Social Security and Me

I got my Social Security statement today. Through 2008, I paid in $218,028 in FICA taxes (and $124,451 in Medicare taxes btw) over the last 40 years or so. In return, I am estimated (not promised mind you, ESTIMATED) to get $28,440/year if I "retire" at 66 and $38,412 if I wait until I am 70. At some really simplistic level this doesn't seem so bad. If I start collecting at 66, I will recoup my "investment" by the time I am 73, and if I wait until I am 70, I will do so by the time I am 75. Of course, as with any lifetime annuity, it pays to live forever, so if I live to be 100, I will collect 4.6 times what I paid in if I start collecting at 66 and 5.5 times what I paid in if I wait until 70 to start. But these calcs ignore a few things. Like the fact that the government is not compensating me for the use of my money for 40 years or so. Nor does it account for the fact that the government will treat their repayment of my loan to them not as a return of capital but as income subject to at 15% to 28% tax (depending on how successful I am at generating income after I retire and assuming taxes on people like me don't go up -- a tenuous assumption at best). Bottom line? SS is a SHITTY investment. It is, in large part, a transfer payment pure and simple, and it should be accepted as such. I'm actually OK with that. I just wish someone somewhere would say "thank you," rather than TAX THE RICH!!!

Retirement Plans

An approach to retiement I plan to emulate:

Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days
interesting. Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and
went into a shop. We were only in there for about 5 minutes. When we came out,
there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and said, 'Come
on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?'

He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a Nazi turd.. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tires. So my wife called him a shit-head. He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the
first. Then he started writing a third ticket.

This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.

Personally, we didn't care. We came into town by bus and saw the car had a Bush sticker.

We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.

Starve the Beast and Stuff the Goose

I had a bit of an epiphany tonight. Remember "starve the beast," the Reaganite theory that the way to control the size of government was to keep cutting taxes until, finally, slashing of spending/programs becomes unavoidable? Well, the Dems have a mirror image of that: Call it "stuff the goose": create more and more entitlements without regard to costs until, finally, tax increases become unavoidable. The problem for those of us just trying to do the right thing is that when "starve the beast" collides with "stuff the goose," the outcome is simply ENORMOUS debt. I'm glad the health care bill passed. I really am. It's a start, I hope, on what is clearly the single most important and difficult domestic issue facing America. But to provide, at taxpayer expense, health care coverage for an additional 35 million people, and to thereby remove any incentive for these additional people to use health care resources responsibly, without doing anything meaningful about the costs and profoundly perverse incentives in the American health care system borders on the criminally irresponsible.