The Right Side of the News

I have been officially working as of 1996. According to SSA website, this is the breakdown of what I and my employers have paid into the system so far:

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For Social Security
Paid by you: $33,446
Paid by your employers: $34,842

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For Medicare
Paid by you: $8,142
Paid by your employers: $8,142

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You have earned enough credits to qualify for retirement benefits. At your current earnings rate, your estimated payment would be:

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At full retirement age (67): $2,159 a month

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At age 70: $2,763 a month

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At early retirement age (62): $1,420 a month

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This, assuming SSA won't be completely insolvent by the time I'm eligible to draw from the pension. Of course, to be fair, this figure is only based on earnings recorded from 2018 (2019 has not been released yet even though I always file my taxes on time) and assumes that you will make the same exact wage as the last recorded year up until retirement.But even assuming a decent trajectory of exponential growth, as one's annual salary typically continues to increase and, hopefully, outpaces annual inflation, we can still surmise that we ought not rely solely on Social Security or Medicare to save us in our retirement years. If you aren't investing and supplementing the pension with a Roth IRA, 401K, have an employer pension system, investing wisely in stocks/bonds/dividends, have real estate, or own liquid assets, etc, your quality of life is gonna kind of suck...I guess the point is, invest, my friends. Cuz Uncle Sam alone ain't gonna cut it.Its interesting, SSA used to be an opt-in program when it first rolled out... Originally you could choose whether or not you wanted to pay into the system or pick your own form of retirement. I guess they realized that in order for it to work at all that they had to implement a compulsory tax at their tiered rate otherwise it would have gone belly up decades ago. Can't even imagine how Japan's federal retirement system could survive into the not-so-distant future. Edited by Hyroglyphx, : Typos

That is correct, Phat, they can't touch those expenses, that is why they just keep adding to the deficit year after year, and it's why the total imputed to the spending of any particular President is false.

The talk show hosts you mention are actually good researchers and I trust them far more than any "news" source these days, since they are all nothing but partisan propaganda machines. Levin exposed this in his book but we on the right have already known it for years. It's too bad those on the left just go on treating it as if it were news. They've completely manufactured story after story against Trump though none of them stick. No matter they just pretend they stick, they pretend they're true. It's so transparent it is hard to understand why the Left goes on accepting it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Those expenses do not add to the deficit.By law.Duh.

Funny then that they do in fact add to the deficit. Duh.

But once again, Social Security does NOT add to the deficit. To say it does is simply not true.

No Phat, they can and do touch those expenses. They just changed the benefits retirement age brackets not too many years ago, they can do so in the future and they can also change how the payments are indexed to inflation.

Yeah, some unqualified PR flack on the radio said so. Forget the fact that there is a law forbidding it and no evidence that the law is not being followed.Bet you didn't read my message one the wingnut fantasy of SS adding to the deficit. Here it is again:There is a bullshit right-wing fantasy that claims SS adds to the deficit. SS is required by law to invest in Treasury bills. When SS needs to it cashes in some of those bills. But the money the Treasury coughs up is just reimbursement of the initial deposit plus interest, which is compensated by the fact the government used that money between deposit and withdrawal. Teresa Ghilarducci (professor of economics focusing on retirement security and jobs) explains at Why So Many People (Mistakenly) Believe Social Security Adds To The Deficit:

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Arguing that Social Security redeeming its Treasury bills causes the deficit is just as wrong as arguing that government vendors cause the deficit. Hewlett-Packard sells email services to the Navy. Let's say Congress doesn’t collect enough revenue that year to pay for the email services without borrowing. In this case, it is not Hewlett-Packard causing the deficit; it is Congress and the president who cut taxes too much relative to spending. It is irrelevant to take to the streets yelling "Down with HP!" If you don’t like deficits, don't blame Hewlett-Packard or Social Securityentities owed money by the U.S. governmentfor causing it.

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The reality! It burns!!

DupeEdited by JonF, : No reason given.

That definition looks like your definition only to you, and only because you are forcing an interpretation onto it that makes no sense. Writers of definitions like to keep them short and concise and so assume people will make common sense interpretations. I grant that the interpretation you're making is possible, but it makes no sense. Let me explain why through example.Say I'm asked at trial under oath what someone said, and I truthfully reply, "He said there are 6 ounces in a cup." I made no attestation that it was true, it's obviously not true, and it's definitely not hearsay because I personally witnessed the person saying this. Perhaps the person who said this was the expert witness on weights and measures for the other side, and the examining attorney was trying to prove he was a fraud.So when Fiona Hill described what Bolton said, she made no attestation that it was true, we don't know if it was true since Bolton hasn't testified under oath, and because she personally witnessed Bolton saying this it was not hearsay.When people take an oath before giving testimony they are only swearing that their own words that they actually speak in court will be the truth, not that the words of others they attest to are true. In your bizarro world it could never be proven that someone was lying or mistaken because people couldn't testify about what other people said unless they knew it was true.This isn't even relevant anymore because the Senate Republicans have changed their position. They now buy into Dershowitz's absurd argument, that it's irrelevant whether Trump did it because it's not impeachable nor even an abuse of power because Trump believed his actions were in the best interests of the country, namely him getting reelected. They justify no witnesses by claiming that there's no high crime or misdemeanor to testify to, since what Trump is alleged to have done is perfectly okay. There's no need for Bolton or anyone to testify that Trump pressured Ukraine to initiate smearing investigations of Democrats and the Bidens, because even if Trump did do it that's constitutionally fine.There is no doubt, and has never been any doubt, that Trump will be acquitted, but we never thought Republicans would stoop so low as to conduct a trial as corrupt as the president they're protecting.--Percy

Social Security was not meant to be a one stop retirement plan. It was to provide safety net.
Please provide the source showing it was originally an opt-in program. I had not heard that and can not find a source saying this.
I do know that originally vast numbers of workers were not included. Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. This excluded most women and most minorities.History of Social Security in the United States - WikipediaEdited by Theodoric, : fix sentence

Missed a couple older messages somehow. The words "tell" and "say" are interchangeable in this context. You've described the same thing twice. "I heard him tell her to kill the guy," and "I heard him say to her to kill the guy," is the exact same statement. Neither are hearsay. Now if I said, "The word on the street is that she killed the guy," then that's hearsay. No, that is incorrect. Fiona Hill's testimony was that she told Bolton what she had heard in the meeting, and that Bolton responded that he did not want to be part of any "drug deal" that Sondland and Mulvaney were cooking up. No, that is incorrect. Fiona Hill's testimony has been quoted to you, at length a couple times, but you don't seem to remember it, because you keep misdescribing it: Again, Bolton didn't tell her something that someone else had said, but more importantly, even if he had and Hill had only testified to the words she personally witnessed Bolton speaking to her, that is indisputably not hearsay.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.Edited by Percy, : Another typo.

Worker threw exception | www.rawstory.com | Cloudflare

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According to a report from CNN, following the Senate vote to block witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, lawyers for the White House admitted that they have been withholding emails related to the Ukraine quid pro quo scandal at the heart of the trial. […]

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The filing, released near midnight Friday, marks the first official acknowledgment from the Trump administration that emails about the President’s thinking related to the aid exist, and that he was directly involved in asking about and deciding on the aid as early as June.

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The truth will out.

Let me guess. This is pure spin. Words like "admitted" and "withholding" and "acknowledgment" and "revelation" in your title as well, are there to insinuate there's something wrong with whatever Trump did, while I'd bet what they actually said was something completely straightforward and innocent. Of course whatever he did was the right thing to do but you'll never get that information from such a description.Just the usual. This is not journalism, this is the ongoing smear campaign.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The truth will out. You won't like it.You're also behind the times. The story now is yeah, he did it, it was wrong, but the President isn't subject to the Constitution or laws.Marco Rubio:

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Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.

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