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Originally Posted by Danzig
i don't know about your last sentence....ss is headed for trouble.
i don't know what the best situation would be. i have made the same point, that people retiring are leaving a job for someone who needs it. but when you consider the vast amount of people about to retire, and the fact that those coming behind are of a lower number.....and how many of those now or about to retired are prepared? what would two more years do by waiting, versus not? certainly something to consider. if it's not mathematically feasible, than it's not feasible. but maybe it is.
and my husband certainly isn't a 9-5'er. makes good money, but he certainly isn't a desk jockey by any means. but then, we're not planning to survive on ss either.
i think the biggest problem regarding ss is too many assumed it would be all they'd need. people are living longer and longer, and taking far more out of that system than they ever put in. negative ROI can't continue forever.
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Social Security is not in trouble. It's just not. Currently it's solvent until sometime in the 2030s, and in political time, that's an eternity to make the necessary changes. As has been mentioned before, lifting the salary cap would fix it forever, and that fix would affect barely 6 percent of the population.
Really, truly, it's not in trouble. People who tell you it is are either misinformed or lying to you (sometimes by lumping it in with Medicare, which is a totally different program and a totally different issue).
I don't think people assumed that SS was all they would need; I think a lot of people don't make enough money to have anything to put away for retirement. Someone working for minimum wage is not going to have money to put in an IRA every month. And SS is hardly cushy; it really is just enough to keep an elderly person from starving.
Again, the people who will be most dependent on SS are the ones who will be least able to last another two years, or five years of work, because their jobs tend to be physically grueling and they have less money during their working life to deal with health problems so they tend to let things go until the qualify for Medicare. Not because they're lazy, but because they have to decide between medicine and food.
And really, which cop would you rather have chasing the guy who just nabbed your purse- the 30-year-old or the 70-year-old?