401k or Social Security? Insurance or Medicare?

[Stinky The Clown]

Imagine if, instead of IRAs and SEPs and Roths and 401k accounts, all that money had been put into Social Security in the form of (significantly) higher FICA taxes and no salary cap. And imagine that it was also applied to rich people's welfare checks (capital gains). Or maybe even add, instead of a salary cap, a sliding scale of taxes that **increases** with higher income.

Imagine.

Imagine all the money spent on health insurance with for-profit companies diverted instead to higher taxes that paid directly into a universally applicable Medicare system.

Imagine.

[tabatha]

1. What has been lost by not being pragmatic but by following

the idealism of "Free Markets" will one day make historians shake their heads at the idiocy.

[valerief]

2. Bullies can talk busy, tired, uninformed, distracted people into anything. Like voting Republican.

And believing in free markets. The bullies have absolute power over these people when they're also religious.

[Rage for Order]

3. A mixture of both

"SSI", the payments you get from Social Security upon reaching retirement age, stands for Supplemental Security Income. It was never meant to be one's entire means of funding retirement. It's designed so that you can live comfortably receiving some money from the government to supplement the money you saved over a 40 year career.