How to Fix Social Security? Expand It

[Ichingcarpenter]

Proposals abound to overhaul the Social Security system via means-testing, raising the retirement age, or price adjustments. But the real solution to a fairer, more stable retirement system is Social Security expansion.




Below is an adapted excerpt from Expand Social Security Now! How To Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve by Steven Hill, published by Beacon Press on May 10, 2016.

Increasing numbers of workers now find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps, contractors, and part timers. Even many professional jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, it’s been estimated that nearly half of the 145 million working Americans could be impacted, turned into so-called “independent workers” with little job security, insufficient safety-net supports, and poor wages.

Add to that new anti-worker methods such as “just-in-time” scheduling and the steamroller of automation, robots, and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to “obsolesce” millions more, and suddenly things don’t look so economically set for a lot of Americans.

Now an insidious mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed has thrust upon us the latest economic trend: the so-called “sharing economy,” with companies that offer short-term freelancer employment with low pay, no safety net, and a need to be in constant job search mode, looking for the next gig. One Uber driver with whom I spoke laughed bitterly when I mentioned the term “sharing economy.” “More like the ‘share the crumbs’ economy,” he said.


Long but a good read with good ideas that have worked around the world. I should get his book


http://prospect.org/article/how-fix-social-security-expand-it


Winston Churchill allegedly once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” We’ve tried just about everything else to create a secure retirement system for seniors, and to stabilize this part of the consumer demand that drives our economy. What we haven’t yet tried is Social Security Plus.

[highprincipleswork]

1. And who is more likely to expand Social Security?

[Baobab]

2. By midcentury few people will work and that will mean many people will go their whole lives never

contributing to Social Security- because they won't be being hired to work for money. Machines of various kinds will do all script-able work. These changes will be far more rapid than 99% of us realize. The sum total of human knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate.

People may need to be so extremely good at some niche skill to get a job tha most people will never be able to.

So Social Security needs to adapt to a world without work where eventually some very high percentage of humanity, through no fault of their own, just isn't working.

Money will also become disconnected from work because only a few people will be working, more likely than not because they want to do what they are doing. (Jobs will be done for other reasons than money.) Money isnt such a good motivator. Altruism or personal satisfaction of doing something for humanity is better.

So shaming poor people and denying people health care is profoundly wrong.


This change is coming much much much faster than most people think.

[procon]

3. We really need a national program like Medicare for all.

Cradle to grave.
No cap whatsoever.
Ability to pay with sliding scale
Subsidies for the poor.
Combine with VA health systems, maining their specialty care facilities.
Eliminates state health schemes, transferring funds to the national pool.
Allow resident aliens and foreign workers to buy in while in US.

[CurtEastPoint]

4. Nailed it.