With regard to social security, there is no problem. The program works fine, and will work fine for decades to come with some minor tweaking, such as increasing both the employer and employee shares from 6.2% to roughly 7.05%.

So you actually advocate increasing an already rather regressive tax. And that is a pretty big increase in taxes (a 13% increase) and considering that for low income earners labor markets are pretty comepetitive the actual tax change would be going from 12.4% to 14.1%. And last, that assumes an increase immediately. The longer it is put off the bigger the tax increase will have to be to return the system to balance.

Nevermind that if we had fixed this back in the early 80's by allowing more choice on what to do with Social Security payments we'd probably not be in this mess. And lets also ignore that back in the early 80's the fix then was supposed to solve the problem for the next 75 years at least. Nope, lets keep "permanently fixing" a program that wont stay fixed.

All the SSI has is government paper saying the government owes itself. It would be like you writing an IOU to yourself for a billion dollars and then declaring yourself a billionaire. But then, maybe that is the solution. We just have everyone write a check to themselves for each SSI payment and then we won't have to worry about the SSI not being able to make the payments.

With regard to social security, there is no problem. The program works fine, and will work fine for decades to come with some minor tweaking, such as increasing both the employer and employee shares from 6.2% to roughly 7.05%. We could further reduce this already trivial tax increase by doing something like raising the cap.

I know it's rightwing conventional wisdom that social security is in trouble, but it's just not true.

Thanks for this light-bulb moment Steve. Suddenly I understand Republican propaganda in a whole new light.

You Tano, you shouldn't let your ideological biases blind you so. The idea about lying about one's preferences are true irrespective of political party...unless of course you also hold the belief that Democrats are simply stupid.

Then again, that would explain alot.

Thanks for this light-bulb moment Steve. Suddenly I understand Republican propaganda in a whole new light.

What is even more fun is seeing them divvy up the days chore list. I hold both of them responsible if the chores are not done and if they use me to "record" their chore division, I'll enforce their agreement (I think that gets into the incentive compatibility issue). Some chores are just about every day (emptying the dish washer, setting the table), some are once a week (taking the trash can to the curb) and some have no periodicity. So they will negotiate between them as to who does what. Some chores they split (you unload the top half and I'll unload the bottom half of the dish washer) while others are split by job 1 vs job 2. They have become pretty efficient at estimating the work, proposing a division of labor and implementing the work.

Now if I can just find an incentive to get them to anticipate the chore list so that they get the chores done without my having to ask.