Liberal = Anti-American?

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Originally Posted by saden1

I am missing something here...if I am 63 and two years away from retirement can I opt-out and what does opting-out mean? What if I am 50 years old? What exactly are my choices? What will happen to the money I contributed in the past ~30 years? I mean that money is long gone and all the spiffy 20-30 year olds are putting their money in private accounts. Are we perhaps going to need to bail out people of a certain age?

Well privatising SS would have to come in phases. You have older people who have contributed into the system so they would receive their benifits they are due. People who are younger and have contributed to SS would have those accounts frozen and then could also have their private accounts. When they retire they would collect from SS (at the rate they paid up to) and could also collect from what they have put into their private accounts. The whole problem is that the money put into SS has been taken out to pay for other stuff not related to SS. If any person selling private funds did anything like this they would be in jail. So the problem is that the funds that should be in SS are no longer there and thats the reason for the problems in SS to start with. What we are doing now is bailing out SS by using current payments to SS to pay current obligations. This is just totaly backward in any type of financial plaining. It should be that my current payments into SS would be collecting interest and would support me when I retire thus making the programe self supporting to say. The problems in SS is a great example of what happens when our politicians get their hands on our money and its been going on way to long by both parties.