Kathy Shaidle is exactly right in her analysis of the key weakness of the Tea Party movement:
The Tea party movement contains the seed of its own failure
It preaches self-reliance and small government, but old people still want their pittance of gubmit cheese, ie Social Security.
If they/we were intellectually honest, we would be calling on the raising of the eligibility age to 90, which is more in line with Bismark’s original plan: a little pension for those who were never expected to live long enough to ever get it.
It was meant to be a “look how generous I am” gesture with no real impact; the original designers never thought we’d live long enough to cash the checks.
Older Tea Partiers (and all of us) should be petitioning the government to write everyone a one time check for the exact amount they were forced to contribute, plus maybe 5% interest if that is do-able.
And then the program should be abolished.
I hope most of my readers are not depending on their “government benefits” to get them through in their retirement years: the economics of the situation almost certainly won’t allow it. There are several problems with government-run retirement schemes, starting with the fact that most of them are not in any sense of the word “funded”. Most governments have been using the contributions as a giant low-interest revolving fund: you contribute, they withdraw and leave a promissary note in the kitty. The promissary note is drawn on you and your children. There is, technically speaking, no money in the kitty.
The people who will be worst hurt by the necessary changes to government pension schemes are the ones who earned too little (or spent too much) during their working lives and didn’t make any private provision for retirement. As Kathy points out, the first government pensions were designed so that most potential recipients would be unable to collect, because the start date of the pension income was set beyond the average lifespan of the population. Looking forward to a pension would be much less realistic today if the official “retirement age” was set to 90!
