The always interesting Monty reminds everyone that social security won’t be there when you most need it:
Generational warfare is all but a certainty at this point as the lie that is Social Security festers and grows unchecked. All I can say is: reality will assert itself, sooner or later. Don’t get caught short — save enough of your own money to fund your own retirement, because Uncle Sugar is going to screw you just as surely as the sunrise. Pull quote:
There will be pain. The system will gore a lot of oxen. The obvious victims will be the oldsters who have become dependent on Federal handouts. They are a powerful swing vote today, but they are in the minority. When the majority of working citizens finally perceive that it is an inescapable choice between handouts to oldsters vs. their families’ solvency, they are going to vote away the oldsters’ handouts.
Social Security only survives at the suffrance of the taxpayers who fund it. Pay particular attention to the part where it’s explained in terrifyingly clear detail that it doesn’t matter how much you paid in: you were paying a tax, not a contribution to a savings account. Uncle Sam can legally stiff you at any time.
And on the Irish financial crisis:
That Irish austerity program just went from “painful” to “Oh my God I think I just barfed up a lung”. The problem in Ireland, as in Greece, is that you somehow have to convince your own citizens to accept dire reductions in their own quality-of-life to make sure that (mostly foreign) bondholders don’t have to take a haircut. I suspect that this strategy will fail, and end in default. Which, really, is probably the best course of action for the PIIGS — get off the Euro, go back to the old national currencies, and devalue. Yes, they will be shut out of the credit markets for a while, but not for all that long in relative terms. And the alternative — extreme civil unrest — is worse.
