Its not about money, its about priorities

A lot of young people have bought into this idea that Social Security “won’t be there for them.” (Okay, just about everyone has.)

But this is complete fiction. We are being misled by people who just don’t want to prioritize our needs.

First of all, the way that Social Security works: current workers pay in to the fund, which goes to current retirees. So the only way there “won’t be any money” for you when its your turn is if there is nobody working. Obviously that is never going to happen. There will always be people paying into the system. Therefore there will always be money there to pay your benefits.

But wait, you might say, I heard that there’s going to be so many boomers that they’ll swamp the system. Or I heard that there are too few workers to support all those retirees. Or I heard that Congress steals the money. Yada yada yada.

Well, according to the Social Security Administration and the Congressional Budget office, based on the current contribution, Social Security is about 75%-80% funded for our entire lifetimes and 100% funded for the next 40-50 years.

That’s not a system that is bankrupt, like some taco stand going out of business. Social Security is not some ATM that’s going to stop spitting out cash just when you get to the front of the line. It doesn’t work that way.

The challenge in front of us is, how do we get from 75-80% up to 100%? Because that’s the goal: 100% for everyone. Keep the guarantee. And of course that takes money.

Is there enough money? Of course there is—its just a question of priorities.

Today, the priorities for Congress are 1. Tax cuts and 2. Military spending. That’s where the money is going.

Let’s take tax cuts first. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the recently passed Bush tax cut costs nearly than 3 times as much money as is needed to pay 100% of Social Security benefits for 75 years.

On the second point, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, sustaining current U.S. defense policies would require much more taxpayer money than fulling paying Social Security benefits.

Now, you can be for the tax cuts or against them, for U.S. defense policies or against them. That’s not the point.

The point is, if anyone says “there’s not enough money to pay Social Security,” or “Social Security is running out of money,” what is really going on is that they want to spend the money on something else.

See, there is enough money in Washington to pay your Social Security benefits. Its a matter of priorities.

Would you favor raising the contribution rate in order to get to 100%? Or using some of the money from the general budget that is presently going to other priorities? Or doing something else? There’s no shortage of options. Check out http://www.nasi.org for more information on what you could do get to 100%.

But whatever you do, don’t get played by believing you’ll get nothing out of the system….because people who think they have nothing to lose will fall for anything.

Rock the Vote: Political Power for Young People.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.