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  • From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] This is easy enough
  • Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:41:18 -0700

clanSkeen wrote:

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



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.

tvoivozhd---numbers have no ideology. Numbers ultimately rule in everything---education business, private business, any other business including Medicare and SSI.

I haven't followed it for many years, and given the Congressional passion for avoiding successful role-models arount the world, I know our "elected" representatives have not----but in Chile the magic of compound interest in a very few years in their version of SSI, stuffed two and one half times the wage-deduction into government-administered retirement funds. Unlike ours, Chilean SSI is not a piggybank from which government can steal. The investment funds were not confined to sterile government bonds either--and of course not junk bonds as well

A government can go two ways---government-administered SSI fund investment---or individually-owned, (portable, inheritable) investment funds. Both have merit and defects of bad individual investment decisions can be minimized. But the transition of present U.S. SSI to a more rational system would require one trillion dollars, which BushBabble carefully avoids discussing..

One difficult thing in small individual SSI accounts is the enormous management costs relative to the relatively small cost of administering a single huge government fund. You know how the prospect of siphoning off small-account investment capital has the stockbroker industry drooling all over the floor.









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