Every single day, except for Sundays, we can go out to our mailbox and receive just about any form of correspondence or package that anyone in the world has chosen to send us. All they need is our address. Let’s think about that for a second. Someone on the opposite side of the world can go to their local post office and, with just our address, have that postal agency send a letter or parcel to our country and that object arrives in our mailbox.
This very same system also provides the ability for anyone in America to send us a parcel or letter, directly to our mailbox, from anywhere in the United States for less than the cost of pretty much any private or third party shipper. In fact, when it comes to letters, it costs the same to send a letter across town as it does across the country. How amazing is that?!
This is called the flat rate U.S. Postal Service, and it lost $5,100,000,000 (that’s $5.1 billion) over the course of its last fiscal year. But the postal service’s losses are not the result of the discrepancy in the cost of service whether your letter travels 3,000 miles or 10 feet, nor are the losses the result of the lack of profitability of it’s service offerings. These huge losses are caused by a congressional mandate that forces the U.S. Postal Service to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retirement benefits for its employees.
Come again? Yes, there is only one entity in the entire country that is required by an act of congress to pre-fund 75 years worth of retirement benefits for its employees…our postal service. What effect has this had on the independent, U.S. government agency? Well, before the congressional mandate, it was profitable and in the black every year, but today, it has lost money the last nine years in a row and is $15 billion in debt.
Once again, government has taken a profitable business and regulated it into the red.
Want proof? Take away the retirement pre-funding requirement and the post office would have turned a $623 million profit last year instead of a $5.1 billion loss. While the good news is that this pre-funding requirement actually will end with this fiscal year, our U.S. Postal Service will start 2017 over $15 billion in debt as opposed to beginning the year debt free, as would have been the case for the past nine years without this restricting congressional mandate.
Government’s job should be to regulate trade, not force organizations to take on vast amounts of debt just to exist.
Photo by Xavier Massa via Pexels
You’re going to have to keep working, America! At least longer than you had planned, anyway. A recent survey found that one in five Americans now say they plan to never retire.
While some of that 20% is surely the people like me who just don’t plan to stop working at any point as long as they can help it, I am sure there is a good percentage that are not going to be working straight to the grave by choice.
With a growing number of Americans facing this same choice, or fate, maybe it is time for us to take a good, long, hard look at our socialist retirement system.
By the time I am at retirement age, there will be huge segments of the population that will not be able to survive on the gub’ment checks alone, and will be forced to keep working. What’s wrong with that? Well, the way the socialist retirement system is currently set up, the more you earn in a year that you receive benefits, the less of the social security money you paid into the socialist system you get to keep. You can even earn so much in a year that you get absolutely no social security money at all.
I hope to be in a spot where I have this problem one day, but I am also going to be really pissed off that all of the money I paid into social security over the course of my life will not be making its way back to me, which was the fundamental promise of the program.
Regardless of where I may end up in the year 2041 (the year the socialists want me to retire, at least for now, anyway), I really think now is the time to reconsider all of this socialist retirement program craziness.
Perhaps there was a time in this country where we needed to ensure that people retired by penalizing them for earning money once they reached social security age, but I think the landscape of America, her economy, the world’s economy, and life here on planet Earth have all changed so much that we need to rethink this antiquated nonsense about incentivizing people to stop working when they get to a certain age.
I am paying money into Social Security right now, but if I choose to keep working, especially if I am in a spot where I continue to earn more and more with each passing year as long as I am of sound enough mind and body, I will be earning the most in my lifetime, right at the time that I am supposed to start getting back all of the money that I will have paid into Social Security for 52 ½ years.
The more I earn, the less I get back, so how much is that going to suck? I get it – once I’m destitute or disabled, and what not, it will be money off of which I can live, but let’s say for instance, I keep working, keep earning money, keep living life like I am planning to do right up until my number is up (it does happen, people)… I may be in a spot where I don’t ever get a dime of MY social security money back. And despite what the government and all of those liberal politicians out there want us to believe, it is MY money, not theirs. That means I will have been one huge benefactor to the U.S. government and its socialist Social Security retirement program.
I get that most of you are going to retire – some of you may even take the hit financially to retire early – and more power to you – but me, the crazy nut-job who wants to keep working ponders….shouldn’t I have a choice? Shouldn’t I have some other option rather than giving all of this money to the socialists in Washington, DC. Especially when you consider the very real possibility that I may get only 85 cents on the dollar back if I actually do stop working, and possibly, no cents on the dollar back if I actually do keep working? Don’t penalize me for working, America! In what world does that make sense?
The U.S. Social Security Administration has fantastic news! Straight from the insert that should have arrived with your annual statement (wonder what it costs to print and mail all of those instead of posting them online), the Social Security Administration is happy to report that by the time those of us in our 30s go to retire, we have the prospect of getting up to 78% of the benefits that we are supposed to be getting! Isn't that fantastic news?!
That means that for every $1,000 that we are supposed to get, in essence, for every $1,000 that people on Social Security are getting now, we are going to possibly get up to $780! So, when we go to retire, we just need to come up with the other $220 somewhere to make up for the $220 that was stolen from us and given to today's retirees!
Given these revelations, how about we be allowed to keep $220 of our $1,000 to invest for ourselves? Go ahead and ask the Social Security Administration that, and watch them just smile and laugh at you, crazy little taxpayer. You can't take care of yourself without big government! Why, that's just crazy. If they let you keep your $220, they'd have to cut benefits to people on Social Security today, and that just wouldn't be fair at all to them.
The burden of benefits being cut is reserved for those of you retiring after 2041, silly goose. The Social Security Administration is just going to hold their breath, close their eyes, and hope that there is some miracle between now and 2041 that will magically occur so that we can get our full benefits. Great plan, folks!
I have a fantastic idea! Why don't we put the idiots in government in charge of all of the banks and large industrial manufacturers in the land to ensure that nothing goes wrong with our pseudo-capitalist system. Oops - am I too late to stop that? Or even better, let's take our very health and well-being and let them tax us even further so they can provide us with a universal healthcare plan (I'm not making that up - there are bills in the congress right now that are going to tax you on the health insurance your employer provides to pay for health insurance for those who aren't working - a tax on families making under $250,000 a year - breaking a certain promise from a certain someone who just happens to be the leader of the free world right now). We're going to have to sit back, watch, and see what passes and what gets vetoed.
In fact, with Taxington, D.C. doing so well with managing our retirement fund, why not let them handle every aspect of our lives?
1913 - The 16th Amendment authorizes income taxes. Congress taxes income over $3,000.
1918 - During World War I, Congress institutes progressive tax rates with a top bracket of 77%.
1919 - Prohibition begins. The commissioner of Internal Revenue must enforce it.
1931 - Gangster and bootlegger Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion.
1933 - Prohibition is repealed.
1942 - The Revenue Act raises tax rates but allows deductions for medical and investment expenses. President Franklin D. Roosevelt says, "In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year."
1943 - Payroll withholding is introduced.
1944 - Congress creates the standard deduction.
1954 - April 15 replaces March 15 as the deadline for filing income taxes.
1974 - The Employee Retirement and Income Security Act gives the IRS regulatory responsibility for employee benefit plans.
1981 - Congress enacts a $750 billion tax cut, the largest in U.S. history. 401(k)s are introduced. IRAs become widely available to Americans.
1982 - Deficits soar and tax cuts are repealed.
1984 - Deficits still soar and more tax cuts are repealed.
1988 - George H.W. Bush says, "Read my lips; no new taxes."
1990 - Taxes rise for the wealthy. Observers later suggest that this hike will cost George H.W. Bush the 1992 election.
1993 - President Bill Clinton signs into law a $496 billion tax hike.
1997 - President Bill Clinton cuts capital-gains rates and introduces the $500 child credit.
2001 - President George W. Bush cuts taxes and the IRS mails outs "advance refunds."
2003 - A 10-year $350 billion tax cut temporarily reduces dividend, gain and estate taxes.
