> I can hardly think that people controlling their own money, and > getting a decent rate of return on it, is a bad thing. Still, no real > problems with the program? It can hardly be said to pay a liveable > amount of money to seniors today. I call that a problem. (Why am I getting dragged into this? Why?)
My problem with this issue is that it's not as clear cut as either side would have us believe. Do I believe that I am better equipped to handle my own money than the government is? Yes. Are most Linux users (an above average lot in my experience, intelligence-wise)? Yes. But is the average citizen? No. The problem is that privatizing social security doesn't really take the burden off of The Government. For those of us who are careful with our money, it does, assuming nothing unforseen happens (for example, how many people saw Enron happening BEFORE it happened? Even the SMART people trusted the financial companies which were, even just months before the crash, giving Enron a steady "buy" rating). But suppose there's another huge stock market crash? Or imagine the results when folks with the financial acumen of peanut butter go trying to manage their retirement money? Yes, it's theirs to do so, but if they squander it on foolish investments, then at retirement age, instead of ending up on the SS rolls, they end up on the Welfare rolls, and it still comes out of The Government's pocket. The solution to THAT would be for the "privatization" to limit the use of the money to certain approved funds, but then we open it up to all sorts of complaints by people who feel they could do better than the approved funds could do, to say nothing of the brouhaha involved when one company's funds get chosen and another's similar funds are not. I don't really like the current situation, but as with a lot of government, sometimes a bad solution in theory turns out to be in practice much better (in terms of workability) than the others. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Linux discussion. This rant brought to you by a guy who really should be working. --Will. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
