5 Comments

You provided no counter-argument to it being a ponzi scheme.

The Boomers are going to receive much more out of the system than they paid into the system. That sort of thing cannot continue. It's that simple.

Your rebuttal is, essentially, that the government can print money to pay the benefits. The problem with printing money to pay for inflation-adjusted benefits should be obvious too.

Why shouldn't we just "wait and see what happens"? Because there is no mystery about it. We know that people are about to take far more than they contributed, and we should take it back while they are still alive. The notion of "seniors in poverty" is ridiculous. That generation is obscenely wealthy, on average. Benefits can easily be provided to poor people (which includes old people) instead of old people.

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> Your rebuttal is, essentially, that the government can print money to pay the benefits.

When you definitely, one million percent understood the post.

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Jesus, the amount of Boomwr Kool Aid coursing through everyone's veins, that they think the government has to print money to make this work. I mean what other options are there? We can't NOT pay them free benefits that they didn't earn and didn't contribute to the system in the first place...

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Senior citizens who are facing serious medical issues that Medicare does not cover like long term care either through home aides, personal care assistance, or poor quality nursing homes that can cost up to 166k a year per patient are not obscenely wealthy. Drugs are expensive on Medicare too even with a gap plan. You will also need Medicaid to cover your expenses, but you will not receive Medicaid until you spend down pretty much all your assets. In my state, you're only allowed to have an income of 900 dollars a month and 1,600 in countable assets to qualify. If you have a social security check that's over 900 a month you will need to "spend down" the money to qualify for medicaid. there's also a 5 year look back period in case you try to give away your assets to others. And, if you take any Medicaid benefits, what they spent on you will be taken from your estate. Most sick senior citizens would have had to sell their house anyway or reverse mortgage it to afford retirement. A lot of people die before seeing a cent from social security or end up working until death due to how pathetic the amount of benefits are (republicans are also proposing to do means testing on social security retirement income).

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These litanies of hardships have nothing to do with the fact that the Boomer generation as a whole is taking about $320k more out of the system *per citizen* than they paid in. My generation is expected to contribute more than $400k per citizen in than they took out (yeah we'll see how that goes, folks).

Go ahead and redistribute as much as you like so that the worse-off people are taken care of within a generation; it doesn't matter to me--but you obviously can't take out more than you pay in forever because that's impossible. Everything you wrote will not only stay true for the next generation, but it'll be exponentially worse, and there won't be any retirements at all.

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