On Sun, 15 May 2005 14:40:55 -0400, JDG wrote > Secondly, Social Security has no investments, so that's a bit of a > non sequitur.
I wrote bout investments in *people*. Surely you wouldn't disagree that Social Security is an investment in people? > Thirdly, Social Security it is inaccurate to describe Social > Security as merely an "investment in today's needy people." Oh, look, you don't disagree. > After > all, Bill Gates is going to get a Social Security check. Moreover, > Social Security provides some *increased* benefits based on having > worked longer, or worked for higher wages, which I would expect to > be inversely correlated to need. I didn't say it was a need-based program. But it is a primary safety net for our neediest people. For example... I just received a message saying that one of my friends, the youth pastor at a large church, died yesterday. He leaves a wife and four kids. The last time I saw him, five months ago, he was leading the funeral for another friend who died leaving seven kids and a pregnant wife. These widows and their children are examples of people for who Social Security is the primary safety net -- and it isn't even much. > Lastly, your position as described above would lead to the logical > conclusion that one should not save so long as there are needy > people - that that money would be better spend on charity than on savings. Reductio ad absurdum! Have I said one word against saving? The two places I've spent most of my life are Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley, which were centers of manufacturing. I saw the mills close in the former and semiconductor fabs largely disappear from the latter, with those businesses and their jobs go oversears. The best understanding of why that happened is that our failure to save, as a nation, has made capital far less expensive in places with high personal savings rates, such as Japan. Our reponse has been to encourage other nations to stimulate consumption, to increase their cost of capital, rather than encouraging savings in our country, to decrease our own cost of capital. I think that stinks. Consumerism is out of control. So, while I am in favor of encouraging savings, which would strength our financial foundations, I don't favor taking money out of the Social Security safety net to do so. > The question is: > "Should the government construct policies such that as few people as > possible need the safety net. What does that have to do with how dependable the safety net is? If there were only ten people who needed it, but it wasn't there for some of them, then we're not being good stewards of the neediest. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
