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Your response is excellent. I do however have one nitpick. Social Security is not a budget expense. I know it's listed as one but it shouldn't be. Social Se
by yequalsx 13y ago
Your response is excellent. I do however have one nitpick. Social Security is not a budget expense. I know it's listed as one but it shouldn't be. Social Security is an actuarially sound self-funded pension system. There is a slight under funding right now however its payments are not budgetary items.
- timr 13y agoA fair point. I just went to the FY2013 federal budget numbers, but didn't think about the fact that social security has a rather large tax of its own, and is therefore (mostly) "funded". That said, every dollar we spend is a dollar that we could be spending on something else, so I think it's still fair to consider the expense of social security relative to other things we buy. We obviously can't abandon old people, but if someone said to me "we should find a way to cut social security by 0.8% to restore science funding", I'd be inclined to think it was a good idea, all other things being equal. I'm definitely not a doctrinaire liberal -- I think we should have a social safety net (including things like single-payer health insurance), but I think we have plenty of other places we can look to balance the books before we start cutting into science and technology.