Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414
I'm not interested in punishing anyone. You brought it up, I threw the other direction at you. Although, the war on drugs/poverty/education are equally as stupid as the war on Iraq - with no better outcome for all the money thrown at it.
Look at the age at which the SS benefit was dispersed at the time the program was created and cross-reference that value with the average life span of Americans at the time. If you did the same thing for today's life span, one wouldn't qualify for SS until the age of 84 or so. Hence, it's obvious it was only supposed to cover those who live a REALLY long time (as opposed to the current benefit which they started issuing as early as 65 and have had to move it because of the debacle (your word) it has become.)
---------- Post added at 01:54 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:51 PM ----------
dippin,
I'm not focusing on just SS. That just happened to be the program I chose to counter someone's farm subsidies assertion. There are many other programs I would cut. Some of the taxes from those programs would then be diverted to offset SS until it was fully phased out.
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The bulk of the government spending is ss, medicare, and the military.
In fact, the estimate is that this year these 3 items alone will cost about 2.13 trillion. The estimate is that tax revenues for this year will be about 2.16 trillion.
In other words, you'd either have to cut every other thing the government spends on, including interest payments, or you'd be in the same situation with regards to medicare, or you'd really, really have to cut the military.