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Social Security … Help!
I am coming up on my 66th birthday in January, and because of the clear economic disasters on the horizon, I’m ready to hit it running so I get back at least some of my Social Security “investment.”
When my wife took Social Security several years ago, she found the process too crazy for her brain, and after making her choices, including what Letter Medicare option to choose, she complained after the fact about how she was stuck with things that were not the best for her.
I thought it would be a good idea to schedule time with a Social Security expert in my local, small-town SS office. Like most things here, even the DMV, you don’t have to go through a lot of bother to get an appointment. (Just because I’m 65 doesn’t mean I have learned my lessons.)
So I looked up their office hours and drove there. The doors were locked. In fact, a sign said you have to make an appointment by calling an 800 number. (There was no way to get anyone’s attention in that location.)
So I called the number and it was the main national number and therefore it had an extra long, waste precious time of your later life, messaging system, so I hung up and searched for a local appointment number for my small city, and actually found one, still an 800 number, and called it and maneuvered my way to a point where I could be put on hold for the “next available representative” and I waited through really bad music for the next instance of “your call is important to us, please wait” and then more crap music and then several more iterations of “your call” and music and “your call” and music and “your call” and music and “your call” and music and more than 30 minutes went by when, suddenly there is a different sound like the phone being answered and then silence.
Silence. And like a dummy, I waited more than five minutes to accept the fact that I had been disconnected, because I was too stupid to realize that I had not taken the hint that nobody wanted to be bothered by an actual human being in need of government services since our government servants have changed the rules, and they are getting tired of serfs bothering them in their cocoons of non-accountability waiting for their own generous pensions and retirement, and what incentives are there anyway for them to actually help people?
_________
So, for those of you who have suffered through the transition to getting Social Security and Medicare, what Do’s and Don’ts have you discovered? Any advice for a silly one like me entering his dotage?
Or should I put more energy into writing the Great American Novel, inventing a vastly popular little timesaver to generate massive disposable income for the rest of my life? Or become a flim-flam salesman for placebo life-changing supplements?
I love this discussion, one that harkens back to when we thought laws mattered.
Congress could easily do a lot of things. But they won’t. The point is that under the current budgetary legislative restrictions Soc Sec is separate and distinct and cannot just be lumped in with the rest of the budget. We have to deal with the world as it is…not as we’d wish it to be.
once the Treasuries in the Trust Fund have all been redeemed, legally getting more money to Social Security means Congress must take some action. Making full scheduled payments to SS recipients from that point going forward will require new taxes, new borrowing, or new money creation. That’s just a fact.
Thank you for adding that.
Or money couldn’t just be printed.
Ekosj,
I understand your point perfectly well: I understand your definition of the term “segregation”, and mine.
But I am almost certain that you and I could debate this question endlessly without ever bringing this debate any closer to a close. Even if we arrived at a common definition for this term, a new digression would take its place.
Why?
We are talking past each other, because of our respective incompatible methods of reading, thinking, and responding. The debate process doesn’t create any tendency to alter our methods. I have no desire (or, at my age, even the mental flexibility) to change from my method to yours: it is part of my personality. And I would be very surprised if you have the desire or ability to change from yours to mine.
It sounds like the two of you are arguing the law (ekosj) versus the fact and practical application (Mark). I think you’re both right. I’m a P3. Technically.
All you need to do is get John Roberts to declare it a tax, and then the government can do whatever it wants.
You are stating a profound truth that I have never before seen in writing.
But why did the Supremes set this precedent during the New Deal, when it nearly destroyed their very own institution forever?
Because they were afraid that if they hadn’t appeased the despot, he would have utterly destroyed that institution immediately. By packing the Court. Or if that didn’t work, step up the level of violence and the brazenness of the assault.
It was a compromise. The last of the three institutional defenders of the Constitution would live to fight again, under the new precedent: All a President needs to do to get the Supreme Court to approve his new abomination is to draft some sophistical text that claims that its class-based confiscation of private property is a “tax”, and then the government can do whatever it wants.
Or the penumbra and emanations of a new and profound right. Or a new and profound definition. The Supreme Court is a Rubber Stamp.
FDR and the other Marxists and proto-Marxists wanted to make the rump Supreme Court into a submissive organ of the totalitarian, utopian, aristocratic, Godless state. A Rubber Stamp.
He couldn’t do it. The populace wasn’t ready to capitulate completely yet.
We who believe in freedom and in America have been watching what his cult have gradually achieved since then to continue the progress of the disciples of Marx: Lenin, Wilson, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, FDR, LBJ, Salinsky, the Clintons, Obama, and the rest.
Didn’t you forget Biden?