Time To Raise Retirement Age

[0b1kanobee]

Nobody seems to get what I tried to point out earlier. If they raised the age they would (our elected officials) just find some other place to spend the money.
I was talking to a school principal about budgets. He's retiring this year but his main point was he always had to spend the money in the budget. God forbid he had surplus because it just wasn't allowed and it goes against the system. You actually get penalized for doing things well. He is also a local business man owning a marina and a few other things.
Simply put, the government and budgets are not run anything like a business where you want to come in under budget. Nope, you must spend that money. The idea of saving money left in the budget for rainy days is a no go. Now the rainy days are here and there is not enough money.

 

[Charpress]

My wife worked as a lawyer for the state at one time. At the end of every budget year, there was a rush to buy stuff so you could ask for a bigger budget the next year. If you had a surplus, your budget was cut.

As you say, and you are entirely correct, any effort at cutting costs is punished, not rewarded. That is the government way -at all levels.

The other big deal where she worked was was the effort by the higher-ups to constantly hire new people. The more people you had under you, the bigger the budget and the more power you had. The people hired did not have to be competent, they just had to be on the payroll. She worked for the largest segment of our state government, which was health, hospitals and social services. Try to imagine what a morass that was. Her job was defending lawsuits against the state. I could tell you stories...

 

[Josh]

The real time to raise it was about 35 years ago, no? Between Medicare and SS we have a financial disaster waiting to happen that'll make this recession look like a joke. The Medicare Part A fund is probably going to be insolvent by 2015, 2017 at the absolute latest. SS is already running in the red which is two years ahead of schedule and it's set to all but completely implode on itself by 2037, that's assuming none of that money goes to fixing the Medicare problem. Oh wait, didn't some of that Medicare money to go the new healthcare "reform" bill? You know, the money they say will all be back into it within 10 years? Three years after the last official estimate said it would be insolvent, yeah that's right, that's the one.

 

[Robert Barney]

Queen Nancy says NO to raising retirement age:

Pelosi Opposed to Raising Retirement Age - Political Hotsheet - CBS News

NOTE: Nancy is 70.

It would be very good idea to give Nancy a little of her own medicine - retire her.

 

[Full Throttle]

My wife worked as a lawyer for the state at one time. At the end of every budget year, there was a rush to buy stuff so you could ask for a bigger budget the next year. If you had a surplus, your budget was cut

.

My friend is an inside sales rep selling legal books, his territory is federal accounts. His best month's are right at the end of the year for the reason listed above. The agencies don't ask any questions about what they're buying, it's literally "how many can we order and how soon?"

Even large corporations struggle from this. My father is a product development engineer. The budgeting office is rewarded based on reducing expenses. His first year as the head of his department, he saw that he wouldn't need the amount budgeted and let the budget department know for the good of the company. Year #2, he needs more money closer in line to the previous year and they tell him no based on the previous year. It costs the company more money in the long run.

Bureaucracy, public or private is wasteful.

 

[ksigmtsu]

One of the fastest ways to reduce federal and state spending would be to provide incentives for all the employees if the program went under budget, and freeze the budget at their current rate if they go under, but require approval to go above current levels.

 

[Charpress]

Another thing most people don't get about government spending is the shell game that is played against us. Grifters who do exactly the same thing on the street corner get arrested for what the government does. That is, cheat people out of their hard-earned money by moving the pea from under one shell to another until you no longer can figure out where the pea actually is. Example:

Our state a few years ago had a vote on the ballot to increase the gasoline tax because our roads are so miserable. Being Louisiana, and most people being painfully aware of how government works, the fund to be generated was to be a dedicated fund that could only be used for road projects.

The vote passed, but the pea was not under the shell people had their eyes on. What they did was immediately take all of the money out of the general fund that had been budgeted for road repairs and go spend it somewhere else. So, the voters put a new tax on themselves but got nothing extra going towards road repairs.

This is the sort of crap that goes on every day at every level of government.

 

[Winter_123]

Another thing most people don't get about government spending is the shell game that is played against us. Grifters who do exactly the same thing on the street corner get arrested for what the government does. That is, cheat people out of their hard-earned money by moving the pea from under one shell to another until you no longer can figure out where the pea actually is. Example:

Our state a few years ago had a vote on the ballot to increase the gasoline tax because our roads are so miserable. Being Louisiana, and most people being painfully aware of how government works, the fund to be generated was to be a dedicated fund that could only be used for road projects.

The vote passed, but the pea was not under the shell people had their eyes on. What they did was immediately take all of the money out of the general fund that had been budgeted for road repairs and go spend it somewhere else. So, the voters put a new tax on themselves but got nothing extra going towards road repairs.

This is the sort of crap that goes on every day at every level of government.

Works between governmental levels too. Need state funds to fix up a wing of the prison? No problem, just get a federal grant to provide a rehabilatitive environment for "residents" with co-occurring disorders (they are mentally ill and have used drugs, in other words most of them). Then you back off the state funds that otherwise would have used. This is called "supplantation of funds" in the parlance. Dont say it isnt done. I have done it by the millions and most public administrators have. It is often justified by the fact that the feds tax beejesus out of the locals so they have no money to do anything so then they have to jump through hoops to get a block grant from the feds to do what they would otherwise be able to do. Often that is complete b.s. as they are just being little piggies at the trough but I must say that the argument is not without merit. The states and localities have an enormous number of unfunded mandates from the feds and have to game the fed system to meet all their requirements. Nasty.

 

[Mr. Bill]

There's always Plan B:

Neel Kashkari, TARP Guru, Supports Cutting Entitlements, Citing 'Me-First' Attitude Of Beneficiaries

 

[BNTRS]

Wait were is all this "Pension" I paid money in the system that I'm supposed to get back stuff coming from? Just because someone incorrectly explained how social security works doesn't mean you can be mad when you found out that it's not true, and it's not like they duped you into paying for it, that decision was made long before most of us--probably all of us--were earning money.

It's called a tax for a reason, it goes to support a program, the money you pay doesn't mean much of anything for you personally. There's no trust fund, and no practice of setting aside money to help pay for future benefits, was never designed to function that way either.

And the age needs to be set a whole lot higher than age 70, it needs to be north of 80 and north of 85 for everyone under 40. Originally, you weren't eligible for social security until after you had passed life expectancy. The system wasn't created to prop up some view of the golden years. It was basically a way to replace income for those who got too old to work and weren't likely long for the world. In fact the notion of working for 30-40 years and then peacing out and enjoying the rest of your life in blissfull retirement is a relatively new concept.

And I'd like to see an old FDR zealot come to terms with that last part.