Sunday, November 24, 2013

Killing The "We Paid Our Taxes; We Earned Our Benefits" Social Security Ponzi Meme | Zero Hedge

Killing The "We Paid Our Taxes; We Earned Our Benefits" Social Security Ponzi Meme | Zero Hedge
One recent study of lifetime payroll taxes and benefits comes from the Urban Institute. For Medicare, they calculated that (in 2012 dollars) an average-wage-earning male would get $180,000 in benefits, but pay only $61,000 in taxes — “earning” only about one-third of benefits received. A similarly situated female does even better. The cumulative “excess” benefits equal $105 trillion, with net benefits increasing over time.
...In fact, perhaps the best description of the current Social Security and Medicare situation comes from Henry Hazlitt, long ago, in Economics in One Lesson:
Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. The long-run consequences of some economic policies may become evident in a few months. Others may not become evident for several years. Still others may not become evident for decades. But in every case those long-run consequences are contained in the policy as surely as the hen was in the egg, the flower in the seed.
Social Security and Medicare’s generational high-jacking has become “the third rail of politics” in large part because seniors want to believe that they paid their own way. 
But they have not. 
They have only paid for part of what they have gotten. 
The rest has indeed been a Ponzi scheme. 
And as Social Security is already revealing, the future cannot be put off forever, however much wishful thinking is involved. 
Some are already being forced to confront the exploding pot of IOUs involved, and it will get much worse.

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