Do you believe George W. Bush when he says Social Security is broken?

[john_mcd_77]

Social Security is going broke but a) Bush has no real intention to fix it and b) Bush isn't the first one to mention it.

Lets address some of the key issues in your question:

"Americans should invest their Social Security funds in the stock market to prevent a tragedy in the future"

This carries obvious risk, but we've also seen that the Federal Reserve is willing to create inflation to keep stock profits up. These types of currency devaluation policies would hurt the lower half of the income spectrum a lot less if they had some money in the market, too. Every worker earning less than $90 K a year is already "investing" 13% of their wage toward retirement, unfortunately our politicians are spending it faster than it comes in. After 70 years of "saving" for social security, we have a big I Owe You saved up and not one penny more. The worst that could happen? The stock market loses all value and we break even compared to the government's investment plan.


"he claims the unemployment rate is extremely low, but on the other hand, he claims that there will not be enough workers in the future to prevent Social Security from becoming bankrupt"

Believe it or not, these are both correct! Unemployment calculates the number of people who WANT a job but cannot find one. For this statistic, our current rates are low. This just means if you WANT a job, you have good odds of finding one.

On the other hand! Last year, only some 120,000,000 income tax returns were filed. More people than ever simply don't have to work because of government benefits, retirement, disability, whatever. When social security was started, there were 15 workers for every beneficiary. Today that number is closer to 2 workers for every beneficiary. Birth rates are in drastic decline and people are living longer than ever before, so this trend is going to continue.

Here are the real options:

-More Money In-
A) Private investment - try to beat the government's rate of return
B) Raise Social Security Taxes

-Cut Costs-
C) Reduce Social Security benefits
D) Raise the Age of Retirment

-Increase the working population-
E) Ban abortion and birth control so we have more population at work
F) Let virtually unlimited amounts of immigrants in
G) Cut welfare benefits etc to force more people to pay taxes

-Save for your own retirement, ignoring the 13% of your income that was supposedly for your retirement, because if you're under 40 it probably won't be there for you when you retire if no reforms are made-
H) None of the above