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Current Events » in reply to Analogies to personal finance are consistently misleading when talking about Gov't finance

Some good stuff.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Social Security has bloated far beyond its original intent, as even Roosevelt's writings indicate. That Medicare's role and costs have exploded far beyond their original projections is a matter of open record.

The lesson Washington has never learned is that universal entitlements are by their very nature poison to an economic system, never mind a culture of individual rights.

I almost blew a gasket when Bush danced right into a major expansion of Medicare. Just what the boat needs when the water is up to the gunwales: somebody tossing in an anvil. That the Democrats would have tossed in a much bigger anvil is not that much comfort.

Given these solid financial examples of how entitlements have turned out so far, the most obvious response to anyone proposing universal health care for every one of 300 million Americans is to beat them into insensibility with a 300-pound dead fish.

Your retirement age change idea sounds very reasonable to me, and if ramped down to apply only to people who aren't going to retire soon,* could even be politically acceptable to the general public.

Frankly, the entire idea of "retirement" is a concept that our modern society has largely outgrown. It was based on a workforce that largely did manual labor, and literally could not work past a certain age. In my line of work, there's no reason not to continue until I keel over.

Hey, I saw those fingers crossing out there!

*Exactly where to draw that line would require a lot of number-crunching. Wouldn't help much to draw it way over on the far side of the Baby Boomers.

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