hopeful wrote:

QUOTE:
I did some cursory research on Bob Barr and he seems to have voted in harmony with my ideas much of the time. Your reference that he might have worked with the ACLU causes me some concern.
The Libertarian Party has only 200,000 members, I don't see how they will be able to defeat the other candidates.

You're right. The deck is entirely too stacked. It's a time scale of generations, and by the looks of the up and coming generation, it won't be this one. That blank look on their face that accompanies "I want change" translates to I want socialism.

José Piñera before successfully privatizing social security in 1979, introduced a package of four related laws:
a) D.L. 2.756 reinstituted free trade unions.
b) D.L. 2.757 regulated the creation and operation of trade and professional organizations;
c) D.L. 2.758 created a new decentralized collective bargaining process with a mechanism of "pendulum arbitration” (also known as final offer)
d) D.L. 2.759 solved specific labor problems and strengthened the anti-monopoly law.
All Mr. Piñera’s reforms were implemented during presidency of archenemy of left, the late Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The greatest generation produced the 'me' generation, which has produced the most naive, miseducated, misguided, substanceless, directionless, amoral generation in recent history. In another 25 years, I predict senior euthanasia will be legal and common. If you're dead, you're not going to need that social security check anymore. My father was part of the greatest generation and my generation squandered their sacrificial gift to us and the world as a whole. We did it to ourselves. We have no one to turn to except our Creator, but most of us only pay lipservice to Him. The only chance we will survive, as a nation to our 300th birthday, is for us to pull together after a huge national tragedy, a 9-11 on steroids. That is, if we don't succumb to a socialistic totalitarian government that promises to be our salvation.

Galveston County retirees don't receive $9K a month, but they're getting a helluva lot more than SS would pay. And under their rules all funds were invested in traditional fixed income annuities. Obviously equities perform better over an extended period.

I think we are wasting our time by trying to convince either the Social Democrats or Republipussies to privatize SS--it's not in their interest. Their only real interest is protecting their own seats.

For any initiative that transfers power from the gubmint to individuals to succeed it must be a demand from the populace: vote for this or you're out. Otherwise, it ain't happening. Witness the defeat of last year's amnesty bill. Right now few people have much understanding of privatization. But since most people below the age of 50 don't expect to receive any SS, there is a real opportunity.

I think the FairTax folks get this. Perhaps we can impose on Neal Boortz to write a best seller about SS privatization to get the ball rolling.

@ Cephran
Let not your heart be troubled. Starting with five hundred dollars, how many years will it take to reach one million
dollars if it is doubled every year? What legal vehicles has the government allowed us to place money into either paying taxes up front or upon distribution? Where can I find information that is reliable and not a scam on the markets
and how they operate? http://www.investors.com/
Ceph, I have been reading this paper for over ten years. Each year they will show stocks that are at say twenty
dollars which will be at least forty or sixty dollars a year later. This requires study and discipline, but they teach
some fourth graders the system so it is not rocket science.
Background on founder, http://tinyurl.com/3bn4vt
Recommended reading http://tinyurl.com/yp6c3f
I have to go to work, I will give you more specifics Saturday.
Imagine the possibilities, and yes it would be nice if our social security deductions were self directed. At even twenty
dollars a week, that is one thousand dollars of seed money in one year. This is an oppurtunity open to everyone.
Carpe diem.
Crunch some numbers!

psomas,

I appreciate the advice. Its information we can all take to heart and use.

The point of my previous post was not to be negative or troubled but rather to be a realist as it pertains to the power grab by federal officials and what that means to me the individual.

I am forty and have never expected (nor wanted) a social security check and have been planning my future under those assumptions.

I would like my tax money back though. Yeah I know, fat chance.

Very Interesting!!
Courtesy of the folks from the Daily Reckoning 5/16:

We had dinner with a fellow who made a real change – Jose Pinera. As Chile’s Labor Minister in the ‘80s, he completely changed the system of public pension financing and provided a model for the rest of the world.
We’ll let Jose tell his story as he told it to us last night:

“I was one of the ‘Chicago Boys.’ That is, I studied under the great economists at the University of Chicago...and then I got my Ph.D. in economics at Harvard, which added a little bit of humanism to the hard-edged teaching in Chicago. So, they called me a ‘Chicago Boy’ and a ‘Harvard Man,’ which is the way I like to think of myself.

“Things fell apart in Chile during the Allende years. We had to rebuild the country afterwards. So, I went on TV and I said what I thought...about how to reform the pension system...or what you call Social Security.

“A little background. You see, almost all the world’s pension systems came from the same source – Otto von Bismarck. He set up the first one in Prussia and it was later taken up in almost all the developed countries. We set it up in Chile in 1925. It wasn’t set up in America until ten years later.

“Bismarck was very clever. He offered people a pension on what is called here in France a ‘repartition basis.’ That is, all the money goes into a pot...and you get from the pot whatever the politicians decide you can have. Bismarck offered people who retired at 65 a nice pension, for the time. Bismarck knew that the average life expectancy in Prussia at the time – this was the middle of the 19th century – was only 45 years old. So he knew he couldn’t have to pay out many pension claims. But the average person didn’t know how long he would live, so he could imagine himself living to a ripe old age and taking advantage of the public pension system.

“Bismarck also knew why he was doing it. He said he aimed to make the population ‘docile’ so they would ‘serve the state,’ more easily.

“Well, now, everyone is living much longer...and the politicians aren’t as smart as Bismarck. They’ve promised greater and greater benefits, and even lowered the age when you can get them...so the pension systems are going broke. They’re all going broke – you can count on it.

“Now, I’m going all over the world explaining this to governments and urging them to put my system in place...to make a radical change in the way public pensions are financed. Recently, I was in China, for example. You want to see a pension problem...look there. That policy of one family, one child is a catastrophe from a pension financing point of view. They’re going to have hundreds of millions of old people, and very few young people to support them.

“Anyway, back in the ’80s, I went on TV in Chile, with ideas about how to reform the pension system. I was just a young economist...only 29 years old. But the president of the country saw me on television and he said he wanted to talk to me. He called me in. I said I would be happy to explain to his people how to reform the pension system. But he said that if you were really going to reform it, you had to start at the top. So, he appointed me Minister of Labor.

“Then, I had to explain to the people what was wrong...and had to explain to them how to fix it. So, the first thing I needed to do was to win their confidence.

“I went on TV again. This time I took my mother’s egg timer and I held it up and I said, ‘I’m only going to talk for three minutes. Give me three minutes and I’ll explain what’s wrong with the pension system and what we’re going to do with it.’ And I told the cameraman to just cut me off after three minutes.

“This worked beautifully, because it made me look humble...I wasn’t going to waste the people’s time with a long, windy speech like Castro...I was just going to tell them something simple, fast.

“Of course, I couldn’t explain everything in 3 minutes. But I told them that I had good news and bad news. The bad news was that the public pension system was broke. We had no money. But the good news was that I had an even better system.

“They called me the Minister of the Egg Timer...but they began to trust me. And then, I went back on TV...over and over...each time for only 3 minutes...and each time with my egg timer to keep me honest...and I laid out everything...why the system went broke...and what I was proposing to put in its place – a different system in which, instead of dumping all the money into a big pot that the government could do with as it pleased, each worker had his own personal pension account. It took some explaining. But I kept going...each time explaining more and more. I had to explain, for example, that the idea of the ‘employer contribution’ is a myth. The employer just looks at it as part of his labor cost. But once you call it an ‘employer contribution,’ the employee gets the idea that it’s not really his money that finances the system and he feels he has no control over what he gets out of it anyway.

“My system is very simple. The worker makes exactly the same contribution as he did before. But it’s his own money and he knows it. And he has some control over how it’s invested. And if he dies, it goes to his family. He’s an owner of it, not just a recipient of government handouts.

“So, when I had finished laying all of this out, over a 9-month period, I then admitted that I could be wrong. ‘Maybe this won’t work as well as I think it will,’ I said. And I said I didn’t want to force anyone to go with my system. So, we decided that anyone who wanted to stick with the old system – which is the system you still have in France...and America – could do so. Or, they had the option of getting into the new system with individual retirement accounts than they could manage themselves. Now, guess how many people went with the new system? We thought 51% would be a victory. Instead, 95% signed up for private retirement accounts.

“And here’s something interesting. About a third of the population of Chile are leftists...socialists, communists, or Hillary Clinton liberals. Even these people – when it came to their own money – preferred to have it in their own retirement accounts, invested in stocks and bonds, rather than in some black hole in the government accounts.

“And the best thing about this is that it turns the whole country into capitalists. Even the leftists think twice before they vote for higher business taxes or more regulations. They worry how their retirement account will be affected. And that’s why Chile is now the richest country in Latin America.”

A companion noticed the problem right away:

“That must be why the left fights so hard to resist this kind of reform,” he said.

“Yes...but it will come. You just have to wait until your current system goes bankrupt. And it will, sooner or later.”

Chile is now the richest country in Latin America. What a shock it will be to the gringos when it is the richest country in all the Americas!

I heard him speak in San Francisco probably 15 years ago and he said the exact same things. I have thought of him often since then and wondered when he and his experience would prevail. It is depressing that he is still traveling around saying the same thing and that nobody has listened. I think this is why many Americans are so angry with Republicans; the solutions are out there but nobody has the balls to take on the socialists.

Seems to me a person of moderate intelligence could self-direct his own investments in his own retirement plan. Really smart people could help others do it and keep our really stupid public bureaucrats away from our retirement dollars. Real Estate is a perfect way to salt money away, but you have to know what you are doing and you have to be disciplined enough to do what you need to do. Social Security is not going to be there for me when I retire, if I retire. (I think I will just work until they put me in the flip-top box.) Why couldn't a small, private consortium of investors buy and hold residential real estate for a retirement income? If one invests wisely, its safer than the stock market. Buying into steady markets, rather than shooting star markets will serve the investor well in the long run. Where I live, we have an average 3-5% increase in values per annum. Conservative investors do well. Massive risktakers can do well or lose it all. We have examples of both kinds in our market. Now that money is harder to acquire, more people are turning to leasing a home. The landlords are doing reasonably well. They can also turn even larger profits by carrying the note themselves when the decide to sell a property. The government doesn't need to be involved in our retirement plans, and never should have been. We can take care of ourselves, if you just let us.

President Bush listened and too no avail....he tried to push us closer to this type of system. And we all know what happened.

Obambi is nothing but an empty suit and is a socialist and would NEVER allow the people to empower themselves.

McCain....I doubt it. [McCain is NOT a smart man.]