win the general, please pay more attention to polling and less to pundits.
This is what happens when you put the bean counters in charge. A car manufacturer needs to have "car guys" in charge that have a passion for making cool cars.
Maybe, maybe not.
For example, Volt vs Bolt. GM's car guys expected the Volt to be the popular one, because of "range anxiety". The car guys couldn't imagine people being happy with a car you had to "refuel" for hours. You can't drive it on a road trip!!
The opposite happened: The Bolt was more popular than the Volt. Not that many consumers actually go on road trips, and 200mi is plenty to handle the driving they do in one day. And a large number of the consumers that actually do go on road trips have a 2nd car in their household.
So car guys do miss sometimes. Though beancounters miss far more often.
This story would be more compelling if the Bolt didn't exist.
Or put another way, why don't they have to retool the factories to keep up with demand?
Because they're expanding production in Mexico instead. Because Mexico isn't subject to Trump's tariff fetish.