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On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:01:01 GMT, "Jim," wrote:
NOYB wrote: "DSK" wrote in message .. . Fits wrote: Accepting the guvmint check returning the money that has essentially been stolen from you every year of your working life....more or less at gun point.......does NOT negate the complaint against socialism....... Sure it does. Accepting a Social Security benefits check... which is socialism... while complaining about socialism, especially saying that socialists ought to be killed... is just outright hypocrisy. I'd happily forgo my Social Security check later in life as long as I am exempt from paying FICA today. Remember that SS is for more than retirement. Should you get hit by a truck tomorrow, and are unable to work, you get to collect. If the truck kills you, your wife and kids (assuming you have any) also collect. The widow must be at full retirement age or disabled and age 50, or she must be caring for a child of the deceased. The children must be under 18, or 22 if disabled. If I had put the money into a Roth IRA, or the equivalent, they would get *everything* without all the qualifications. Personal savings accounts are the way to go! John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." |
"John H" wrote in message ... On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:01:01 GMT, "Jim," wrote: NOYB wrote: "DSK" wrote in message .. . Fits wrote: Accepting the guvmint check returning the money that has essentially been stolen from you every year of your working life....more or less at gun point.......does NOT negate the complaint against socialism....... Sure it does. Accepting a Social Security benefits check... which is socialism... while complaining about socialism, especially saying that socialists ought to be killed... is just outright hypocrisy. I'd happily forgo my Social Security check later in life as long as I am exempt from paying FICA today. Remember that SS is for more than retirement. Should you get hit by a truck tomorrow, and are unable to work, you get to collect. If the truck kills you, your wife and kids (assuming you have any) also collect. The widow must be at full retirement age or disabled and age 50, or she must be caring for a child of the deceased. The children must be under 18, or 22 if disabled. If I had put the money into a Roth IRA, or the equivalent, they would get *everything* without all the qualifications. Personal savings accounts are the way to go! Yes, they conviently ignore the fact. If I were to get hit my a truck the day after my daughter turned 18, she would get nothing, if the same money was in my own account, she would get would have received a couple hundred thousand. John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." |
John H wrote:
On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:01:01 GMT, "Jim," wrote: NOYB wrote: "DSK" wrote in message t... Fits wrote: Accepting the guvmint check returning the money that has essentially been stolen from you every year of your working life....more or less at gun point.......does NOT negate the complaint against socialism....... Sure it does. Accepting a Social Security benefits check... which is socialism... while complaining about socialism, especially saying that socialists ought to be killed... is just outright hypocrisy. I'd happily forgo my Social Security check later in life as long as I am exempt from paying FICA today. Remember that SS is for more than retirement. Should you get hit by a truck tomorrow, and are unable to work, you get to collect. If the truck kills you, your wife and kids (assuming you have any) also collect. The widow must be at full retirement age or disabled and age 50, or she must be caring for a child of the deceased. The children must be under 18, or 22 if disabled. If I had put the money into a Roth IRA, or the equivalent, they would get *everything* without all the qualifications. Personal savings accounts are the way to go! John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." I've posted this before, but given the discussion, you might find it worth reading again http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1227/p01s03-cogn.html One man's retirement math: Social Security wins By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor At the heart of President Bush's plan to sell Social Security private accounts is a simple notion: You're always better off investing your retirement money than letting the government do it. By doing it yourself, you can stow some money in the stock market, and over the long run will get a better return on that investment than today's Social Security system offers. The idea is broadly accepted. That's why the administration's plan to partially privatize the system sounds appealing to many. But that better return won't always happen. Just ask Stanley Logue of San Diego. For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr. Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration? He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends). To his surprise, the Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873. It's an astonishing finding. The DJIA represents blue-chip stocks. Social Security invests in US Treasury bonds. Over long periods of time, stocks have consistently outperformed bonds. So, you would think that Logue's theoretical stock investments from 1950 to 1994 would have surely outpaced the return on government bonds. The fact that they didn't illustrates one of the hard truths about stock investing: Timing matters. Although Logue started pouring money into Social Security in the 1950s and early 1960s, some of the best years for stocks, he hadn't accumulated a lot of money. So the gains of his theoretical stock portfolio would have been limited. By the time he had substantial sums, the market swooned for long periods. From 1965 to 1982, for instance, the DJIA made no progress. Logue retired before the real run-up in stocks in the latter half of the late 1990s. So the real lesson from his analysis is that any pension plan based on stock investments carries extra risks. Advocates of privatization point out - correctly - that Logue's analysis compares theoretical stock returns with what the Social Security Trust Fund earned - not what he himself would get from the system. From that perspective, the investment approach looks better, they argue. Over the long run, a typical worker can expect to earn 4.6 percent a year (after administrative costs) on a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds and only about 2 percent or less from Social Security, according to federal estimates reported by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, long a proponent of privatization. Hypothetically, someone earning $30,000 annually would at the end of a 40-year career receive nearly twice as much under the investment approach ($344,000) than with Social Security ($185,000). Who's right: Logue or Mr. Tanner? The debate hinges considerably on what people want their retirement system to be. Social Security has always been an insurance program. It was never intended as an investment scheme. So everyone - retirees, the disabled, widows, and orphans - receive guaranteed monthly income. The "return" on their Social Security contributions depends largely on how long they live. Those in their 90s have enjoyed superb returns. Those who don't live as long benefit less. Private accounts, by contrast, involve far more variability, both sides agree. Individuals who enter and exit the market at the right times would undoubtedly do better under privatization. But under Britain's privatized pension system, so many retirees are doing so poorly at this moment that a commission warned this fall that widespread poverty among the elderly may be returning, which could require massive new government spending. Presumably, President Bush's plan would offer the choice to meld insurance and private investment: much less guaranteed income in return for the opportunity - and risk - of earning more in the markets. "Because financial asset returns are volatile, benefits under a personal account system would fluctuate," notes Bill Dudley, an economist at Goldman, Sachs & Co., a New York investment bank. "On a risk-adjusted basis, the privatized account ... becomes much less compelling." There are other problems with private accounts. Administration expenses of the present Social Security system are minuscule compared with the size of the benefits provided. The Bush administration so far has provided no details on its private accounts plan. But if these are handled by Wall Street, the fees could be sizable, dissipating some of the return from investing in stocks. Logue takes no account of such expenses in his analysis. Further, administrative costs and difficulties for private business could be large as companies, big and small, try to deduct the right amount from a payroll and put it into a private account in a timely fashion. A study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) notes some complexities: 650,000 employers go out of business or start new businesses each year. More than 4 million employers have 10 or fewer employees, often having record-keeping problems and errors. About 12 million to 15 million individuals are self-employed and presumably would have to send money directly to a private account. So the complexities of change are substantial. If the extra return from privatization is not very advantageous, "why even consider changes that all agree would be very disruptive?" asks Logue. |
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 13:23:13 -0500, "P.Fritz"
wrote: "NOYB" wrote in message link.net... "Jim," wrote in message ... NOYB wrote: "DSK" wrote in message .. . Fits wrote: Accepting the guvmint check returning the money that has essentially been stolen from you every year of your working life....more or less at gun point.......does NOT negate the complaint against socialism....... Sure it does. Accepting a Social Security benefits check... which is socialism... while complaining about socialism, especially saying that socialists ought to be killed... is just outright hypocrisy. I'd happily forgo my Social Security check later in life as long as I am exempt from paying FICA today. Remember that SS is for more than retirement. Should you get hit by a truck tomorrow, and are unable to work, you get to collect. I buy personal disability insurance for that kind of thing. Remember, jim is from the "the guvmint has to do it for you, you are to dumb to take care of yourself" liebral mindset. He's sure as hell not the only one. My God, I can't believe the bull**** I'm seeing in *this* thread! I just heard an ad on the radio saying private accounts would dismantle social security. What garbage. But, there are actually people who believe that. John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." |
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"Harry Krause" wrote in message ... Calif Bill wrote: "Harry Krause" wrote in message ... NOYB wrote: "DSK" wrote in message et... NOYB wrote: I'd happily forgo my Social Security check later in life as long as I am exempt from paying FICA today. Same here, and I'm a lot closer to collecting than you are. If Bush & Cheney were seriously interested in reforming or fixing Social Security (instead of their plan being a subterfuge to harvest campaign contributions from Wall St), they'd offer that option. They can't. That's the fundamental flaw of the system. We're not putting money away for our retirement. We're paying for the retirement of those who are now retired. Those who are now retired made it possible for you. No, we have a "Trust Fund" of money. It is a "lock box" of money. Sorry, I'm talking here about the opportunities created for today's generations by those those who came before. Isn't that what every preceeding generation does for the next throught the whole of history? |
"Don White" wrote in message ... "Bert Robbins" wrote in message ... elections. Still, a good commie is a dead commie! Bert...most of us have left the 50's far behind. We don't mind a little '50s rock & roll on occasion...but that's it! Communism is still bad and should be stamped out wherever it is and whenever it rears its ugly head again. |
On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:06:20 GMT, "Jim," wrote:
He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends). Which explains why one should never put all their investment eggs in one basket. Even the Thrift Savings Plan allows diversification. We can all find examples which would give a return less than the social security return. John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." |
John H wrote:
On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:06:20 GMT, "Jim," wrote: He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends). Which explains why one should never put all their investment eggs in one basket. Even the Thrift Savings Plan allows diversification. We can all find examples which would give a return less than the social security return. John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." The Dow is composed of 10 companies supposedly representing a cross section of American industry (loosely defined of late) and is updated periodically -- so go back to 1950 and see just how many companies he invested in. I believe the Dow is a good measure of the economy, and lists the type of large cap conservative company one should invest in for their retirement. |
"John H" wrote in message ... On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:06:20 GMT, "Jim," wrote: He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends). Which explains why one should never put all their investment eggs in one basket. Even the Thrift Savings Plan allows diversification. We can all find examples which would give a return less than the social security return. And it still does NOT account for the fact that you cannot spend the money the way you see fit, and may not get any of it. For example, if it is your won retirement account, and at age 72, you find that you a a disease that will take you life in 2 years, if it is your own money, you can enjoy life for the next 2 years as you see fit, with SS, you are stuck with the meager monthly check. If you die at age 59, and your kids areover 18, the guvmint keeps everything. If there was no SS at the current time.....no sane preosn would agree to a system like there is now, where current workers pay for those that are already retired. In any other industry, it would be called a pyramid scheme and be illegal. The fact that the liebrals wish to bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything is just dandy is mind boggling. John H "All decisions are the result of binary thinking." |
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