Social Security

I thought the best place to start is the begging, what is Social Security. Social Security was originally set up to supplement our retirement. It was never suppose to be a full retirement fund. People always say it is a horrible investment which it is because it is not an investment. It is designed to provide you with basic need for living such as a roof over your head or basic food. To long people have looked at Social Security as their retirement and then when they retire they are unhappy with how much they have. People need to start taking care of themselves and putting money away for their own future. Look at it as an insurance policy you pay for. If you are not putting some of your money aside every month into something for your future such as an IRA, 401K or even a savings account then you are part of the problem. We need to get everyone to start taking responsibility for their own future and not rely on the government.

With that said Social Security is in sad shape because of the draw on it now. My understanding of how it works is this. What you pay in now goes to pay for those who are collecting it now. When you retire the people still working will be paying for your benefits. The first problem is we will soon have all the baby boomers retiring. There will soon be more people drawing benefits then are working so there will be more money going out then coming in. the government over the past years has slowly increased the age at which you can get Social Security to try to slow this down. This also is not a go choice and is unfair to the people putting their money in. when I started working I could get full Social security at 62 and Medicare. That has changed to 65, and now 67 and they are talking about making it 70. I have been working almost 30 years and if they make this change it will be like taking away 8 years I have worked. How would you like your bank to come to you after you have been paying on your house for 20 years and tell you, I know your loan was for 30 years but we are short on money so now you have to keep paying your mortgage 8 more years for a total of 38 year? They would be sued because that is illegal but yet the government thinks they can change the rules after you have already agreed to them.

Right now you pay Social Security on the first $96,000 of income after that you pay no Social Security. I think we should change that, maybe not for the tax payer but make the businesses that hire these CEO’s for millions of dollars keep paying on what they pay. They keep talking about helping the middle class and yet Social Security is a tax on middle income America. Just look at the payroll for Baseball. The averages salary for a player is now over a million dollars a year so they are paying Social Security on less than 10% of that. The average team salary is over 100 million which means Baseball has a total payroll of over 2.5 billion a year and Social security is collected on less than 10% or 250 million. Now if you only take the 6.2% that the employer pays on the remaining 2.25 billion it would equal $139.5 million dollars into social security and that’s just for baseball. There would also be basketball, football and all those hi paid heads of companies.

The next thing is they make everyone pay into social security even if you have a retirement plan from your work but if you are an elected official or state employee you don’t these people have some of the best retirement plans around. Let make them pay into social security like the rest of us do. This would also ad millions of dollars to Social Security ever year. It would also give our elected officials an incentive to fix Social Security.

Pay raise for Oregon Governor and other Elected officials

Well the state of Oregon is planning on giving the Governor and other key elected officials raises next year. The raises will be anywhere from 35% to 41%. Now for the governor this is $36,000 a year raise. Does anyone else find this excessive? The average tax payer in Oregon earns about $40,000 a year working and they want to give him a raise almost equal to this.

They justify this by telling us that they haven’t had a raise in five years well guess what. Lots of hard working tax payers haven’t had raises either. I got my first Raise in five years also this year and it was a whopping 2.6% nowhere near the 39% they are planning on giving the governor.

Their next argument is they need to give the raise to keep them competitive with other governors. Well guess what we have never had an election where we did not have someone running for the office. As another point the governor can’t just go to another state to be governor like you would change jobs. You must live in the state you are governor of and then be elected. It would be almost impossible for a governor to change states.

In recent months we have watched the banking industry in trouble and all the elected officials are criticizing public business for the pay they give the CEO and executives of these companies. These companies earn a profit and pay them out of the profits they make. Elected officials are paid by tax payers and as they give them these huge raises it has nothing to do with whether the state turns a profit or not they just come to the tax payers for more money even though we don’t see raises like what they are getting.

It seems that our elected officials are no longer interested in working for the good of the people who elected them and just how much money they can get. I don’t care who you are you should never get a 39% pay raise in one year. Besides they all get cost of living raises each year. They should spread it over time by giving them a 3% raise like everyone else and do it over several years so it is not such a big hit to tax payers who are over taxed now.

They need to live in the real world with the rest of us. For too long elected officials and government employees have been getting raises the average taxpayer does not get. I have always supported worthy taxes such as schools, fire, police and the like but if they give raises out like this I can assure you I will never support another tax and will tell everyone I know to vote no on all taxes. It is time that the tax payers stand up and put a stop to this before all our money goes to pay them and there is nothing left for us.