Social Security Information Systems Near Collapse 279
matty619 writes "An Information Week article warns that the computer systems that run the Social Security Administration may collapse by 2012 due to increased workload, and a half-billion-dollar upgrade won't be ready until 2015. One of the biggest problems is the agency's transition to a new data center, according to a report (PDF) by the SSA's Inspector General. The IG has characterized the replacement of the SSA's National Computer Center — built in 1979 — as the SSA's 'primary IT investment' in the next few years."
2012 (Score:4, Funny)
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So the world will end in 2012!
Only if you are on Social Security, For the rest of the folks, just keep on paying those Social Security taxes . . .
. . . and stay in your homes; there is no danger.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the pay ins. it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme. For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you have to keep getting more and more people into the system just to cover the existing payouts and the total projected payout grows without limit. The only growth in payout for Social Security is the result of long term growth of population, and the tax rate is high enough to allow for that. You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people who have just signed up and now expect to be paid off within a few months or years.
Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy. Tell me - when people retire on their savings, doesn't their outgo generally exceed new income? Sure, some of them will eventually exhaust their savings entirely, but we don't announce that all people who retire are bankrupt just because outgo exceeds income, even though that state usually lasts for the rest of that person's life. Social Security enters a temporary period of negative growth, and Social Security is currently owed large amounts because the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress to support the general fund. Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
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Social Security actually does classify as a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes give earlier investors payouts not from any actual investing taking place, but from buy-ins from newer investors. They are also destined to fail because the number of people getting paid will exceed the number paying in. Social Security fulfills all of those criteria.
- There is no actual money in the Social Security "trust fund." The money collected by the payroll taxes above and beyond what was required for paying benefits got spent by
Re:2012 (Score:5, Informative)
After the Boomers, the system reverts to complete pay-as-you-go, requiring a stable 6.2% of GDP. Everyone's forecasts for outlays shows them to be stable, from the SSA itself to the most conservative think tanks. Unfortunately, the commission assumed that future gains from productivity would be shared across the entire spectrum of income; if that had happened, the debate we would be having today would be regarding a permanent small adjustment of the SS tax rates down. But the productivity gains for the last 20 years have been largely captured by those making more than the SS cap, so are not being taxed. A small change in the cap formula, phased in over a decade, would erase the problem entirely.
Productivity gains are why it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you don't include such gains, you simply get the wrong answer.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud -- people are promised their money goes into X and makes a return but it really doesn't. Is this happening?
I agree with the brother poster that the crank theory that the SS Trust Fund is a "Ponzi scheme" come from people's misconception of it as a savings vehicle. It's not, it's much more like an insurance risk pool. People who pay into SSI have zero equity or ownership stake in the fund and are entitled to no money back. Who gets money out of the fund, and how much, is completely a regime decision and can be changed by law.
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This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest? Most of the time that money doesn't go to someone else. What if you go blind at 20? you're going to receive gobs of SSA benefits you didn't pay for. You don't own "shares" in the trust funds; I'm sorry that you applied the sort of flaky logic most Americans apply to their credit card statement when trying to understand the Social Security benefit,
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>This is imbecilic. Do you have a contract with the SSA guaranteeing you money? What if you die before you vest?
That isn't my problem with the trust fund - my problem is with the government spending the surplus it got from the baby boomers when it should have been banking it away for when they retire.
I'm not claiming fraud. I'm not claiming that people won't be getting their money back. I am claiming that it's not a well run institution, and, once again, the taxpayers are going to feel the brunt of it's
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Isn't it amazing that whenever there is an alien invasion, they seem to invade the US first (or some times ONLY in the US). Bleh.
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Look on the bright side. If they come to destroy us the USA will be the first to go.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
They already were. Nobody noticed.
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That's marketing. Apparently Americans don't like movies and games where the important people aren't American, I recall a story about a game that was supposed to be about rebels in some Soviet bloc state trying to get the SU out of their country getting a rewrite so it plays in a Soviet-occupied America for that reason.
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That's marketing. Apparently Americans don't like movies and games where the important people aren't American
Ya that whole Harry Potter thing, it was a complete flop here in the 'states.
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That's just because kids haven't learned that particular stupidity yet.
Re:2012 (Score:4, Interesting)
(Yes, this is off topic, but discussing the social security system's IT infrastructure isn't exactly thrilling conversation.)
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It's advertising, obviously they are going to use the type of voice that their research (or just the anecdotes they happen to have heard) says is most effective for the demographics they are selling to.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong. In most disaster movies, there is usually the obligatory 'interference-laden quick-cut TV new reports from around the world section'.
By law this must feature:
The Eiffel Tower, the UK Houses of Parliament, the Taj Mahal and optionally the Sidney Opera House.
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Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs did that well with the news announcer commenting that it was an unusual weather pattern to hit major landmarks first and then the rest of the world.
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And Godzilla attacks Tokyo, and Mothra has these two little japanese princess figures that advise or cajole him. (If I haven't gotten my monsters mixed up.)
When I lived in Japan back around 1960 I saw LOTS of Japanese SciFi flicks. (Some with subtitles, some with English dubbed.) They *always* attacked Japan. Only in films made originally in English did they attack the US,
Movie makers know that their audiences are ethno-centric and state-centric (whatever the word for that should be). In fact Hollywood
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Watch Torchwood or Dr. Who sometime. With those, take every instance of "The President" and "The Whitehouse" and replace them with "The Prime Minister" and "Buckingham Palace" (Rarely 10 Downing Street). The alien invaders typically pick on the U.K. with occasional mention that the U.S. isn't any better off.
Re:2012 (Score:4, Funny)
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And if I were an invasion, I would alien Britain first.
Don't. The Doctor will kick your ass.
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Or crazy drunk crop-duster pilots with armed missiles on a jammed release.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
And I'd invade China and only China. Your planet would owe its ass to my planet.
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I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...
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I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...
Huh? WTF?
Tell me, have you heard of any recent abduction stories in the US?
No, I don't think so. That's because the aliens who invaded the US had to cut their science budget to pay their debt. No more human anatomy studies for them.
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Are you kidding? Debt is transferred all the time. Have you never sold a savings bond?
Also, sovereign debt isn't revolving like a credit card. It has fixed terms and needs to be refinanced all the time. Just China stopping buying new debt would have significant repercussions.
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The relationship between the US and China is a relationship between two parties. Both nations are equally complicit in this particular fraud scheme.
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Yep for the same reason you go after the root account on a computer...
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
If I was an alien, I'd invade France, always do the easy problems first.
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The problem with that is after you've invaded France, it's still France.
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Palin will never be elected now - Cross-hairs and the death of a ten year old girl decided that.* I used to not particularly like Sarah Palin as a candidate, but I knew she had never actually said she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fay, parodying what Sarah actually said). I knew she wasn't as dumb as some people were portraying her, and I was at least willing to listen to her message. Last night, Sarah Palin's website was changed to take down the Cross-hair commercial that had painted them
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Palin will be elected but the world will end before she can take office. I'd love to see the look on her face when it happens.
What do you mean? She'd love it if that happened. She does not want to actually govern, she demonstrated that by quitting the Governorship of Alaska.
She just wants to fly around and be rich and famous, and the only way she sees to do that is talk about political stuff, which sometimes means doing something that puts her in the public eye, like running for office.
I, personally, r
*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states. And as our unqualified, ignorant, idiotic National CIO stated last year -- something like this, anyway -- "we need to improve the computer human interface with skip-logic, because a lot of things are in COBOL binary interface". Or something.
Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far. How much longer are these guys going to get away with these twenty million dollar Drupal *.gov website projects and other scams?!
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.
If, say, they're including upgrading all IT infrastructure for the agency (all desktops, laptops, network etc), and they're including things such as training of users and rollout costs, then it really isn't such a crazy figure at all.
That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.
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Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Informative)
Now I've RTA I do.. it's just talking about hardware..
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...you forgot something. That's the costs of new personnel because of the ones that quit because they have to learn something new.
This might seem silly to some of you, but it's quite real. I worked on a rollout where a department in a certain U.S. state's government in the mid 90s. People resigned in many offices rather than learn about the new equipment even though it was going to help them out tremendously.
This is one of the problems in government agencies... people are there because it is cushy and wh
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I think you've misanalysed that. They work in civil service because they're afraid of change. When change is *going to happen* they reanalyze their job options. Maybe there would be less change to be dealt with if they changed to somewhere else, where people already knew how the system worked.
The effects are largely the same, but that actions to mitigate the problem are very different. E.g., long ago I used to set up duplicate systems...the new one and the old. It was a big hassle, but it solved severa
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That's also the problem with these projects. They include everything under the sun in one project budget, instead of splitting it out into multiple smaller budgets.
I'll bet the real problem is scope creep. It probably started out as a two year, $100M project ten years ago and every nine months the requirements are rewritten so that the current work is 50% scrapped and another year and a half and $100M are added. It stinks of poor executive management support and inadequate project management pushback to changes.
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Funny)
Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states.
Yes, and upgrading legacy code to become a modern data center is hard. Why, I remember how I struggled to turn a simple Pascal Hello World into a cafeteria. Can you believe there's no open source tool to translate for loops into pretzels?
Hint: It's a building. With computers. And data.
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem. IBM makes it real easy to not only run your forty year old COBOL applications but integrate them with Java, Ruby and other more modern languages. You can even do things like implement web services and the like pretty easily in COBOL these days, I have seen some pretty impressive copy books.
What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success. It might not be the most fun thing to write code in but its actually quite good for accounting and basic reporting processes. Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL. Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced.
There are lots of good reasons to replace systems and forklift old code. If you are tossing out you old COBOL process because its a mess of badly done spaghetti code fine, if you are getting rid of it just because OMGs COBOL is dying that is fixing what is not broken an asking for trouble.
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Right. Why fix what isn't broken in a panic. Sure, make it a long term goal to move away from it, as realistically someday it wont be supportable as the pool of people slowly shrink, but don't flip out and convert it into today's latest and greatest language.
COBOL is stable, and has been proven by the test of time. For projects like this you want its successor to do the same.
I still remember in school how 'pascal is the next thing and its all you ever need to learn..'. ya, that worked out real well and it w
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'shrinking pool of developers' problem is only a problem when you have the mindset that everyone must be a star on their first day. It is how we see ads asking for 10 years of experience in technology that is only 5 years old.
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Similar arguments are being used about IE6. Doesn't stop ActiveX from being any less horrid and IE6 the bane of web development.
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I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem.
See... the problem here is you are trying to apply normal logic. Look at this from a PHB persepective.
It's OLD. Old is BAD.
New is GOOD. Replacing old with new is something that we can spend money on and the PHBs can put on their bragsheets to get promotions.
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Oh, and note that the article said that half a billion dollars is just what has been allocated for the project. So far.
You can safely assume this project will overrun its budget just like many many many other government and defense programs.
OMG! $500,000,000.00 for a datacenter (Score:5, Insightful)
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke. And we're looking to find a way to keep this program afloat well into the future, to "protect" us in our retirement by siphoning off extra taxation from every paycheck for our entire life? The same guys who are spending $500,000,000.00 to upgrade the system that maintains it? You could buy a million iPads at retail price for that. I don't know why you would, but you could. Holy fuck.
I like bashing expensive government projects as much as the next guy, but if you are creating a nation wide IT system of any kind for a nation of 300+ million people $500,000,000.00 it doesn't sound too far off. Hell, Apple just sank $1 billion into a datacenter and Google sank $600 million into a datacenter in Berkeley, South Carolina and that one is just one of their many data centers. People love to take the total costs for a project like this and shout: "SCANDAL! $500,000,000.00 spent on failed IT project". Nobody mentions that the investment in a data center is largely recoverable since it and it's hardware can easily be repurposed. It's only development and training costs that are wasted which is bad enough but still only a fraction of the costs. The main scandal here is not so much the cost of, its the fact that they will run out of capacity before the new datacenter is ready. As for COBOL being a dying language COBOL is in good company on death row along with C, C++, OpenGL, BSD (and UNIX in general) plus a number of other things IT that have been labeled as "dying" almost as long as I have been in the IT business which is longer than I care to remember. The claim " is dying!" is a long time IT gutter-press favorite.
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It is absurd to say that SS has failed or is a joke. Without it, millions of elderly would live in poverty, just as they did before the program was instituted, only moreso, since people live longer now.
When a nation's demographics skew older, it is overall less productive and so less wealthy. The effects of that are felt in many ways, including increased direct burden of supporting the elderly. Co
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Yeah, and? A $50, 1 TB hard drive could hold 3 kilobytes of information for every citizen in the US. So, the real question is..
Just how much information are they storing here, and how frequently are they accessing it, anyway?
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500 Million is an astronomical number for a SQL database.
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Paranoid much?
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Social Security's client base is a tremendous chunk of "every citizen in the US". With records of every quarterly payment sent in for what is often a 40 or 50 year employment history, every monthly payment sent out for what is often a 10 year plus retirement, Medicare related records, court transcripts and records where someone has successfully challenged a disability ruling, all the ongoing legal paperwork where someone is still in the process of challenging one, an individual investigators report whenever
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Answer: Your USB drive (or internal SATA drive, or cheap single desktop RAID solution) has neither the performance, reliability, or feature set required by a modern datacenter.
A standard (7200rpm) USB drive can get around 320 IOPS. A single application in an enterprise environment, serving multiple use
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In addition to the $180,000+ national debt per US citizen. Just keeps on piling up, don't it?
Re:*HOW* Much?! (Score:4, Interesting)
$500M is about $1.40 per US citizen.
From experience doing genealogical research, if SS is anything like the civil war era northern army pension system, this would still be a substantial cost savings over doing it manually, crazy as that might sound.
Also from having been involved in major data conversion projects over the decades, a cost of $2 per account converted would have been an incredible daydream. Just having a final step of a semi-intelligent semi-trained human being review the converted account will cost more. The only thing saving the SS is probably huge scale and frankly all the accounts are pretty much the same story other than personally identifiable information.
Finally from having been around for awhile I know that shock stories like this are based on rolling everything they possibly can into that figure, rounding up, passing along to the next guy whom adds some more (maybe even the same stuff) and rounds up again, repeat until a scary enough figure is generated. So this is probably like three annual department budgets plus training budget plus a lifetime supply of backup tapes plus a couple weeks salary for all front end personnel (assuming they're paid during training).
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I see this type of argument before. If everyone pays an extra dollar for X then we can have so much more money for Y. The problem is there are so many ways to use money that they add up quickly. And you are paying a lot for taxes. That is why we need to keep viglalent on where all are our taxes are going.
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I prefer the argument that if it weren't for the extraordinary taxes (especially when you consider all the taxes you are really gouged for, beyond just income tax - and the increase in the tax rate over, say, when your grandparents were around), think of all the things you could do. In my early thirties, I could have already put my brother and sister through private four year universities and bought our mom a nice house. Or, you know, have covered 1/900,000,000th of the 2010 budget.
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Um, you really need to actually check your assumptions. Because I don't know 'when your grandparents were around', but you're wrong. Just wrong.
Either you're talking about the great depression, when taxes, were, indeed lower, but no one was buying houses or putting people through college or, you know, eating real food...
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I wonder if knowing that they won't be allowed to starve is part of the reason they don't save for their retirement. Sort of like the
obvious solution (Score:5, Funny)
Just use facebook ID's instead.
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I really can't decide whether to mod this funny, insightful or terrifyingly possible.
Not that it matters now...
Flash... (Score:5, Funny)
In a related story, it has been reported that top officials at the Social Security Administration are prepared to reduced the entire Social Security System to a Web App and run it on the Amazon Cloud.
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And having a web app is bad why?
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I'm not worried. Those nukes are paid for, and will become remarkably liquid when we need them.
Re:Flash... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.
-jcr
But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?
Re:Flash... (Score:5, Informative)
It's appropriate, since the entire "social security trust fund" is nothing but IOUs from a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history.
-jcr
But the US also has an economy that's larger than any other economy in recorded history. How large is the debt in proportion to the economy? How much of that debt is owed to the social security trust fund?
Year, Debt (in $B), Debt/GDP
2005 12638.4 62.77
2006 13398.9 63.49
2007 14077.6 63.99
2008 14441.4 69.15
2009 14258.2 83.29
2010 14623.9 94.27 (projected)
There were precisely six years in our nation's history when our debt-to-GDP ratio was over 90%: 1944-1949. Of course, we had a huge jobs program back then, which was pumping up the economy. We were able to leverage that momentum to pay down the debt to 50-year debt/GDP lows by the mid 1970s (although the absolute size of the debt kept increasing through that period).
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html [usgovernmentspending.com]
The net present value of total OASDI costs over the next 75 years is estimated to be about $5.3T, or about 37% of the present value of the debt. On the other hand, the net present value of Medicare part A costs over the same window is $13.4T, or 94% of the present value of the debt. As anyone who is familiar with the numbers will tell you, Medicare is a much larger and more immediate problem than Social Security.
Source: http://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0197.htm [ct.gov]
Next time, look up the numbers yourself, ya lazy bum.
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If you don't like that the social security program has money and the government doesn't, so the government keeps borrowing from social security, perhaps you should figure some way to fix the government's financial woes (A good start might be not extending tax cuts, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and not repealing the health care bill, which saves hundreds of billions of dollars.), and not worry about, you now, the single part of the government that actually seems to be doing okay.
What better way to explain away... (Score:2)
Why there is no money in SS to distribute...
A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
2) Call centers - (this is for old people after all)
3) Printing checks
The rest can be handled by less than a million dollars in hardware / software.
3 can be outsourced (paychex doesn't overburdern my company with overhead as far as I know).
2 can be outsourced and them
Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead they should try running it like a government. You need at least enough people to watch the contractors or they rob you blind.
Endless red tape is not a feature of government versus private enterprise. It's actually sometimes far worse in very large private enterprises and there is usually little or nothing to catch the inevitable petty or major corruption. Badly run private enterprise can look just as bad or far worse than badly run government, and on some levels they are indistinguishable. Look at Australia's Telstra under Trujillo as a shining example of a business that could not possibly fail due to it's monopoly status but that didn't stop it trying to fail in so many ways.
Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:4, Informative)
1) Data acquisition (who has incrementally paid into the system) - this is B.S. accounting because it's all going to come from the general tax fund soon anyway, so why the charade?
They gather that data to verify eligibility and calculated benefit payout. Don't you get an annual statement listing what you earned for the past X years and if you were to become disabled you would get Y dollars per month, etc? I just got my annual statement on Friday.
They send this out annually because if the food store that I worked at in 1991 forgot to credit me with that income, its a heck of a lot easier to set the record straight in 1992 rather than waiting for me to retire or become disabled decades later and ooops I haven't paid in enough "fully qualified" years for whatever benefit.
Also if someone steals your SS number and works under it, you can trivially figure out how much money they earn, which is interesting.
Re:A good place for Gov. to be run like a business (Score:5, Insightful)
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A 7% variance is OK? That's about $50B a year vs the entire SS administration budget of $12B and no matter what you'd still have to pay someone and have systems to make sure some jackass wasn't collecting for six fake people. Let's just ignore that it would take a major legislative effort that might cost more than the new systems.
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Enough of this robbing peter to pay Paul crap.
Too bad you're proposing the same thing. A better idea would be to stop robbing Peter and let Peter just put the amount he's paying in into an investment fund of sorts he has control over. And if you work somewhere like I do, my employer is helping to give me a "pension" by matching my 401(k) contributions anyway (the difference is that once my employer contributes to my 401(k), the money becomes mine, whereas with a pension I'd need to worry about sticking with this dead-end job for the next 40 years an
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Social security is going to an all direct deposit system. So you can cross off printing checks.
The call centers could easily be outsourced to Zimbabwe or wherever English is spoken with the worst accent possible thereby eliminating the need to pay benefits.
The data thing is the hard part. It isn't 300 million records, it's 300 million times the number of paychecks you receive in your lifetime. But that could easily be handled the same way the people who receive the paychecks do. Shoeboxes. And anyway with t
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The costs of the rote standardized execution of normal transactions is nothing compared to processing the exceptions created by over 2000 pages of law that have no doubt given rise to hundreds of times that much supporting legal interpretation documentation each and every one of which may require implementation of a supplementary system.
It's never the "1) Do this 2) Do 1 again with a different name" system that costs money. It's exceptions, interfaces, changes, specialized reporting and human intervention r
Collapse? (Score:2)
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I suppose it looks the same as when your backup system collapses. The next backup starts before the current backup has finished.
The system collapses when next month's work has to start and this month's work is still processing.
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Re:Collapse? (Score:4, Interesting)
Similar to Y2K? (Score:3)
This strikes me as a task comparable to the Y2K crisis, which was handled well enough that the vast majority of the sheeple believe it to have been a scam, a tremendous waste of time, money, and urgency that was all for naught.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The major differences between this and the Y2K crisis is that the politically-dominated government, and not profit-minded enterprises, is responsible for dealing with the problem. And so we are likely to see government gridlock drive us straight into a collapse of the system that would have been paying out a huge chunk of the spending money to just about the largest demographic group in the country -- those age 60-something-and-over, with the resultant impact on the economy triggering an economic crisis that will be truly stupendous to behold.
Consider the alternative: an economy that is strapped for reasonable-paying jobs, hires a bunch of the near-retiring or retired boomer coders, delaying their retirements and generating additional cash flows into the economy. We get a smooth transition to a SS system (hardware and software) that is capable up supporting the huge demographic bubble of the boomers, that also happens to lessen the impact of an abrupt boomer retirement. This covers more than mere coders, as the planning and logistics and setup of a number of fault-tolerant fail-over capable data centers employs a lot more than just coders and analysts.
And Obama says he can't find any "shovel-ready" jobs.
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When it takes in less revenue than it pays out, it will already be insolvent. The "surplus" was "invested" in treasure bonds. Who do you think pays those back..
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I was thinking the same thing - and it would be funny if I wasn't one of the ones left holding the bag of crap
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It is only a ponzi scheme now because Congress continually increased the number of straws sucking money out of the system. All they need do is increase the age at which you can withdraw benefits. Unless of course you think a society should send all its blue hairs out to the desert to die away from everyone else.
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No, that's a stupid way to fix the system.
The actual way to fix the system is to raise or even remove the income cap.
Or just raising rates by 2% or whatever. Or means testing.
Idiots looking at the social security system and claiming it's about to be 'broke' and we should give up on it are like idiots looking at a gas gauge in a bus and claiming we're almost out of gas so we should get out and walk.
We're only going to run out of gas only if morons repeating over and over 'social security is broke' actual
Re:LOL, the irony is amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not a Ponzi scheme since there are viable alternatives for keeping the system solvent until the boomers are mostly dead. It's only a Ponzi scheme if it's impossible for it to be sustained. It isn't. You may not like the choices, but there are choices.
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors." [source] [wikimedia.org] Just saying...
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You're offering only part of what defines a Ponzi scheme. Using that very brief and incomplete definition, most of what people invest their money in for retirement is a Ponzi scheme. Let's consider some other characteristics that define a Ponzi scheme.
Ponzi schemes offer large short term returns that are abnormally high or consistent. Social security doesn't.
Ponzi schemes require an ever increasing amount of money to continue paying off past investors. Social security has a temporary problem from t
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Yes, but those 2 dozen professional data thieves are attempting to build a system that will last another 10-20 years with increasing demands on it and a constantly changing database. Do get a sense of proportion.
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But you aren't doing that. You're investing in special treasuries (with non-standard payout rules). 140 m workers investing in the productive capacity of the economy instead of loaning money to the government could very well have much better perf
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How did they go broke in 2008? I owned stocks in 2008, they are worth more today then they were then.
Yes the bond-rating agencies were being fraud, still anyone who bothered to look could see that r
Re:Typical IT cognitive distortions... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Doubling up here for the quoted part)
1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong.
2. If he's paying on 8 months, that's about an 8.3% rate, compared to the poorest workers making only 10 or 20 K a year, who are paying 12.5%. He's complaining about being taxed at a lower rate than the poorest people who have a job at all. Whaaaaahhhhhh! Tell, me, I'm 6''5", 250 lbs can bench press 480 (Kilos), and personally kicked Bruce Lee's, John Claude van Damme's and Chuck Norris' asses at the same time, beating them severely with Kurt Russell in his Snake Pliskin suit, and I own my own nuclear weapons for defense, so why do as much of my taxes go for police protection as some fat neckbeard's (Disclaimer: Not really, on any of that - Disclamer 2: If you did somehow believe all that BS, I also want to sell a nice bridge cheap, you'll make loads of money.). Oh, and I come from a very long lived family, why aren't my insurance rates lower than everyone else's? I do better work than any of my coworkers, why am I in the same paygrade? Whaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!