Every year ’round about this time give or take the Social Security trustees provide their annual report. Sometimes they have good news. Others, like this year, they have bad news reports Julie Zauzmer Weil at the Washington Post:
The trust funds for Social Security and Medicare will run out of money in less than a decade, according to a report released Wednesday, as the programs’ trustees warned that the funds’ depletion date is significantly closer than predicted a year ago.
If Congress does not overhaul the programs’ financing, automatic cuts will slash Social Security benefits by 23 percent and Medicare hospital benefits by 11 percent in 2033, the report said.
Read the whole thing. My prediction is that Congress will not overhaul Social Security and Medicare until it’s absolutely necessary which will be too late to do much about it. As I’ve said before my proposals for reforming those systems are:
- Make all wage income subject to Social Security withholding
- Reform the retirement ages to make the actuarial assumptions resemble those at the inception of the plan more closely
To those I believe that employers should be required to report how many jobs they are outsourcing and pay a tax of roughly 30% of the gross to make domestic jobs more competitive with offshore employees. I don’t know who first made the wisecrack. I’ve heard it attributed to Joe Kennedy, father of JFK, Bobby, and Teddy:
When my shoeshine boy was giving me stock tips I knew it was time to get out of the market.
Offshore outsourcing isn’t just for enterprise-sized companies anymore. Even very small companies are offshoring software development these days. When a $10 million company is offshoring jobs, it’s time to start keeping track of the practice and controlling it.
