Understand, I've been paying in now for almost 25. Honestly I'm fine if they take mine today if they'd quit making me pay more but that is a pipe dream. It's like every entitlement program we have, you can't stop it once you start it. We used the initial tax to pay people who never paid in, you can never end it after that point.
I would wager, tragically of course, that in my working life and across my entire career path and given all my companies, that I'm probably in the Top 5 to Top 10 in terms of total taxes paid for every regular FBG poster who has ever existed.
Here's my position. If I could say, "I paid a lot in taxes, but damn does this place have the best schools in the entire world and the best educational system in the entire world" then at least I could say something good happened from it. But I can't say that. All I see is staggering waste. I pay Gavin Newsom's salary. In fact, in the decade he was Lt Governor, I was paying his salary back then too. And while he was under fire for his recall, because he kept running the state in the ground and got caught at the French Laundry defying his own rules, he started giving away money to try to buy back votes. Not his money, tax payer money. My money. The money of other people here.
What no one is talking about is the entire class of "retirees" who have to basically "unretire"
Not only is that a devastating loss of voters for the Democrats, but it lends the impression of total hopeless for young people trying to carve out a career for themselves and starting out. What's the point if you can never retire, never buy a home, never do more than suffer check to check, never afford college practically speaking, always be a paycheck and a half away from being totally homeless and watch your future being destroyed while printing presses keep churning out new dollar bills.
Like most people who own their own companies, while I'm retired, I'm not always truly "retired" And I feel the pull day by day and more and more in the last two years of being dragged back into the fray. I paid my dues Shula. I really did suffer and fight. I put endless gobs of money into this system. And what was the ROI for our society? For my godson? For the children of my employees. For your kids. For the kids of the people here.
Did I really grind for decades upon decades so Pete Buttigieg could tell me how hard it was to take a three month government paid vacation, in the middle of a national crisis, while lecturing everyone on buying an electric car that most Americans can't afford?
Shula, you are a very thoughtful poster, very bipartisan when it comes to economics and finance. I'm actually in the more fortunate situation compared to most retirees. But I wanted to ask you about the impact of people who paid their dues and now have to drag themselves back out into this madness. I have my own companies, I have a soft landing, or as soft as it will get for being a geriatric. What about these other working class stiffs who have to go back out there with limited job skills or obsolete skills or can only take jobs that are brutal physically on them in their old age and health.
I want to ask you, at what point does America on an economic and financial basis, start to open up a ramp in threat point of ending up like other Third World countries?