| Westcoastdog, would you mind providing a link to those recommendations by Paul O'neil? I looked for the article you mentioned on the San Francisco Chronicle website and came up blank, then I searched for "Paul O'Neil tax recommendations" and got a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with what you mentioned. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I'd like to read it from the source.
As a 25 year old worker, the thought of shelling out a third of the fruits of my labor to a 70-year-old Ponzi scheme doesn't exactly float my boat. Unless old people start dying like they used to or my generation has starts having babies like mad, no accounting tricks are going to change the number of people paying in relative to the number of people collecting.
The most laughable thing about social security is the obvious question that no one seems to ask: When it's my turn to retire and life expectancies are even longer, am I really supposed to believe that the following generation will be stupid enough to put up with even higher taxes in the hopes of passing the buck on to their own kids? Call me cynical, but I think they'd throw us out on our butts before they do, which may well be what we should be doing now.
I sincerely hope that we figure out a way to diffuse this time bomb without undue pain and suffering for those who trusted politicians to take care of their retirement, but I would not be at all surprised if this leads to very bad things in another 40 or 50 years. One could reasonably say that the American Revolution and the Civil War both started out largely as tax revolts, and the taxes in question then weren't nearly as high as what it would take to keep Social Security afloat indefinitely now. I, for one, certainly won't be branding my grandchildren as un-American for taking up arms against a 50% payrole tax. |