DocHoliday

An idea I read about that has gotten me thinking, that can be instituted on a state by state level or unified federally:

Eliminate the various welfare programs from DCF, food stamps, etc and institute a single welfare program administered by the state IRS (or if implemented federally, through the national IRS).

Over a certain income, you pay income tax. Under a certain income, you receive money that will put you back up to the minimum income level.

Essentially this would reduce massive overhead of the various welfare programs across the nation and simplify everything, allowing better detection of fraud. More complex schemes allow more fraud. This would be a single control point for the administering and monitoring of social services.

On the flipside - that's all you get. No more social security, no more government aid. This is the ultimate safety net that would put the responsibility on the individual to manage his or her own finances. This would probably have to be coupled with some sort of 'financial parole officer' to keep the recipients looking for work (or perhaps even coupled with mandatory work).

In theory, this would pay out the same amount of benefits as we do now, but would be far easier to manage, monitor, and administer (saving money!). Downsides would be that the lack of restrictions on where the money goes could mean they spend it on junkfood and gambling instead of food, but the financial parole officer would be tasked with monitoring these situations.

This would not apply to medicare, or any other healthcare programs.

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PatsFanInVa

Sounds like lots of room for "simplified" cost shifting, i.e., elimination of a great deal of the total currently distributed. Social Security is an earned system available at 65, for the most part (soon to be 67.) You would have people just collecting "social security" for their whole lives beginning at 20, and be in the same boat as someone turning 65? You wouldn't track lifetime earnings to determine social security?

Social security's a middle-class retirement augmentation program, as it exists today. It's not a poverty relief program. It's more of a poverty prevention program, through a deferred compensation system.

In this specific instance, it's very clear that the proposal will trash some pretty well considered incentives. They only look well considered when we see alternatives like this to compare them to

I think we need to stop screaming and gnashing our teeth and pulling out our hair and accept that people are living longer and are already working longer to try to cope with it... AND we've got the baby boom moving into the ranks of the retired.

So plain fact, retirement in the future will cost us all more, not less.

Sounds like your "plan" is one size fits all, and would enable a happy lumping-in of retirees who worked all their lives until they got old (for example) with people who never worked a day in their lives.... and both of those are lumped in with temporarily unemployed people, etc. etc. etc.

I'll pass. "Lets make everything simple" sounds like a bad match for the many situations people have out there.

PFnV

Patsfanin Philly

Yup. When it started, SS was designed to supplement any other forms of retirement income. People lived to age 65 on average and there were 16 workers for every recipient. Now it's 2-1 and falling. While the retirement age has risen, it needs to go higher to keep it solvent in the long term.

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Um, Mr. Brady, can we line up?

patsfan13

If you look at the number of dollars spend on "Social Services" at the Local, State & Federal and divide that by the number of people in the country if you like.

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Ilikehappyppl

Or we could just stop borrowing from it.....

Or we could raise the age limit a few years....

Or we could make it to were if you make lots of $$$ you don't get SS

The problem isn't they system or the government, its the people running it! You could have the best system, the best government but if you have dumb asses running it, it will fail no matter what.....The best system is the system with the best people doing the job.

Doctors, Lawyers,lobbyists, and bankers shouldn't be running our country, common men and woman should be.

System isn't broken......people are......


For foodstamps, we need new ideas, for housing we need new ideas but a lot of stuff already is setup well, its just ran badly.

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America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.
Warren G. Harding









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