Blogs For Victory

From CNS:

There were only 1.75 full-time private-sector workers in the United States last year for each person receiving benefits from Social Security, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Social Security board of trustees.

That means that for each husband and wife who worked full-time in the private sector last year there was a Social Security recipient somewhere in the country taking benefits from the federal government…

This cannot be sustained – even when you throw in government workers (who are paid out of tax dollars, of course) you still don’t get enough total workers paying in to support those who are taking out.  You probably have to get to at least 4 total workers for each beneficiary for it to be financially stable; and likely 5 or 6 private sector workers per beneficiary.  And it is only going to get worse – even after the Boomers all retire and start to exit the system via death, our rapidly declining birth rate ensures there will be no significant improvement in the worker/retiree ratio.

A Ponzi scheme, just to clarify it for our liberals, is a system where early beneficiaries are paid out handsomely from the proceeds of later entrants.  It all works well until you stop getting enough new people to sustain the generous payouts.  Social Security was first implemented when most people only lived a few years beyond 65 and there were a couple dozen workers for each retiree.  Now we live past 80 as often as not and there are less than 2 workers for each retiree.  This a classic example of a Ponzi scheme…and it is failing just like any other Ponzi scheme.

To be sure, Social Security is too deeply ingrained in American life to be easily or quickly done away with…but it must be deeply reformed just to ensure that older people can get retirement pay and younger people can build up independent means of retirement.  The time to do it was, of course, after the 2004 election…but a combination of Democrats wanting a campaign issue and Republicans who lacked backbone ensured that the Bush’s modest reform proposals were killed.  Now it is 7 years later and things are worse…and they will do nothing but get worse from now on, unless we change.

Additionally, any attempt to get our overall fiscal house in order requires Social Security reform (as well as Medicare/Medicaid reform).  The whole economic future of the United States rests on our ability to develope the courage to act.  Democrats will never do anything but “fear and smear” on the issue, so it is up to Republicans to lead the way…and our first step is to (a) bring the subject up and then (b) so badly beat the Democrats in 2012 that they can’t stand in the way of reform.