On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 12:59:00AM -0700, Trent Shipley wrote: > Of course, with ever increasing (and expensive) life qualities and > life spans there will be people born in 1976 still collecting their > retirement social security in 2075.
Andtheir PIA will already have been calculated years earlier using the old formula with wage indexing. After retirement, benefits are indexed to inflation in the current system. > From my perspective, the REAL problem with social security is > extrinsic to the system. People *believe* they are ENTITLED to > retire. I would add that they believe they are entitled to a certain high standard of living when they retire, and it doesn't matter who gets stuck paying for it. > When it was started, Retirement Social Security was tied to actuarial > facts. As I recall, it was setup to kick in when 50% of the workforce > could expect to be dead or disabled. > > It was popular, and the system was expanded. Of course it was popular. The "early adopters" got a free ride -- they didn't have to pay much into it, and they got a lot more out of it than they paid in -- a consequence of it being a pay-as-you-go system. > We should NEEDS test social security so that it is NOT a retirement > program but entirely a disability program. > > OR we need to tie the social security retirement age to actuarial > facts. As in, "The Social Security Administration actuaries will > forcast mortality and disability morbidity for your age cohort. You > will be notified of your minimum retirement age when the actuaries can > predict the 33.3% disability and mortality threshold rate for your > cohort with 95% accuracy." Reasonable enough. Certainly we cannot keep giving each new generation increasingly more retirement payments. But I think the proposals you list above hhave less of a chance of passing than changing the AIME indexing for future generations to inflation instead of wages. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
