Tea Partiers Say They Would Absolutely Abolish Social Security

by sammielee24 108 Replies latest jw friends

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  thomas15

  And everlasting
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  BurnTheShips

  Nothing is everlasting. I am not a doomer.

  BTS
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  BizzyBee

  Excellent post, mindmelda!
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  VIII

  Bravo JWoods!!
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  BurnTheShips

  Mindmelda's post is just warmed over, rephrased Marxism--a proven failure.

  Democracy cannot survive without capitalism. Capitalism, however, can. Capitalism alone can even function under anarchy. Socialistic democracy is the consensual hallucination of people concerned with how to divide opportunity fairly. This is impossible to do while retaining some semblance of negative human rights. Our Constitution, which includes a statement of these rights, guarantees "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", not happiness itself, which can't be guaranteed to anyone.

  "But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?"
  
  ""Noble Experiment'?" I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. "Oh, that was repealed."
  
  "Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon."
  
  "Oh, no," I said. "I was talking about Prohibition."
  
  "Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. 'Democracy.' A curious delusion — as if adding zeros could produce a sum …"
  
  — Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

  Human beings, for the great majority of human history, have lived under the yoke of despotism. For a little time, we have managed to avoid this in America. Will the noble experiment succeed? Maybe not here, and not without a fight.

  BTS
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  sammielee24

  Mindmelda!
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  JWoods

  Thank you, VIII.

  What has astonished me here is the level of rancor on the part of our socialist membership - combined with a determined lack of answers on what to do about the fact that these programs are bankrupt.

  It has been clearly pointed out that "taxing the rich more and more" will NOT sustain the programs in question.

  OK, so if you love those programs - (and many do) - how are you going to pay for it all?
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  BurnTheShips

  OK, so if you love those programs - (and many do) - how are you going to pay for it all?

  They don't have any answers. And they don't care, so long as they can continue to suck the tit of the Nanny State. They'll leave the shitstorm for future generations to sort out. The West is in the early stages of the first backwards wealth transfer in human history. All previous generations passed on their wealth to their children. These slobs are going to be the first to rip off their descendants in order to fuel their lazy selfishness. They will continue to trot out sob stories and divide people by invoking class warfare for every item on their agenda, as if some utopia could ever be created where human tragedy and suffering and loss can be extirpated. They always fall back on an appeal to emotion, rather than reason, in order to find support for their collective delusion.

  BTS
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  sammielee24

  A quarter of those today who are retired ( millions) live only on social security. Today, the jobs report was shown on a graph - future job growth is primarily in health care however, out of the 7 or so categories of jobs in that field, only 2 pay higher than the current average income. That means we are creating a lot of jobs that are low paying, lower paying than today, and that means that people have less to save. Working for today, surviving today becomes more important than tomorrow as people struggle to pay off school debt, housing, transportation and medical costs - and when inflation hits, as it inevitably will - those workers get further behind in the savings game. It isn't just a mandate to end social security - it is a move toward eliminating police, firefighters, etc., from public paid to entirely private. That means, those future retirees would also be out of luck if their house caught fire and had no money to pay.

  sammieswife.

  --

  Those numbers could grow as the baby boom generation enters retirement. Currently, 53% of people in the workforce have no pension, and 32%have no savings set aside for retirement. The number of traditional pension plans — the kind that guarantee a set amount of money for life and that have propped up many of the pre-boomer generation — has fallen to 29,651 in 2004 from 112,208 in 1985.

  The average Social Security payout is $955 a month, $11,460 annually. The benefit can be more or less, depending on how many years you worked, how much you earned and the age you started taking payments. If your check is less than $579, you can get Supplemental Security Income. But that just brings your monthly income up to $579.
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  JWoods

  But, running to people who promise paradise won't solve it. It just creates the illusion of security for as long as you believe the magicians are really pulling rabbits out of their hats.

  As long as you never look at the man behind the curtain, you can feel safe for a while. That sort of thing has also been going on since there were humans.

  I recommend anyone who thinks a certain religion will fix everything wrong with their lives to look at the Mayans. Their climate changed, as it periodically does, and they had gotten to that poing in civilization where they had food problems, social problems, political chicanery, all that stuff.

  The priests started sacrificing more and more victims to the gods to appease them, to bring back the former peace and prosperity. Of course, it didn't work. The created illusions to comfort the people, pretended to see gods, to trick the people into thinking they were seeing gods, and they started sacrificing their children, too.

  Didn't work. The rains still didn't come, the land changed, and their devotion to sacrificing enemies earned them more war and bloodshed. Sound familiar?

  The above was intelligently posted by mindmelda on another thread - showing how dependence on increasing levels of religion failed in history.

  I wonder if it has occurred to the poster that you could very similarly apply all that to increased and unaffordable levels of government socialism - i.e. that it cannot fix everything wrong with everyones lives. I.E. - that it cannot bring about a JW style secular paradise through increased government. After all, the Mayan system was as much government as it was religion.