trigon on February 19, 2013 at 10:14 PM

I might be missing part of your argument. Interest rates are not always going to be 5%, right now they are about .5% to 2.5%. If you allow risky investments with any risk, the retiree may end with no money to return to the government or to live on. In order to get the 2.5% today, you have to be willing to put your money into a 10 year treasury. Of course, if the accounts are all government treasuries, the government still has to collect that same amount of money in taxes to pay the person. Of course, if you allow investments outside of the government, this sets up the situation where any market crash destroys everything and the incentives for the government to get involved and pay trillions of dollars to wall street become HUGE. Of course what this means is that like under Bush, the government will do what ever it takes in order to keep the balloon inflating and preventing it from popping. It really does nothing to solve the problem and sets us up for massive future liability and extremely likely negative out comes.

Better to just let it burn I think. Nothing as refreshing a just desserts! The USA will survive, and likely will revert back 150 years culturally and politically, lose a decade of prosperity followed by several decades of supreme prosperity.

I have always dreamed of driving through los angeles with no significant congestion to go out for lunch.

As to the fact that they are idiot voters, I can’t do anything about it other than try to put an end to the idiocy they’ve supported. I see it as better to do it without blood in the streets.

Your funding assuming you are working would be that you’re covered by the government for everything you’ve put in already. I know the law says otherwise, but most idiots don’t know that and if you try to enforce reality on them, they’ll balk and you’d never get this implemented. When it goes active, you’d start paying into your account on top of the government funding. When you die, the portion of your account funded by government money would go back to the government. The portion you funded would go to your heirs. Being dead, you won’t care all that much about the government money.

It’s just been maneuvered off track by the wrong people.

Make no mistake. I’m of the opinion that it’s all going to crash. And, I’m no Romney supporter.

trigon on February 19, 2013 at 9:32 PM

Well, I like most of what you say.

I guess the spot that gets me is that it is those old people who for generations of their lives kept voting to continue this extra constitutional activity that you want to hand over an account I calculate out to be about $600,000 in order to pay their benefits through interest alone. $600,000 is a conservative number in several ways. It could be smaller with higher targeted interest returns, or it could and likely should be much more to ensure they get inflation adjusted dollars as they age.

I am not sure where I would fit into all of this, am I close to retirement to get paid back or what? But my paid in dollars were never meant for me, ever, the law specifically says it pays out what is paid in pretty much like a pay as you go system with a tiny fake trust fund put there to dupe the morons of the world into thinking their money is there waiting for them to make it around the sun enough times to collect.

astonerii on February 19, 2013 at 9:21 PM

Yeah. You’re going to get some asset inflation. Probably not as much as you might think, though. As the ‘funny’ money gets retired, it will tend to return asset values to normal. Also, since this would largely be a buy and hold scenario rather than a churn scenario, I suspect you wouldn’t get as much volatility as you might otherwise.

I don’t have any problem with getting the government out of all it’s unauthorized activities and seeing the US continue. I see it as a very worthwhile undertaking. It’s just been maneuvered off track by the wrong people.

Make no mistake. I’m of the opinion that it’s all going to crash. And, I’m no Romney supporter.

The government is already creating money out of thin air. What I’m proposing would keep the ‘funny’ money confined to investment accounts and then withdraw if after it had served it’s purpose. Since it would never be out in the general economy, it shouldn’t be overtly inflationary. I’m not without concerns on this point, though, myself. All I’m really doing is trying to put forth an idea that would get the government, eventually, almost entirely out of the SS business. It would, in a couple of generations, end the theft that the government has perpetrated.

So far as health care goes, I’d like to see the government out of that, too. Employers also. People should buy their own insurance. Possibly coupled with an HSA. If the government does have a role it should be in tort reform. Maybe reform of the drug patent laws to favor cures rather than palliative treatments. There might be a role for a small tax to create a fund to cover individuals for catastrophic healthcare situations. That would also help to keep individual policy costs down.

trigon on February 19, 2013 at 9:09 PM

Most of what your end goals are are good. But creating $50 billion dollars and having that money be invested means that those funds will be chasing limited resources. Gold bars, oil reserves, stocks, bonds and so forth. It is basically a bubble instantly inflated.

I for one am glad that in my lifetime the end of this nation will occur. At least I will not be passing onto my children a failed state, I figure it can go on til about 2022 at which point it will have gone beyond the point that even Romney supporters can be too blind to see the truth of the situation. Not claiming your support of any candidate, just picking a particularly poor vision group of people.

Well, you got me, there. Specially with a hundred plus years of constitutional negligence, subversiveness and just plain silly fairy talk about enacting Social/Economic “justice” when the framers couldn’t have expressed more clearly that such a thing would doom the whole works.

HarneyPeak on February 19, 2013 at 9:07 PM

Just pushing the guy’s argument to its reality.
Imagine 54 trillion more dollars chasing a limited number of money making opportunities to earn that interest payment that pays the retiree. There is no good way to solve this issue.

People who are 70 years old and been out of the workforce for 8 years or so are not going to be very capable of earning their own living. A widow who never worked and is living off the welfare social security check is likely to find it impossible to earn a living even the lowliest of.

Then again, going on the way we are, where the government is replacing the role of children in the secure futures of aging people, is destroying this nation, making slavery an acceptable lifestyle again, driving the dearth in births, the lack of caring about education and other trends which make the future of this nation much darker than it naturally should be.

If it were up to me, there would be a constitutional amendment which prevented any taxation for the purpose of funding individuals lives or the payments for such.
I also would go back to having the states collect the taxes which pays for the federal government, giving them ultimate final arbitration on what the federal government can spend.

astonerii on February 19, 2013 at 8:58 PM

The government is already creating money out of thin air. What I’m proposing would keep the ‘funny’ money confined to investment accounts and then withdraw if after it had served it’s purpose. Since it would never be out in the general economy, it shouldn’t be overtly inflationary. I’m not without concerns on this point, though, myself. All I’m really doing is trying to put forth an idea that would get the government, eventually, almost entirely out of the SS business. It would, in a couple of generations, end the theft that the government has perpetrated.

So far as health care goes, I’d like to see the government out of that, too. Employers also. People should buy their own insurance. Possibly coupled with an HSA. If the government does have a role it should be in tort reform. Maybe reform of the drug patent laws to favor cures rather than palliative treatments. There might be a role for a small tax to create a fund to cover individuals for catastrophic healthcare situations. That would also help to keep individual policy costs down.