Listen up baby boomers! YOU are going to bankrupt social security! Lawmakers might begin looking at ways to cut your benefits to save money. Save money for WHAT you might ask? Well even though you paid the money in and thought of it as your retirement fund, you were just a fool. It's THEIR money don't you know?
You see, the money paid out of your paycheck into social security is used to pay for a lot of other programs. Yes, you are right, that was never the way it was supposed to be, but over time Congressmen were being hounded by special interests to hand out billions of dollars to pet projects in order to keep their lucrative jobs in DC, with all the perks and the applause that comes with it. Knowing how hard it is to raise taxes they had to find a source of cash to pay to their big donors and power brokers and then they found it.
You see, there was this big bank account just sitting there, earning interest and it kept growing and growing as baby boomers became more and more productive. Calculating that these people who were paying in wouldn't need the money for decades to come, Congress decided to raid the piggy bank and worry about retirees later, long after they had fluffed up their own retirement nests with pet projects, crooked deals and under the table perks.
Now the time is fast approaching when we who paid the money in, planning to use it in our "golden years" are starting to count pennies as our productive years are running out. And guess what? It ain't there!
As the record federal budget deficit draws increasing scrutiny from Washington to Wall Street to Main Street, deficit hawks may take aim at entitlement programs including Social Security.
By 2017, Social Security is expected to start paying out more than it collects in payroll taxes, according to the 2009 Annual Report from the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees. There is currently a large surplus, but it will be drained by the year 2037. At that point, Social Security will only be able to pay out 75 percent of its benefits.
A separate report, done by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, concludes much the same thing, but gives the system another 10 years before it begins to fall apart.
As Boomers begin to retire, the huge group of people putting money into the system will begin taking it out of the system, which then will be funded by a generation of workers—the so-called Gen X—whose numbers are some 15 million fewer.
Count Gen-Xer Tom Firey among those younger workers who think they’re getting the short end of the stick. The managing editor of the conservative Cato Institute magazine, Regulation, first wrote about the subject nearly 10 years ago in a column headlined, “Boomers Fleece Generation X with Social Security.”
"The debt level of the United States is unsustainable, something has to give," said Rudolph Penner, head of the CBO from 1983 to 1987 and co-chairman of the report.
“Given that no one in power is serious about restraining the deficit, we are rapidly heading toward a crisis,” Penner said. “If we should ever become rational, I think that the only solution involves a combination of tax increases and spending restraint.”
The U.S. Senate last month voted down a proposal to create a bipartisan commission that would have made recommendations by December on how to deal with rising deficits and the fiscal instability of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Like the Greenspan Commission 27 years earlier, this one would have presented legislation to Congress in a yes-or-no vote, with no opportunity for amendment.
Sen. Max Baucus, (D) Montana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said, “Their commission is a Social Security-cutting machine.”
“Before too long we need to put political posturing aside and sit down at the table, as we did in 1983, to be bipartisan,” said Astrue, the Social Security commissioner appointed by George W. Bush in 2007 to a six-year term.
“My sense is that very few members of Congress have faced up to it in a hard way,” he added. “But I’m not writing off Congress. I try to be optimistic about these things. I continue to believe we’re going to have some very honorable people taking risks for the good of the country.” [CNBC]
While there may still be time to voice our concern before Congress cuts Social Security benefits in order to free up enough money to fund their pet projects, let me waste none of that time and voice my concern right now: KEEP YOUR DAMNED HANDS OFF MY SOCIAL SECURITY!!!!
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