By which you mean Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Those programs have broad public support.
Which is largely an education problem. Diamonds have overwhelming public support and are essentially a scam. We need to build sustainable, healthy systems that work for our population and don't make naive assumptions like infinite growth.
This is extremely misinformed.
Social Security Retirement, Survivors, and Disability Insurance are entitlement programs, and by far account for the vast majority of this budget (along with the Medicare that most of these individuals are entitled to have). You do not have a right to it, and you are obligated to participate in the insurance program by paying taxes. They are payed for by the individual worker and in some cases, partially, by the employer, via FICA taxes deducted from your US paycheck. Other taxes may be withheld from your paycheck, which lower income individuals will get money back from the IRS for, upon filing their taxes. But, this is not the case for FICA taxes.
The issue is that actuaries have not properly estimated the costs of things like Medicare, and then Congress has really never updated the tax code to account for proper FICA taxes for future projections.
Bottom line though is we are taking in about 3.5 and spending about 7. We are well past 'buy one less bomber'.
A just system would be something like "invest 15% of your income in XYZ approved categories, or pay a penalty tax on up to 15% of your income". This effectively mandates citizen savings via penalizing irresponsible spending/lack of savings.
"We'll tax you and we pinky promise to pay you back someday... totally investing that money and not spending it now then printing more when we need to pay up" is both so insane and obvious an outcome I suspect leaded gasoline played a role in societal acceptance.
Likewise, not true. I find your comment to be extremely offensive, too.
I have 2 rare immune-mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes. I worked nearly full-time at university, while going to university full-time, while still making good grades in undergraduate, in electrical engineering. I had to do this just to keep medical insurance so I would not die.
Anyways, I was extremely sick from age 18 on at university. I was misdiagnosed, and my health problems were blamed as "diabetes complications". I found out that I had a very rare neurological disease, that very likely caused my type 1 diabetes, when I was 22.
I was declared disabled by the Social Security Administration at age 21. I am sure I am not the only one, and some people incur costs that cannot be paid for by just "saving up". This especially applies for medical care. In my case, I really had no chance whatsoever to do this.
By the way, I am off of disability now.
That's great to hear! The issue I take with your story is not that you got help, but that a government mandated retirement program should never have been retrofitted to provide socialized health care. It is an absolutely terrible design.
I'm not going to write a blog post about my theory for an optimal health care system architecture, but I suspect we would agree that a lot of things are wrong and need to be redesigned.
