Lamont: Any politician that TOUCHES my social security benefits will get FIRED. You have to find a solution that’s politically palatable, or polticians won’t touch it, no matter how much sense it makes.

Nice attitude. Dude, keep in mind, in case you don’t know, that there’s no box somewhere with your name on it and a bunch of money inside. You get paid out of money that comes into the system NOW, not anything you threw in over the years. Which is the whole problem with the system. Now I don’t know anything about you Lamont, but just for the sake of argument, if you have a couple of mil in the bank and were drawing say $100k a year on interest, why on earth does anybody owe you a thing?

Programmer makes a good point about the Boomers. They will hold onto life to their last broken breath. I guess the abyss looms darkly for many of them. But as Dave points out, an extraordinary amount of money is spent on the last part of life, which is often lived quite miserably. He cites 26% of costs in the last six months. I’ve seen much higher figures. From a 2002 study: “77% of the Medicare decedents’ expenditures occurred in the last year of life, 52% of them in the last 2 mo, and 40% in the last month.”

Assuming that’s true, you could cut the Medicare budget in half by cutting people two months short. The math is pretty compelling, and I think at some point we’re going to have to face it. Especially if we nationalize health care, which automatically means it will be rationed and scarce. Are we going to be able to justify keeping a bunch of old folks alive for a few more months while younger people can’t get treatment?

“Today the Obama administration announced it’s new ‘green’ initiative. Soylent Green that is….”