Thanks to A Question For The Community I started thinking about Social Security. I was born in 1948 and am very much a part of the baby boomers.
I wrote an extensive comment in the above diary that was posted at the bottom of a long list comments. While I do not address the excellent questions asked, I do offer some thoughts on social security.
I start with the fact that the money in the social security trust fund has been spent. Yes spent. I explain below.
The money in the SS Trust Fund is invested in US Treasury bills. In other words the money has been spent by the US government. To make payments from the Social Security trust fund to people means that taxes must be raised to buy back the Treasury Bills to pay retirees.
Without raising taxes the trust fund is of no use. People need to understand this.
Since the founding of social security until the eighties social security was a pay as you go system with children paying for their parents. When we baby boomers grew up we had a much lower birth rate than our parents. Fewer children paying into social security would mean either raising the tax rates or reducing social security pay outs.
Ronald Reagan needed to figure out a way to raise taxes on the middle class to help pay for his tax cuts to the rich. Hence the raising of social security taxes to create a trust fund for the baby boomers. The money though was spent on the day to day running of government. Clinton was able to change this slightly by raising taxes on the rich which he then used to pay down the debt. By doing this he was enabling the trust fund Treasury bills to be sold to others when needed to pay retirees.
Then Bush came to power, taxes on the rich were dropped, and US borrowing increased. Greenspan kept interest rates low, and this caused the problems we are faced with now.
The argument that social security will be a problem is only a cover for the real issue, the money is spent and we have no way short of even more borrowing to pay the baby boomers as we retire.
What to do? To me the answer lies in taxing the wealthy and ultra wealthy, using short term deficit spending to create jobs, educating our populace, improving the trade relationships with foreign countries, and researching, developing, and deploying inexpensive green energy.
Energy prices have a multiplicative impact on society. When prices on energy increase the price of manufacturing increases, the price of transporting increases, the price heating and cooling increases, in short increasing energy prices help to kill economies.
Carbon based energy will kill us all. Hence the need for inexpensive green energy.
World trading is another serious problem. Cheap labor in the rest of the world, combined with low transportation costs is hurting the US economy. Poor trade barriers will hurt more than they help. However, we need to establish better trading relationships with nations that enable unions, provide health care, provide good wages to their workers, educate their populations, and work towards improving living standards for all their people. Trade barriers need to be set up for nations that do no behave in such a way.
As for raising the age for social security, I would lower the age, first to sixty and then to fifty-five. I would also make certain that there were enough jobs so all those who wished to work into their hundreds could, either part time or full time. There is so much work to do and so few of us to do the work, that I really do not understand the lack of jobs other than as a desire by the rich to hoard money.
So how to fight the anti social security folks, I don't know. How do you fight the no taxes deficit hawks? I don't know. Unfortunately I believe only horrific times may do the job. But who wants the human race to go extinct?