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Originally Posted by Faldur
Wow, really...
Postal Service, never had a profitable year in its history. Estimated to loose 7 billion dollars in the 2009 year. Just a general business rule, business that loose that kind of money go bankrupt. One of its counterparts, UPS, earned $908 million dollars in 2008. And contrary to a government run business UPS and its employees actually generated tax revenue, rather than just spent it.
As I said, the postal service doesn't cherry pick, they deliver pretty much everywhere. It's called: providing a public service. So your comparison is apples to oranges.
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Medicare/Medicaid will consume 19% of GDP by the year 2013. The systems is fraught with fraud and the only time anyone discusses fixing the fraud is when they want to buy something they cant afford they point to Medicare and say well we have $200 billion in fraud here that we can pay for it. Left to run its own coarse it will fail from lack of funding, or the youth of today will see a very steep tax increase. Estimates put employee portion of medicare/social security taxes at 17% by the year 2020.
Again, you fail to notice that private healthcare is in even worse shape than medicare. Are you suggesting we move from a public system that is messed up to a private system that is even more messed up?
You cannot use medicare as an example of government solutions being bad when the private alternative is even worse.
And regardless, the real problem is out of control healthcare costs. That is the real problem which does need to be addressed.
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Social Security, where to start.. the systems is broke, and will fail within 15 years unless major changes are made to it. Services will be drastically cut, and taxes will be increases substantially if the program is to survive. Social Security may hit its first cash shortfall this year, projected to have a positive cash flow of $119 billion in 2009, that projection has been revised to $19 billion, and many feel that will also reduce due to the high unemployment. Had this program done as it was set up to do, and safely invest the monies it received, rather than spend every penny like drunken sailors this program could have worked.
The SS trust fund is expected to be depleted somewhere around 2040. After that it could only pay 70 cents on the dollar for a while if it was not allowed to run an unfunded deficit. It's a generational hiccup caused by the baby boomers which will self correct provided that our population doesn't start endlessly shrinking.
Now compare that to private investment. We've just witnessed the market plunge to 50 cents on the dollar. It's recoverd to 66 cents on the dollar but there's not a lot of confidence that it'll stay that way.
So really, worst case, social security is looking a lot healthier and more stable than private retirement investments.
Also, Social Security acts as a very good stabilizer in times of economic crisis(like now). It spreads out a steady flow of purchasing power that is largely unaffected by what the crooks on wallstreet are up to. Our economic collapse would have been much more severe without SS to pad our fall.
Pete Peterson, David Walker and the Concord Coalition(the IOUSA ppl) make an argument about SS & Medicare much like the argument you are making. They are of course completely wrong and here's why:
Thier argument is based on "national savings". They believe that the government should run a balanced budget AND that the public should increase thier personal savings. This is mathematically impossible in a world that runs on a dollar reserve system.
Under the dollar reserve system the rest of the world has to acquire an ever growing quantity of dollars to support thier trade and economic growth. By definition, that means that the rest of the world must run a trade surplus against the US in order to acquire an ever increasing quantity of dollars. That of course means that the US ends up with trade deficits.
Where do the dollars come from that make up the US trade deficit? There's only 2 possible sources: the US government or the US public. So the US will always run deficits so long as the dollar reserve system is in place.
It's a rather dishonest system, I don't like or defend it but it is the system we are currently using. Thus much of the balance budget and deficit talk is utter nonsense. The real threat to the dollar and economy is entirely related to what our wallstreet clowns have been up to. It has nothing to do with Medicare and SS.
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Any program that every illegal alien in the country is on should be eliminated.
Oh, I'm all for law&order when it comes to illegal immigration. The simplest way to fix the problem is to fix the Mexican economy. It also happens to be a much cheaper solution than building a wall along the Mexican border.
Most of the illegals don't want to be here. They are only here because thier country has been turned into a violent jobless drug infested pile of crap due to 30 years of deregulation, privatization and "free trade".
If we help them to fix thier economy they'll be more than happy to go home.
