Homestead mailing list

["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Don writes:

> In not too many years in the future the cuts in Medicare and SSI will be
> combined with the cuts in private retirement so many will be forced to
sell
> homes and eat dog food.

Many of us have been saying for years to run the numbers:  how many, what
percent, of the population can be receiving SSI SSDI and retirement pensions
before you have more than half the people expecting to receive goods and
services while they are producing nothing.  Fairness says that if you worked
and paid into a system, or agreed to work under the terms of future
benefits, you ought to get them.  But reality is that *everyone* can't do
that, can they?    If all of us agreed to work double shifts for five years
and spent almost no money with the promise that the next two years we could
all do nothing and enjoy the benefits of all that work we did, we'd find
that very soon into that two years of leisure, there'd be very little to buy
or use.  The thing is that stored goods and services have a short shelf
life.  At any given time the number of people who can expect to be endowed
with the power to command goods and services by means SS, disability,
pension ... that is: they are not producing goods and services themselves
.... that number of people is small, it is a small percentage.  And it
doesn't matter what people have been promised or how despicable the reneging
of the promise might be.  It is not possible to employ someone 25 years old
today and make promises to him about how you can arrange for him to command
housing, food, clothes, medicine, and fuel 40 years in the future.

James