"the only reliable program Americans use to put money away for their old age or possible disability"

They keep pushing this meme on alternate weeks----and everybody who has given SS one lick of thought knows it is untrue. And government takes our money now, and says that in the future they'll give us a monthly check---if they feel like it.

Ask anybody who owned investment real estate when the 1986 tax law went into effect how reliable government laws and policies are. They can and will change the law whenever they see fit, and there's nothing a citizen can do about it.

There's always been an elephant in the Social Security room: its egregious stripping away of rights.

The difference with this elephant-in-the-room is that liberals don't even see it. Conservatives see it (maybe because Republicans like elephants), but for some reason feel compelled to tiptoe around it and rarely point it out.

The reason to get rid of Social Security doesn't involve a bunch of complicated math. It involves real simple principles of liberty, rights and responsibility.

Semolina:

Those "rights" have been found not worth protecting due to the social costs.

the Social Security Trust Fund has only about a trillion dollars in it

Except, you know, not.

well, in i.o.u.'s

Momentarily setting aside the value of protecting them, I'm curious why you've put quotes around "rights."

You don't think an individual has a right to his property?

No, obviously not.

Not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. I wish your comment responses were as thorough and lucid as your book reviews...

All taxes take our property. No one but Libertarian kooks think we should not have to pay taxes to fund government.

An individual has a right to his property.

Society, through the federal government, has chosen to infringe, or at least temper, this right via taxation.

Taxation can be proper — legally proper, at least, if it serves purposes explicit in the Constitution, most notably national security.

However, federal taxation that serves arbitrarily chosen purposes — such as giving money to "retired" people — is not proper. It is, in fact, a gross violation of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Besides simply reading the Constitution, here's a good rule of thumb for determining the propriety of a given federal program: If it requires a ream of arbitrary definitions (in this case, codifying the otherwise vague meaning of "retirement," establishing age qualifications, etc.), then it's probably not proper.

It doesn't matter if you and 299 million other Americans have decided to take an individual's money to fund Social Security. That doesn't mean an individual doesn't have a right to his property. It simply means that right has been infringed.

America was supposed to be different. The system of rights and liberty that was set up in 1789 wasn't meant to be vulnerable to the whims of one generation of voters who happened to be around in 1930-whatever. What's the point of the Constitution if folks like you think it doesn't have any point?

Arbitrary impositions are an infringement on liberty, not property.

There is no right to property in a functioning society.

Semolina: We need to distinguish among the federal power to tax, to take and to spend.

Since passage of the 16th Amendment, there is no effective limit on the federal government's power to tax whatever it wants to tax. The fact that Congress chooses to pretend that certain taxes, such as FICA, are earmarked to a particular purpose doesn't change the broad scope of the taxing power. It is possible that there could be a tax so specific and so confiscatory as to be struck down as a taking, but that would be a limit on the taking power, not the taxing power.

The fact that, in theory, the government takes your money (i.e., property) and gives it to someone else, does not make every tax a taking. If you want to argue that Social Security is not within Congress' enumerated powers, more power to you, but the source of money makes no difference.

This is how it should be. The point of the Constitution is not to stop the people from exercising our control of the political branches. If we continue to vote for people who continue to tax us, why do we deserve to have the Framers ride to the rescue?

The Framers do explicitly allow the Congress to tax.

You mean before the 16th Amendment? Sure, but because direct taxes had to be proportional to population, the types of taxes that could be imposed and the amount that could be raised were constrained.

"...while we own something like $8 Trillion as private citizens in just mutual funds (heck, we have $2 Trillion in money market funds)."

"We?" There may be $8 trillion dollars invested in mutual funds, but how much of that belongs to "private citizens?" Heck, if you do the math, that only gives a mean investment of ~$30,000 per citizen. And we all know that the median, if someone bothers to figure it out, will be much, much lower.

M: The average American is also 36 years old.

And the total we own is over $42 trillion after debt.

"M: The average American is also 36 years old."

And? Do you expect me to believe that the average, or especially the median, 36-year-old has $30,000 in mutual funds?

"And the total we own is over $42 trillion after debt."

Again with the "we." Isn't something like 60% of that wealth owned by ~4% of the population? I'm pretty sure I'm not part of that 4%. Are you? Your favored economic theory, after all, was once termed "trickle-down" for a reason.

M:

Yes, in fact the 90 million Americans who own stocks--41 million through 401ks--have quite a bit more than that.

M:

I do, even after the tech bubble burst.

And I'm sure as heck not in the 4%.