[Info-vax] HP stopping VMS paper documentation ?

[Kenneth Fairfield]

On Friday, December 9, 2011 6:50:17 PM UTC-8, AEF wrote:
> On Dec 9, 10:54 am, Kenneth Fairfield <ken.fa... at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> > Indeed.  Just lift the cap on SSI tax for incomes in excess of $106K and the problem disappears.  Sigh...
> 
> How about changing the retirement age? Implementing means testing? And
> raising the "cap"?

Both very bad ideas.  

Changing the retirement age only works for the upper-income (or socio-economic classes) who generally have better health and longer life expectancy.  It fails miserably for the laborers (whether carpenters, or farm workers, truck drivers or garbage collectors): their bodies where out from all the physical stress, and that added to their statistically poorer health.  It amounts to a tremendous burden on those who can least manage it.

Needs testing turns SSI into a "welfare program".  In the current system *everyone* pays into SSI, and *everyone* draws from it when they reach retirement age.  Therefore, *everyone* can feel it's fair and has a stake in its future.  Start needs testing and you'll have the rich complaining that they paid in but didn't get "their money" back out.  That's just the first step in cutting back the benefits after attacking the program as an "entitlement".

Raising the cap simply closes one more "tax loophole" on the wealthy.  Is there a problem with that???

Please remember your history!  Check out the numbers for elderly poor before and after SSI was implemented.  Before this program, a huge number of post-retirement people (that is, post being able to work at all!) lived in poverty...the numbers I recall off the top of my head is around 60% but I haven't double-checked).  Post SSI, that number is more like 15-20% (again, OTOMH).  SSI is the *most* successful federal program we've ever had!

> 
> Compared to other problems, esp. health care, it's a math problem.
> 
> > BTW, I agree with the gist of George's follow-up: the "temporary" reduction in SSI tax is not a good idea.  For one thing, it makes its financials look worse, and therefore lends credence to the <false> claims by the right that this an "entitlement", e.g., "welfare", program.  OTOH, eliminating the cap solves all its solvency (real or imagined) problems well beyond the foreseeable future.
> 
> Wait a minute. Didn't you just pooh-pooh eliminating the cap just one
> short paragraph above? Which do you advocate? Elimination or not?

I don't think so.  I think I said that eliminating the cap *solves* the perceived solvency problems (see the first quoted paragraph above).

   -Ken