Social Security and Medicare are Next?

Hate to say it but if we don't rein in those entitlements they'll break the country. Odds are when I retire they wont even be there for me. Our politicians are to blame for spending all that money and we the taxpayers will have to pay yet again.

What you fail to fully understand is social security is NOT an entitlement in the pure sense. It is something that people have paid into all of their professional life. It is more of a pension plan than an entitlement. There would have been plenty of money in that system if the government (LONG before Obama, so don't blame that on him, too) had not taken the money out and spent it elsewhere. Yes, the government took the money out of the social security and spent it. THAT is why it is insolvent.

THE LOOTING OF SOCIAL SECURITY TO BALANCE THE FEDERAL BUDGET | WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Why hasn't there been a bigger howl about that? It really started in 1987 and went out of control by 1999. Gee that was presidents Reagan and Bush #1 who started raiding the SS coffers!!

By the way, because I said I thought that cuts to SS and Medicair/aid will be unavoidable does not mean I think they are right, and that it doesn't make me see red to think of how so many will end up being screwed over.

Boy are you on the attack! Did I blame Obama? No, but he is part of the problem along with every politician for the last 40 years. And blaming Reagan/Bush 1 is wrong, Congress is the one who has their hands on the purse strings, not presidents. Presidents only have the option of signing or vetoing a spending bill when it crosses their desk.

But you are right, SS is not an entitlement, it's a tax. In two seperate cases Fleming vs. Nestor and Helvering vs. Davis the supreme court has said SS is a tax and as such is just another gov't spending program. That means they can spend the money how they wish and don't have to give us one red cent of it for retirement benefits. As a tax it can be changed, reduced or eliminated at any time.

Other reasons SS/MC are going broke are there used to be over 50 people (can't remember the exact number here) working & putting in for every 1 person receiving. Now that number is about 3.5. Also, people used to die a few years after retirement, where as now some are living 20, 30 years or more.
So if you add up all the money an individual put into the programs & compare that to how much they receive later the latter is greater than the former. Unsustainable. Think Greece.

Gov. Raiding of the fund didn't help either.

There would probably be more than enough to go around if we took care of our own first instead of giving $$ to countries that hate us.

Heck, we only have roughly 310 million people, so why is it the trillions they take in in taxes isn't enough?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/...-pays-in-taxes

Actually it started in 1968, President Johnson took the
Social security trust fund and included it into the federal
Budget.



"President Johnson created the 'unified budget' in the late 1960s to disguise the real cost of the Vietnam War.[6][7] President Johnson did not want to ask for income tax increases to pay for several ambitious government programs of that era (the Vietnam War, the Great Society War on Poverty, the NASA Space Race). Putting surpluses from Social Security overwithholding “on budget” (adding them to the general operating budget of the United States Government) so the overwithholding could be used to pay for other government programs would make the federal budget appear balanced. The resulting debt to Trust Funds would be presented “off budget.”
In 1967 President Johnson appointed a Commission on Federal Budget Concepts which in its October 1967 report proposed a unified budget to do this. Johnson submitted the first unified budget to a Democratic Congress for Fiscal Year 1969 scheduled to begin on July 1, 1968. Thus was born the practice of using Social Security Trust Fund surpluses – or "Intra-governmental Holdings of Debt" to hide the size of the overall federal deficit."
Social Security - Conservapedia

While that is true, the first president who seemed to think the money was free to spend was Reagan. Maybe part of the reason he seemed to help the economy "recover" on paper?

This graph is when the money started getting raided;

FEDERAL "BORROWING" OF SOCIAL SECURITY FUNDS

Social security is not an entitlement. You and I and everyone else pays into social security with our own money.

Johnson used the money to conceal the true national debt,
The Great War on Poverty and NASA. And Presidents after
Johnson just kept on taking the money out of S.S. And
Replacing it with I.O.U.'s. Which by the way are kept in
An office building in Parkersburg, Wv.



"So - how much does the US government owe the Social Security Trust Fund? Let's look to the most recent "Monthly Statement of the Public Debt of the United States" (courtesy of TreasuryDirect.gov, *.pdf) to get the answer.

On Page 9, we see that the outstanding amount of Treasury Securities to OASI and DI are currently:

OASI - $2,596,371,000,000 (Social Security)
DI - $139,145,000,000 (Disability Insurance)

So, that's almost $2.6 trillion for the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund, plus an additional $140 billion or so for the Disability Insurance trust fund.

Source: SSA.gov - Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs

Here you go...

Reaganomics at work... Oh, and lets not forget Bush too... he had a hand in it all too...

Reagan, Greenspan and the Social Security Trust Fund | Thom Hartmann - News & info from the #1 progressive radio show