I'm having to work extra hard these days to avoid slipping into becoming a total crank. Hey, I qualified that with "total." It's just the BS is flying so fast and furious that I can hardly stand to read the news these days.
The latest today was listening to Sean Hannity interview Senator Rand Paul while I drove home this afternoon. Sen. Paul mentioned that fixing Social Security long-term would probably entail some combination of later eligibility and means testing. After some discussion, Hannity piped up with something along the lines of this, and let me be clear here that this is paraphrased:
You mean I've been putting into Social Security since I was 19 and now what you're going to do is screw me out of that when it comes time for me to collect? After I put into it my whole life?
Yes! Not only that Sean, you're going to pay your own damned health insurance too! Why? Well let's see, maybe that $100 million five-year contract you signed in 2008 will have something to do with it. You cannot, must not, see a dime of Social Security or Medicare unless you have totally screwed up and blown your fortune by then. And no whining, because a lot of people with likely far fewer assets and income will be in the same boat by that time.
And don't whine about justice either. There will be means testing and as wealth and income go up it will eventually get to zero benefits for the well off. Somebody is going to get screwed, and the choice is between the well off who are retiring in the next few decades and their children/grandchildren, or in my case, nieces/nephews. I don't know what those numbers would be, but I'm thinking something along the lines of if you are retired today and otherwise making $200,000/year you get no Social Security payment. The Medicare threshold would probably have to be higher. The bottom line is that anybody who is rich and still demanding their government retirement benefits at this point or in the future is basically a dirtbag. Don't bitch at me, bitch at the politicians we've elected who have spent the entire damned trust funds and lied about the viability of the programs for 30 years.
There's one more problem here and that is raising the retirement age for those who worked in physically demanding jobs. There's no way you can keep raising the retirement age on many of those people, it's tough enough raising it from 65 to 67. We're going to tell them that they have to keep working construction or farming or whatever until they are 70 now? Really?
Shoot. I still have about 15 more of these. Oh well, at least I got this one off my chest.
Recent Comments