Nobody on this board really gets it. You are all concerned with money. But, money is merely a representation of goods and services available. Money is how we allocate those goods and services.
In many ways, pulling the money from one account and putting it into another is all smoke and mirrors. If you privatize SS, you will not likely get the returns in real dollars from private markets that have been the historical norm, unless… unless the money privatization stokes productivity so that more goods and services are produced. No doubt, it would, to some extent, but enough to support the incipient burgeoning leisure class? Probably not, and unless there is some deux ex machina ready to leap out onto the stage through, e.g., limitless fusion energy or some other great advance, we are f___’ed.
This is the fundamental, underlying issue. In the very near future, we are going to have to produce a lot more goods and services with fewer workers. The ONLY way that can happen is with massive increases in productivity. It doesn’t matter if it is a federal dollar or a private dollar, if the goods and services are not there to buy, the dollars will not be worth as much. There are no shell games you can play with the money that will change that reality.
That is why our policies should be geared toward growth. The more goods and services there are available, the more the same supply of dollars is worth, and the more wealthy is the society.
Unfortunately, we are currently massively indebting ourselves, significantly to foreign borrowers, in a non-growth oriented fashion. That means that we must siphon off an increasing share of the goods and services we can produce to foreign lands. Obamaconomics will reap its full reward when the US becomes a sweat shop to produce goods and services for Asian creditors.
