Public schoolteachers in Illinois do not participate in Social Security, and their pension fund is in precarious shape. Last year the fund reported having just 48 cents for every dollar of benefits it had promised, largely because the state had failed to pay the required amount of money into it for many years. NY Times, November 5, 2011
So Anthony Wiener has to resign his seat in Congress because he hit on a few women he was not married to. So Herman Cain is toast because of 15-year-old allegations. So Eliot Spitzer is out because of a call girl. Did any of these gentlemen hurt anybody as much as the state government of Illinois has hurt its public school teachers? So Obama wears a flag pin in his lapel and the Republican candidates reverently clasp their hands to their hearts during the singing of the national anthem. So Kim Kardasian got divorced after 81 days of marriage.
It’s not even close. Not even in the same universe. How different is your life going to be if you are going to get half of the pension you expected, and which you paid for? How different is your life because Anthony Wiener tweeted a picture of his underwear?
Yet Americans screamed and jumped and screeched and wailed until Anthony Wiener resigned. Yet the government of Illinois continues along blissfully oblivious to the slightest opprobrium.
Rick Perry is half right in the way that only a half-wit can be: it’s a ponzi scheme in the sense that you start paying for it at the beginning for those who are retiring at that time, and then, when you retire, you collect… So, in theory, if the taxpayers decided to stop paying into at a certain point in time, you get what happens with a ponzi scheme: the money runs out.
So, if you think we will run out of taxpayers in the future, vote for Rick Perry and he’ll do his best to get rid of Social Security. Then everyone can just put some money aside every year, year after year, so that when they retire, they will have a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank.
Uh huh.
There is nothing fiscally unsound about social security and it would take the collapse of our entire economy to make it fail. Or the massive stupidity of a lot of of legislators and the shenanigans of investment brokers and managers.