Social Security

[BallsDeep4Cash]

He could be an English teacher in Asia. All you have to do is be White and have a pulse. Well, if he got a BS that is, he could probably pull it off.

 

[QI 541]

He could be an English teacher in Asia. All you have to do is be White and have a pulse. Well, if he got a BS that is, he could probably pull it off.

Chris is the one who needs an English teacher.

 

[BallsDeep4Cash]

He could be an English teacher in Asia. All you have to do is be White and have a pulse. Well, if he got a BS that is, he could probably pull it off.

Chris is the one who needs an English teacher.

Very true, but there are a lot of White guys in Asia with little qualification, some with little control of the English language or self-control for that matter, that are teaching as ESL teachers right now.

 

[shutupman]

Barb won't let him out for more than a few hours close to home; there is no Glorious Nippon in Chris' future.

 

[BallsDeep4Cash]

Too bad. He would have been an attraction once I start my All-Blacks boxing promotion in Asia.

 

[Bgheff]

People get pissed because social security doesn't really work the way it supposed to. In theory the government puts aside the SS money it taxes just for social security payments. the government spends the money you put aside on whatever it wants and pays the current generation that needs it what they can. People now are more pissed off about it because they will likely pay into social security most of their working career and never get any because the government wants to cancel it by the time they would use it. If social security worked as it was supposed to I would get social security payments when I retire, having paid the tax in my working years. Chris is just a leech, what Bob and Barb paid they get back in their checks.

 

[JULAY]

He could be an English teacher in Asia. All you have to do is be White and have a pulse. Well, if he got a BS that is, he could probably pull it off.

Chris is the one who needs an English teacher.

Very true, but there are a lot of White guys in Asia with little qualification, some with little control of the English language or self-control for that matter, that are teaching as ESL teachers right now.

Yep. And those white guys get them lots of that sweet azn china. We should inform Chris of this fact. Either Tardrage will result, or the CWC in the Far East saga will begin.

 

[Smokedaddy]

People get pissed because social security doesn't really work the way it supposed to. In theory the government puts aside the SS money it taxes just for social security payments. the government spends the money you put aside on whatever it wants and pays the current generation that needs it what they can. People now are more pissed off about it because they will likely pay into social security most of their working career and never get any because the government wants to cancel it by the time they would use it. If social security worked as it was supposed to I would get social security payments when I retire, having paid the tax in my working years. Chris is just a leech, what Bob and Barb paid they get back in their checks.

Sort of. The government can't touch the Social Security money (a.k.a. people paid in FICA taxes) for anything except administering Social Security itself and payments to people that qualify to draw on it, for example retirees or the disabled. It's not as if they can build highways or buy airplanes with it. Benefits are paid out on a scale partially determined by how much you paid in and a base rate that's adjusted for inflation every year. People that paid in starting (say) 45 years ago who are now reaching retirement age weren't making nearly as much money on average as people do today, so the system generally pays someone more than it took in from them. In 1967, $30,000 was a fat income. An absolute movie-star grade mansion would run you $100,000, too. It cost less to live, people made less, and paid less tax. Today's benefits for a new retiree are based around the current cost of living, which is a whole lot more. A new retiree that draws benefits for 20 years will take out much more than they paid in. Benefits also include Medicare, and the cost of medical treatment and drugs has gone up a fuckton since most people started paying in. The tax money is in what amounts to a trust so it gets invested and hopefully makes more money to keep the whole thing afloat, but outgo is still > income. (An insurance policy works kind of the same way -- the insurance company invests the money so it can pay out what it needs to and hopefully profit, but it absolutely has to stay liquid.)

The system is running out of money because the benefits paid to the average person are much greater than the tax they paid in plus whatever the fund has earned on that money. The time is coming up when the line crosses zero (I forget what year, 2032 or something). Who knows what'll happen then, but they'll have to figure out something.

In the interest of full disclosure, I draw disability benefits and Medicare. My tugboat is a few times Chris's but that's because I was paying tax on a six-figure salary. What they've paid me in benefits (and to cover medical expenses via Medicare) is about at the break-even point now. I hope to get the hell off the bandwagon and back to work ASAP ('cause even the highest benefits bracket isn't enough to put in your ear, plus I'm sick of being bored + broke all the time) but even so (assuming I actually retire when I'm 68 or whatever and draw a few years' benefits) they're going to take a loss on me. Still, that was the god-damned deal with FICA tax. No way in hell it would have made it through Congress if it were just another income tax spent on whatever the government felt like. There's a case to be made for the Libertarian view that they should let you keep your money and worry about your own retirement (the theory is that you could do a better job than the government can with your money because the government pretty much sucks at everything), but in reality practically no one would. Also, that catastrophic thing sometimes happens where you really need a fallback. (Case in point: me.) It bugged me for a while to accept the benefits, but when I saw the medical bill I figured hell, they pried the taxes out of my hide for decades and now they can hold up their end of the deal.

 

[PolterBob]

Uh, point of fact: when you pay into Social Security the government does not set it aside for when you retire.

People who get pissed over Chris wasting their "hard-earned dollars" are justified because the money that Bob and Barb paid into it long ago was also used up long ago by other people.

Yes, this is all correct. But I'm afraid this still misses the point I was trying to make, so let me try to explain it one last time.

People get mad that CWC uses up resources. They blame him for being a miserable manchild piece of shit good for nothing waste of life, and they also blame Bob and Barb for raising him to be so terrible. So let's go with that for the sake of argument. Let's agree that Bob and Barb are rotten people, and that Chris was the inevitable product of their lives misspent.

Let's now imagine a hypothetical world where Bob and Barb and Chris never existed. Now we don't have Chris being a welfare leech! Think of all of that money that can go to far more deserving cases and causes.

But, wait a second. As we established earlier in this thread, Bob and Barb worked their entire lives and put money into the system that Chris now collects from. If they had never existed, the system would be that much poorer as a result. So, in the end, it kind of comes out as a wash! Now do you see what I was getting at?

Of course, I could be completely wrong from a sheer numerical standpoint. As I said up front in the very first post of this thread, I do not know how much individuals like Barb and Bob would have put into SS over the course of their careers, and I didn't bother to run the numbers for how much Chris has collected so far. I'm sure that if he hasn't already burned through the contribution of his parents, he will do so over time. Or maybe he had already negated their lifetime contributions within the first year he was collecting. I really don't know. The point was, though, that Barb and Bob and Chris probably haven't managed to cheat the system and steal "OUR hard earned money" quite as badly as a lot of people angrily proclaim. For every dollar they've taken out of it, you have to consider that they also put many into it. That's all I was trying to say.

If Bob never existed, we would never have plastic bottles or plastic funnels!!!!
What kind of a sick dystopian Hellscape are you trying to condemn us to, you monster???

But actually, the money that Bob & Barb paid into Social Security was already spent within a year by the oldsters of that era. The money Chris is drawing now is from the money paid by TODAY'S taxpayers.

I want there to be a Social Security Disability system in place should I ever need it, but it really does annoy me that Chris is showing that he's wasting it on games that he doesn't even play.

 

[Holdek]

But, wait a second. As we established earlier in this thread, Bob and Barb worked their entire lives and put money into the system that Chris now collects from. If they had never existed, the system would be that much poorer as a result. So, in the end, it kind of comes out as a wash! Now do you see what I was getting at?

Not really, because people's gripe is not at the Chandler Family's use of SS, but rather Chris', specifically, use of it.

He could be an English teacher in Asia. All you have to do is be White and have a pulse. Well, if he got a BS that is, he could probably pull it off.

[cwc]Chris and English[/cwc]

People get pissed because social security doesn't really work the way it supposed to. In theory the government puts aside the SS money it taxes just for social security payments. the government spends the money you put aside on whatever it wants and pays the current generation that needs it what they can. People now are more pissed off about it because they will likely pay into social security most of their working career and never get any because the government wants to cancel it by the time they would use it. If social security worked as it was supposed to I would get social security payments when I retire, having paid the tax in my working years. Chris is just a leech, what Bob and Barb paid they get back in their checks.

Sort of. The government can't touch the Social Security money (a.k.a. people paid in FICA taxes) for anything except administering Social Security itself and payments to people that qualify to draw on it, for example retirees or the disabled. It's not as if they can build highways or buy airplanes with it. Benefits are paid out on a scale partially determined by how much you paid in and a base rate that's adjusted for inflation every year. People that paid in starting (say) 45 years ago who are now reaching retirement age weren't making nearly as much money on average as people do today, so the system generally pays someone more than it took in from them. In 1967, $30,000 was a fat income. An absolute movie-star grade mansion would run you $100,000, too. It cost less to live, people made less, and paid less tax. Today's benefits for a new retiree are based around the current cost of living, which is a whole lot more. A new retiree that draws benefits for 20 years will take out much more than they paid in. Benefits also include Medicare, and the cost of medical treatment and drugs has gone up a fuckton since most people started paying in. The tax money is in what amounts to a trust so it gets invested and hopefully makes more money to keep the whole thing afloat, but outgo is still > income. (An insurance policy works kind of the same way -- the insurance company invests the money so it can pay out what it needs to and hopefully profit, but it absolutely has to stay liquid.)

The system is running out of money because the benefits paid to the average person are much greater than the tax they paid in plus whatever the fund has earned on that money. The time is coming up when the line crosses zero (I forget what year, 2032 or something). Who knows what'll happen then, but they'll have to figure out something.

In the interest of full disclosure, I draw disability benefits and Medicare. My tugboat is a few times Chris's but that's because I was paying tax on a six-figure salary. What they've paid me in benefits (and to cover medical expenses via Medicare) is about at the break-even point now. I hope to get the hell off the bandwagon and back to work ASAP ('cause even the highest benefits bracket isn't enough to put in your ear, plus I'm sick of being bored + broke all the time) but even so (assuming I actually retire when I'm 68 or whatever and draw a few years' benefits) they're going to take a loss on me. Still, that was the god-damned deal with FICA tax. No way in hell it would have made it through Congress if it were just another income tax spent on whatever the government felt like. There's a case to be made for the Libertarian view that they should let you keep your money and worry about your own retirement (the theory is that you could do a better job than the government can with your money because the government pretty much sucks at everything), but in reality practically no one would. Also, that catastrophic thing sometimes happens where you really need a fallback. (Case in point: me.) It bugged me for a while to accept the benefits, but when I saw the medical bill I figured hell, they pried the taxes out of my hide for decades and now they can hold up their end of the deal.

Yeah. I mean, like I said, and what a lot of people in this country seem to forget: it's insurance. You paid your premiums (in the form of FICA) and now you are filing claims (so to speak, in the form of tugboat).

 

[IceBeam]

You know, Chris is not unique among welfare leeches.

When looking at the moral aspects of the tugboat, we need to add together points that have already been made.

One, Chris was able to work at one point, possibly. Now, after over a decade of unemployment, and with a criminal record, plus the autism, he is not a very attractive option for a prospective employer.

Two, as stated, many of us would rather have him receive the tugboat and stay (mostly) cloistered away at 14BC than running amok and wasting an employer's time and money. In other words, we're willing to have our tax money spent on his ass than deal with the alternative.

Third, a point I don't think I saw anybody mention (though I could have missed it), is that the tugboat is simply meant to be a supplement to a shitty income, and the idea is that the two together would equal the pay of a normal lower-income job, allowing Chris to theoretically live on his own. This point is important for two reasons. One, because the kind of job that Chris would almost certainly have would fall into the category of minimum wage, part-time, and shitty, so he would still get the tugboat. Two, he's been getting the tugboat rather than full-blown welfare, so therefore Borb has covered the rest of his expenses (stuff besides video games, toys, porn, and dildos). That being said, he will be on welfare-proper after Barb dies, most likely, but since he's spent all this time getting only the supplementary check rather than actual welfare, he's cost the system less than he potentially could.

Also, about the moral perspective of Chris volunteering, getting a shitty job, or just being more responsible with the tugboat: I feel that, with all the other shit he's done (spreading rumors about Snyder, the vehicle incident, the Megan art), the tugboat is not among his greatest moral failings, and simply being responsible with it- or even getting a job- would not make him a better person in my eyes.