Video: Romney hits Perry on Social Security, Perry doubles down on “Ponzi scheme”; Update: Perry swats Rove

Don’t just replace SSA and other entitlements.

Make something better that the government can’t ravage to its spendthrift ends.

This took all of 10 minutes to think up.

I am sure you can do better.

ajacksonian on September 8, 2011 at 7:12 AM

I concur with the 30 year lock before you can access it. There are plenty of ideas floating around and the cream of them all won’t get to the top, let alone implemented, unless all angles are frankly examined and discussed.

The longer it takes before we have this discussion and reform, the more I’ll be resistant to any notion of “shared sacrifice”. If I as a young worker in the 80s knew SS was crap and prepared for it, yet the people didn’t want to hear any “evil” even till now, then a pox on their foolishishness. Every day we postpone this overhaul & privatization, the more it is going to hurt the unprepared.

AH_C on September 8, 2011 at 9:24 AM

As for the founding fathers and pensions, how about you provide a link. I’ll check it out tomorrow….

Buy Danish on September 8, 2011 at 12:14 AM

Mea Culpa.

I checked it out this morning and the 1770 – 1850s pension system wasn’t as restrictive as I thot when I last examined the issue back during Dubya’s PSA debacle. IOWs, I mis-remembered some of the facts.

In any case, here’s a pretty good link and a piece that I find interesting:

In 1890 Congress enacted a new law that paid pensions to any Union veteran of the Civil War who served for at least ninety days, was honorably discharged, and suffered from a disability, even if not war-related. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt ruled that old age itself was a disability, basically transforming the system into a government pension system for all Civil War veterans. Three years later, in 1907, Congress legislatively endorsed this position in the Service and Age Act. Congress, in subsequent legislation during the first quarter of the twentieth century, increased pensions and tied the amount of the pension to the period of military service.

The last Civil War pensioner, Albert Woolson, who joined the Union Army as a seventeen-year-old in 1864, was collecting a monthly pension of $135.45 at the time of his death in 1956. And perhaps more remarkably, there were still nineteen dependents of Civil War veterans receiving benefits in the last years of the twentieth century. At its peak, the Civil War pension system consumed approximately 45 percent of all federal revenue and was the largest department of the federal government (other than the armed services). In addition, state pension systems were developed in the former Confederate states to provide pension and disability benefits to Confederate veterans.

For many historians and other social scientists, the Civil War pension system represents both a mirror of social and economic features of the United States between the Civil War and the turn of the century, and a bridge between an era of limited government and the regulatory state that emerged in the last seven decades of the twentieth century.

Bottomline with entitlements, politicians just can’t help themselves but be more and more generous with our taxes to fund others’ entitlement.

AH_C on September 8, 2011 at 9:32 AM