BoatBanter.com - Why the silence from JohnH?

On Fri, 28 Aug 2015 15:14:11 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 8/28/2015 1:33 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 28 Aug 2015 10:18:22 -0500, amdx wrote:

On 7/25/2015 12:35 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 24 Jul 2015 15:37:39 -0500, Califbill billnews wrote:

The problem is we have politicians catering to those who would vote public
money to themselves. Seems as if there was a warning about the life of
democracy and public money give away.

This have a number of different attributions but this is the gist of
it.
**********
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new
constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at
the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the
Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as
a permanent form of government."

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters
discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public
treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who
promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result
that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy,
which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the
beginning of history, has been about 200 years"

I think the solution to that short life would be,
Only people that pay federal taxes get to vote.
If you don't have money in the pie, you don't get to pick
who decides how it's spent.

SS is a payment into a retirement fund, disability plan and life
insurance for your children in case you die, and thus doesn't count
as Federal tax in my plan.

The problem with that plan is FICA/SS/MC is so entwined with the
general revenue fund that you can not distinguish which is which,
since1939 when FDR started raiding that over funded plan and spending
the money. In 1968 LBJ saw the opportunity to hide the cost of his
war by putting that money on budget. There has really been no
distinction at all since then.
If those plans had to stand on their own, they would be bankrupt and
that has been true for quite a while. They simply can not collect
enough taxes from workers to fund them. There is no cap on medicare
wages for quite a while and medicare is broke. The cap on SS is up
into the 10% territory for a single income household and that fund is
broke too.

Correct me if I am wrong but, by law, isn't the yearly SS *surplus*
allowed to transferred to the general fund? From what I've read that's
how Bill Clinton was able to claim a surplus in his final fiscal year in
office.

Yes and that has been true since 1968. Nixon was the first one to
benefit from it in 69 when he showed a one year surplus.
A lot of that Clinton "surplus" was also based on projections of
continuing the dot com boom. It is unclear that there ever actually
was a surplus when the dust settled. I know the debt clock never
stopped advancing. Eisenhower was the last president to do that and
actually paid down the debt for a few years (55-57)
It has gone up since then.

It is a moot point now. We haven't had a surplus for years. That is
why I say you can't separate SS from the general fund, because if you
did, they would have to admit they are broke.
The trustees report this year says the deficit will average $76
billion for the next 3 years and then it really starts going downhill
from there.
People still try to promote the idea that there is actually a trust
fund and we can collect interest from that but it is just general fund
revenue paying that back.
It is all voodoo economics and a bookkeeping model that would put a
CEO on federal prison if they treated a pension plan the same way.