The whole reason the far right and billionaires like the Kochs despise Social Security and Medicare and want them gone is because they don't want to pay their share of FICA. It is really that simple. The despicable Pete Peterson and equally despicable Cato Institute came up with the bogus "insolvency" in order to create resentment from younger people and to try and undermine faith in the program.
Because SS is a tax, it can't go broke, and any shortfall can be handled through the general fund, as this article makes clear. Ditto for Medicare. This is why Congress is in no big rush to handle the "crisis." As long as the assholes in the GOP don't mess with them, the programs should remain viable forever, or for as long as the planet exists.
Snip:
If Congress does nothing in the mere, uh, 4,000 days it has left to avert calamity, Social Security checks will still go out to beneficiaries nationwide. They’ll just be for less money—specifically, everyone will receive only about 83 percent of their current monthly benefits.
That would be a terrible outcome that Congress absolutely can and should avoid. But it is still a better outcome than Social Security disappearing altogether, which is what half of millennials think is going to happen. If the Social Security trust fund depletes in 11 years, that just means that it will have depleted a nest egg it built up a few decades ago. In that event, Social Security will just pay out every cent that it takes in. Our checks will be for less, but we will still get checks.
My fellow millennials’ misconceptions make sense, however: Our whole lives, we’ve been subjected to Pete Peterson propaganda that depicts our parents as stealing our earnings to fund programs we’ll never enjoy. Journalism’s job is to cut through that noise, not exacerbate it.
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The NFL nitwit Harrison Butker's speech saying women should pursue an Mrs. rather than an MS has gone over like a turd in a punch bowl, to read social media comments.
Sixty years ago, those comments would have been standard. Somebody like Betty Friedan giving a commencement speech saying young women should be free to pursue their dreams of a career and such would have been totally condemned by the media and much of the public. How times have drastically changed, thank God.
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