[quote name='Prefect' timestamp='1303281654' post='4800669']
[quote name='ChurchSkiz' timestamp='1303249283' post='4800524']
A person working at 25 who puts 6% of his paycheck in an A rated bond (8% return) will have $1.2m at 65 and with 8% could draw $8k a month for life, not including any 401k or employer matching contributions.

Having an 8% return in the long run is incredibly unrealistic. If you actually look at long run numbers, you'll realize that on average, you can't do significantly better than just putting all the money into long-term government bonds, which are perhaps half that return. Sure, some people manage to beat that number in the short run, but periodic crashes tend to cancel that out - just consider all the stories about people who lost their private retirement funds as a result of financial crises. Also, for everybody that gets lucky and gets incredible returns, there will be more than enough people who don't manage this. Finally, you are conveniently ignoring inflation, which does have a significant effect over such time scales.

So sure, some people will get lucky with private capital-based retirement funds. As a society-wide retirement system, it is a horrible idea.
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Please provide data, the average return of the S&P 500 over the last 140 years is 10.6%. 8% is a conservative number in investment terms, which amounts to a typical A rated bond (which is a secured investment and thus considered fairly "safe"). Unless someone invests all their money in one stock, or cashes out at the bottom of a crash, their retirement money is going to be ok, as proven statistically over 3 pretty strong market crashes in the last hundred years.
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I was speaking from a German perspective, since I know those numbers better. Looking at the last 30 years of the DAX, you get about 5% yearly. Historical data for government bond interest rates always seems to be harder to come by, but as far as I know this has traditionally been fairly stable at something like 4%. I could imagine your 10% number over 140 years is massively overstated because of some periods of incredible returns.

Which brings me back to the main point: Private retirements suck not because some people are bad with money, but because they are inherently more volatile than a government-run can be. (Of course, the downside of this is that the people who run retirement funds have a vested interest in making government-run retirement systems artificially suck, so they invest heavily into lobbying efforts to destroy it.)

This would allow not just young people but people in their 30's and 40's to elect to opt out...
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The government can't let people opt out of social security without destroying the system, or severely reducing benefits to lower earners.


The whole system is a progressive tax, and it takes money from the more wealthy earners to give it to those of lower income. If given the choice to be in or out, rationally everyone with higher earnings would opt out because the system is a net loss for them, and everyone with lower earnings would opt in because they get free money.

(Ignoring inflation for the below calculations...)
If you put into the social security calculator that you earn 100,000 a year, lets assume that this puts 12,000 a year into SS in your name. Over 50 years you've contributed 600,000 dollars. If you retire at 70 then you can get a maximum payout of $3000 a month.

If you earn 25,000 a year, then you're only putting in 1/4 as much, but your monthly payout is $1400, which is slightly less than 50% of someone who contributed 4 times as much.

Social security can only function by force, it won't work as an optional system.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/quickcalc/index.html

Social security can only function by force, it won't work as an optional system.

This may sound very Stalin of me, but honestly, I'm okay with that. I mean, you making millions of dollars a year and you pay into a system that allows the have-nots to continue paying for your services which means that ultimately your money is getting back to you through direct revenue or through investment anyway. So what's the problem? Ideology?



[size="1"]*wow, that was one hell of a run-on sentence, lol.

What exactly would make ANY war legal? Wars cannot ever be a legal matter.

Ah, you're one of those people. Carry on.

With this many people we can find individuals willing to commit mass murders and even genocide, and left unchecked they will succeed. The question is simple: Will the rest of the world let the acts continue? Will the powerful nations decide that the actions of a few people are so immoral and destructive against humanity that they must be stopped, even at the cost of international war?[/quote]You do realise that to a lot of citizens of the world, that question is equivalent to: will the rest of the world step in and attempt a "regime change" against the US?

What would they change the regime to?

Probably some nutjob theocracy, or dictorship thinly veiled as a communist utopia, etc, etc.

That's not the point though -- I was just pointing out that, outside of the US, it's a very common view for the unchecked, mass-murdering, genocidal, immoral, destructive bad guy to be the US itself. So if you're asking all people of the world to support efforts to step in and stop this bad guy, you're asking quite a few people to take up arms against the US...

That's why cross-nation bodies such as the UN seem so ineffective and piss-weak when it comes to hard action. Once you take everyone's views into account, it's hard to agree on exactly who is right and who is wrong. A single empire with a single head of state doesn't have to deal with these shades of grey, thus, they get things done, at the cost of being wrong to half the world.