A seed of thought is forming this morning as I look at some of the headlines and find myself shaking my head in dismay. Why am I shaking my head? The cost of eggs is about five times or more as expensive as they were a year ago. We are on the brink of nuclear war. Mortgage interest rates are sky rocketing. So-called green technologies are pock marking the Earth and being claimed to be green. Talk of giving social security to Illegal Immigrants, and more crazy things.
What are people thinking is important and actively protesting?
Well this morning the thing that caught my attention was the "Free the nipple" protests that are coordinated and targeted.
I found myself shaking my head and thinking "Yep, that is a profoundly important topic in the age we currently are in with the massive amounts of problems that we have out there. Real problems, not simply things someone is offended by."
I mean that is profoundly important stuff right? /sarcasm
I didn't want to include photos from that article in this post as then I'd have to flag this NSFW and I don't think it is necessary. If you are okay with some nipples showing up in images I suggest you check out that article and see the actual lengths and efforts people are putting into this thing they perceive as a "problem".
Now I did mention something above that I think warrants further discussion. I mentioned how there is a push by some to give Illegal Immigrants social security. This is a big problem and is outright theft.
Some of you may not know much about social security. Until you do you may not understand how blatant a robbery such a suggestion actually is. It is also not a robbery from the rich. It is a robbery from every U.S. Citizen. It also can be a potential life threatening robbery.
Social Security
While many people may not be fans of the concept of social security the fact is that if they live and have been legally working in the U.S. then a portion of their wages have been taken from every paycheck to go towards social security.
The promise is that this acts as a safety net for when you get old enough where working is more difficult and you need money to survive on. How much money you can get is based off of how much money you have paid into social security. Some people may think that is "unfair" but the truth is we PAY for the amount we receive. We are PAYING for a promise that IF we reach the age where we can get Social Security we will get a fixed amount each month to help us survive.
If you happen to go to Plan for retirement you can create an account and it will show you what they show as your payment history. It will then show you what you can get if you take out Social Security at age 62, if you wait for full retirement 67, or wait for delayed retirement 70. Those ages have increased and changed by acts of Congress over the years.
The amount you get is based upon how much you have paid. This is important because if you have a mortgage payment, and other bills and you reach the age where you can no longer work the same should you suddenly lose your home and be cast onto the street? If the answer is no then Social Security needs to be based off of the amount you put into it because it will be more reflective of what you have actually engaged in that you need to be able to pay for.
There has been a fear for some time that social security would be insolvent and unable to pay people. This reason was because the actual way it works is they take the money we pay into it and use that to pay people that currently are receiving social security benefits. The hope is that more money will be coming in that is going out.
Well the "Baby Boomers" produced a lot of children so once they reached Social Security Benefit age it was known that it would require more money than had been paid into the system. This is partially when we started seeing the age you could collect benefits being increased.
Why the increases? If they increase it a bit then more people will die off before they can get to the age where they can collect upon their benefits. The way it is setup a spouse can typically only receive half of what their deceased spouse would have received. That means there is half what they were going to have to pay out in benefits that they no longer need to pay. If both people in a marriage die before they can collect benefits then there are two people that they never need to pay what was put into social security by them back.
It seems like another way to protect that fund would be to try to insure more people die before they can claim that.
Now that you know that.
What do you think about them saying they will give Illegal Immigrants Social Security?
How are they going to determine how much they get since for the rest of us it is 100% based upon how much we put in? In fact another thing I forgot to mention. If you don't work enough you may not be able to claim social security benefits at all.
They were worried about the "boomers" destroying social security because there were more of them than the fund had been paid into to support.
What then is likely to happen if you suddenly are giving social security to illegal immigrants who did not pay into the system at all, or so little that if they were not illegal and were an actual citizen they wouldn't qualify?
With the amount being allowed and beckoned to enter the country it sounds like they are intentionally proposing exploding and destroying social security.
This does make sense because so many of their other obvious actions seem geared towards doing precisely this to the entire economy.
Now if you are familiar with the study done by Cloward & Piven then you may be very aware of why so many of the things around us that seem stupid are being done.
I am done. That is the product of that mental seed for this morning. As always, thank you for your time. It is the only true currency any of us have.