If You Are A Baby Boomer - the real reason YOU SHOULD BE FURIOUS over CPI cuts:

[JDPriestly]

86. What happens two or three or four decades down the road

has nothing to do with the Social Security benefits paid out now.

Future benefits will depend on whether we can maintain full employment at good wages and replenish the Social Security system with the payroll taxes from the wages of future workers. The Social Security Trust Fund mostly belongs to the current retirees and the baby boomer retirees. Those are the people, the big demographic bulge that created that Social Security Trust Fund by paying higher payroll taxes beginning about 1985 than their parents had paid. The Social Security Trust Fund is intended to insure good benefits for the demographic baby boomer bump. It should not be needed for future generations because the ratio of working younger people paying ordinary payroll taxes to the number of retirees will become more balanced once the baby boomers are no longer living and drawing benefits.

Once the baby boomer generation has died, the Social Security benefits of their children will depend on how our economy is doing and how well working people are paid.

If people are worried about whether the Social Security Trust Fund is big enough to cover the needs of the baby boomers, they should simply raise the cap on the incomes on which the payroll tax is imposed.

Remember, baby boomers paid enough payroll taxes to keep their parents and grandparents in style with generous pensions and Social Security on top of it. Interest rates were quite high in the 1980s and and not so low in the 1990s. They are almost nothing now. You are practically paying the bank to keep your money safe and earning nothing from your retirement savings if you keep them in the investments that are recommended for seniors.

The post-baby-boomer generation will not have a problem provided that our economy is good.

I agree that NAFTA and our other trade agreements are much greater threats to our economy and to the earnings, stability and Social Security benefits of the post-Baby-Boomer generations. We need to change our trade agreements. They are really hurting us and threatening our sovereignty far more than are the terrorists.