Remember, Boomers, how they told you Social Security woudn’t go broke for years and years? Well, good luck with that.
Here’s the truth, though. Social Security isn’t going broke any time soon. Benefits will be trimmed somewhat, and retirement ages will be raised, and eventually the problems will be resolved. What? You say that can’t happen? It already has, and hardly anybody noticed.
My dad retired with full benefits at the age of 65. I won’t be able to do that until I hit 66. And in the not too distant future, I expect that number to hit 70.
UPDATE: Folks, do check out Steve Egg’s layout of the numbers. I still think SS can be “fixed,” but the fix might involve you having to live until you’re 90 before you can start collecting.
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I never expected to receive anything from Soc. Sec. anyway.
Full retirement benefits is already delayed until 67 (which my dad just hit).
As for “broke” versus “not broke”, that is a rather fungible term. Since the “interest” on the “trust fund” is kicked right back to the Treasury to be spent on other items, tapping into even that represents either an unplanned tax increase or an unplanned round of borrowing.
On the other hand, because it is the federal government we’re talking about, they can just print more money and send us into hyperinflation.
There simply will be no meaningful SS benefits for anyone in my generation. We’ve known it since we were children, and every passing year we get more pissed off. You can’t keep spending money you don’t have, and eventually a generation is going to simply say NO. I’m guessing that would be mine…
Seems like the previous generations have forgotten an important concept -
We get to choose your nursing home
Some day I should put together a modest proposal to turn seniors into biodiesel.
Bill, I’m 45, and quite frankly I don’t ever expect to collect Social Security.
Way ahead of you, wtfo. I’ve been predicting (and sometimes advocating) for years an eventual uprising of the young against the geezers. Lamppost, rope, geezer: some assembly required.
We may be older and slower, but we’re meaner and generally better armed.
This is not news. The honest folks have been saying this for the last 4 years. The American public doesn’t care. And won’t care until they lose it all. We have been a nation of bums for 50 years and the mentality is ingrained.
Frankly, nothing is going to happen on this front until the US government starts having problems moving bonds - not “oh, we had to raise the point a bit”, but an honest-to-goodness “nobody wants to buy our debt!” crisis.
At this point, the idea that we’re ever going to pay down the national debt is ridiculous. It simply will not happen. It would take fiscal responsibility on a scale never before even contemplated, and then that policy would have to be in place for decades for the debt to be worn down. And how do you keep each new administration honest? It’s far easier to get elected if you promise to spend more than you tax, after all.
Of course, when it comes apart, it’s going to come apart all at once - financial panic doesn’t hit in degrees - and then it’s either enforced austerity (because nobody will loan to you) or running the money printer. Which option do you think our government is likely to pick?
Craven cowards to the last, they’ll run the presses until we are drowning in worthless fiat currency, and then they’ll all try to sign on to the next Man on the White Horse’s bandwagon - and whether that pale rider is of the Hitler or Stalin persuasion won’t make a damned bit of difference to them.
‘We may be older and slower, but we’re meaner and generally better armed’
And there’s a lot more of us.
As for the “fix”, the numbers simply don’t support one lasting much more than 10 years even if it were in a vacuum without trillions of dollars of new welfare spending. With that additional spending, it is closer to failure before the ink is dry.
That doesn’t mean the leadership of the bipartisan Party-In-Government won’t try to ensure that they’ll die natural deaths wealthy, those born after JFK was assassinated be damned. As our host said, they are craven cowards to the last.