Tag Archives: Entitlements

News

Surprise! Social Security ran a $47.8 billion dollar deficit in 2012

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

The Social Security program ran a $47.8 billion deficit in fiscal 2012 as the program brought in $725.429 billion in cash and paid $773.247 for benefits and overhead expenses, according to official data published by Social Security Administration.

The Social Security Administration also released new data revealing that the number of workers collecting disability benefits hit a record 8,827,795 in December–up from 8,805,353 in November.

The overall number of Social Security program beneficiaries—including retired workers, dependent family members and survivors and disabled workers and their dependent family members—also hit a record in December, climbing from 56,658,978 in November to 56,758,185 in December.

In 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an average of 112.556 million full-time workers in the United States, of whom 17.806 million worked full-time for local, state or federal government. That left an average of only 94.750 million full-time private sector workers in the country.

That means that for every 1.67 Americans who worked full-time in the private sector in 2011, there is now 1 person collecting benefits from the Social Security administration.

There are about 310 million people in the United States.

Now consider that the same people who make you wait in line at the post office and the department of motor vehicles are teaching your children in public schools. What are the children learning there? Are they learning marketable skills so that they will be able to get private sector jobs and pay for these programs? No, they are learning about recreational sex, global warming, feminism, gay activism and other leftist dogma. They learn how to feel offended, how to blame men, how to blame white people, how to blame job creators (“the rich”), and how to blame the our armed forces.

We have borrowed over one trillion dollars from future generations to pay for these entitlement programs, and there is no reason to believe that a bunch of brainwashed children will be up to the task of paying for those entitlements. We shouldn’t be aborting 1 million unborn children a year either – we should be marrying and raising them with two opposite sex parents. The welfare state is just not sustainable when we destroy the supply line of new law-abiding productive workers. We have a growing public sector parasite feeding on a shrinking private sector host. It just won’t work for much longer.

Commentary

Young workers pay into entitlements that will be bankrupt when they retire

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Payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare
Payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare

Doug Ross from Director Blue has a public service announcement for young people. Even if they are able to find jobs, they can look forward to paying a large chunk of their income to the government for retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare, that will be bankrupt by the time they are ready to retire.

Excerpt:

Ever seen these numbers on your pay stub? The numbers I’ve highlighted?

That money is being taken from you — or, more properly, it’s being stolen from you — to fund a myth. A mirage.

You’re never going to see a dime of that “Social Security Retirement Insurance” you’re paying for.

You’ll never a see a nickel of that “Medicare Health Care Insurance” either.

That money is being taken from your pay — your livelihood — to fund a system that will be bankrupt in less than a dozen years.

Oh, and it’s not me saying that: Medicare’s own actuary, Richard Foster, is. Social Security is in a similar situation, according to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who serves as the system’s senior trustee.

Suffice it to say that these systems will actually go broke far sooner than anyone’s really admitting because the economy remains poor and appears to be slowing down even further.

My public service message is this: this money is being taken from your pay in exchange for a promise that will be broken in just a few years. You’ll never see that money again. And it is the government — the government, not “the rich”, not the Koch brothers, not the oil companies — that is ripping you off.

It is the government, not corporations, spending untold billions on “green energy” scams like Solyndra. It is the government, not “the rich”, slathering EBT-welfare cards around like confetti. And it is the government, not “the Tea Party”, that is promoting illegal immigration and offering huge financial benefits to those in the country illegally. All with your money.

Medicare is the one that is really in trouble, as Forbes magazine explains:

The Trustees of the Medicare program have released their annual report on the solvency of the program. They calculate that the program is “expected to remain solvent until 2024, the same as last year’s estimate.” But what that headline obfuscates is that Obamacare’s tax increases and spending cuts are counted towards the program’s alleged “deficit-neutrality,” Medicare is to go bankrupt in 2016. And if you listen to Medicare’s own actuary, Richard Foster, the program’s bankruptcy could come even sooner than that.

See, the funny, funny thing about young people is that they are almost complete uninformed about basic economics. They don’t know where jobs come from. They don’t know where the money that the government spends come from. They don’t know how much the government spends. They don’t know about our debt-to-gdp ratio. Their view of economics is all determined by socialist public schools and socialist Hollywood and socialist mainstream media. It’s all emotional for them. They have feelings that the rich are greedy, and must be taxed, and that the government is Santa Claus, helping the poor with money from the rich. It’s the ultimate system of slavery, except the slaves want to be enslaved.

News

Why do so many people vote for the Democrat party?

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ECM sent me this article from National Review that explains why so many people vote Democrat.

Excerpt:

First, we should recognize that the War on Poverty is now a huge budget item. According to calculations by the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Budget Committee, taxpayers coughed up over $1 trillion in federal and state-provided benefits in 2011. These benefits flow to tens of millions of voters and cover the waterfront, offering low-income Americans everything from cash assistance to food, housing, and medical care, not to mention help with education, transportation, home-heating costs, and child care. Spending on these programs has soared more than 40 percent since 2007. That’s an unsustainable trajectory.

Then we get some facts from a Wall Street Journal article on the topic:

  • The percentage of the American labor force drawing disability benefits from the government has doubled since 1992, from 3 percent to 6 percent. They further note: “The number of workers qualifying for disability since the recession ended in 2009 has grown twice as fast as private employment.”
  • During the last four years, the Obama administration’s aggressive promotion of the food-stamp program has increased the number of recipients by 18.5 million.
  • Unemployment insurance that lasted no longer than 55 weeks in 1980 and 72 weeks in 1992 now can last 99 weeks. Some 40 percent of unemployed workers have been out of work for more than half a year.

And how does it affect voting?:

The Battleground Polls conducted by the Tarrance Group on behalf of George Washington University and Politico make this level of detail readily available. The poll helpfully divides its sample of likely voters into, among other things, those who self-identify as either “low income” or “middle class.”

So, what do we know about these voters?

  • Those who self-identify as “low income” are more likely to be unemployed, frustrated over the state of the economy, and pessimistic over the general direction of our country than are those with higher incomes. Yet the Battleground Poll indicates they are more Why do people likely than those who identify as middle class to believe the country is heading in the right direction (42 percent vs. 35 percent).
  • Do welfare benefits insulate these voters from the sort of economic concerns that plague middle-class voters? Apparently so. Compared with their middle-class counterparts, far fewer low-income voters cite pocketbook issues as their number-one concern (53 percent vs.74 percent). Middle-class voters are, almost by definition, far more likely to pay taxes than low-income voters. Unsurprisingly, they are much more likely to list the economy and the level of spending and deficits as their most important concern (28 percent and 17 percent, respectively) than low-income Americans. Among the latter group, only 20 percent say the economy is most important, and a mere 7 percent worry about spending and deficits. Again, this is not surprising, considering that, for most low-income Americans, government benefits come with no strings attached, and at little or no cost in taxes.
  • In contrast, low-income Americans cite Medicare, Social Security, and education benefits as their number-one issue (29 percent in all) more than twice as frequently as do middle-class voters (only 13 percent).
  • If the receipt of welfare benefits affects voters’ views of the economy and alters the equation they use to judge candidates, one would expect them to give the president high marks for how he has handled the most stagnant and underperforming economy in over half a century. And, indeed, that is the case. By a margin of 51 percent to 37 percent low-income voters prefer Obama over Romney on this measure. They prefer Obama by an even more lopsided margin, 55 percent to 37 percent, on the issue of jobs. In contrast, Romney wins big among middle-class voters on these concerns (56 percent to 41 percent on handling the economy, and 54 percent to 43 percent on jobs).

These people aren’t voting for any high and noble reason. They want money. It’s just greed. Greed is why people vote Democrat.

Elusive Wapiti adds:

It makes sense, really. The 47% vote their pocketbook too… the issue comes from the pocketbook being oriented in the opposite direction. Government largesse fills their wallet, whilst draining the bankbooks of the 53%. They are the “zero liability” voter; they are insulated from the costs of the programs and candidates they vote for… but they are understandably quite concerned with ensuring the payouts continue.

You need to get out there today and vote for Mitt Romney to stop the downward spiral into dependency and bankruptcy that we can see in countries like Greece, Spain and Italy. We can see it happening over there, don’t let it happen here.