@plainoldme,
As I said, that was part of the email.
I have some observations to make.
The first is that while the age at which one can receive full Social Security benefits is rising, nothing is being done to protect the older worker from age discrimination. For those of you who would demand a translation, that means that while the older person may be forced to work, they may not be hired and nothing will be done to protect them. Raising the mandatory retirement age means that older workers will see their incomes plummet. They will probably not be able to collect welfare or even purchase food stamps, making homelessness and hunger an increasing problem among older workers.
Furthermore, despite the skills that an older worker may or may not possess, people who are more than 50 are more apt to be limited to jobs that pay very little, due to the situation outlined above whereby older workers are excluded from decent jobs. Most will accept lower earning positions which means that they pay diminishing amounts into SS.
Privatizing is a joke because most people are probably not financially savvy enough to invest well, and, even if they are, considering all the financial schemes and disasters that have negatively impacted the economy since the last seventies, there is no reason to believe that even those possessing the right amount of caution and daring, coupled with sophisticated analytical skills, will be able to profit.
Does anyone remember the abuzz poster who daily railed against the post office? The strange thing is that I had as many complaints against UPS, complaints that were often identical to his postal service bashing. Let's face it, all of these systems are made by human beings and are all fallible.
These proposals are just that top 1% (which profited at the expense of the 80% who saw no real increase in their wages over the past three decades) flexing their selfishness again. It will not fix the problem.
