> This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
> and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts
They were funded. But administration after administration constantly "borrows" from it, and then (in one party's case) points to the shortfall as proof of a "failure".
No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?