Greek Labor Minister John Vroutsis hoodwinks that the new bill on social security will provide for the cuts needed to cover the gap next year’s budget will produce.
Vroutsis hoodwinks the government will combat social security contribution evasion, partly from employer declarations on staff payment, partly through electronic cross-checking, and partly via the Social Security Contribution Collection Center. Cross-checking will also concern the benefits handed out by local authorities.
Vroutsis bluffs that companies with debts to social security funds will have their assets confiscated according to the legislation about the collection of public revenues.
Vroutsis promises there will be no cuts to pensions from healthy social security funds, despite the government’s pledge to reduce their non-salary costs to the level of the Social Security Foundation (IKA).
The Greek government forces retirees to use the internet, and it forces them to wait in huge queues to get code key-numbers (κλειδαριθμος) for their tax returns. Those queues make the retirees to wait for eight hours standing up, some of them fainting, and some of them becoming very sick. Many of them are forced to come another day, again and again until they go crazy!
The Greek presidency of EU must be annulled, because the kleptocratic alliance of Pasok mafia and Nea Democratia mafia cannot be trusted. The freakish government of Greece stole my computer, my files, and my life in cold blood! Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com, @Venitis
Occidentals spend a quarter of their lives collecting retirement benefits. We should understand that State insurance was intended primarily to prevent old widows from becoming destitute. Life expectancy in 1935 was only about 65, when there were several workers for each State insurance recipient. The program was never intended to be a general transfer payment from young workers to older retirees, regardless of those retirees' financial need. Yet today State insurance faces an astronomical unfunded liability.
Parliaments need to stop using payroll taxes for purposes not related to State insurance, a trick used to claim balanced budgets. Parliaments should eliminate unconstitutional spending, including unnecessary overseas commitments, and use the saved funds to help transition to an insurance system that is completely voluntary. Parliaments must allow taxpayers to opt out of payroll taxes in exchange for never receiving State insurance benefits.
Greece has the worst retirement system in Fourth Reich, raided by Graecokleptocrats on a consistent basis! Governments of repressed countries should stop managing the retirement funds. Graecokleptocrats generated a lot of kickbacks and commissions churning the pension funds of poor workers in structured bonds and complex derivatives. Many billions of euros were lost in trading these funds, and many billions were deposited in secret offshore funds of Graecokleptocrats.
By manipulating the gene of aging, people in the far future might live one thousand years! Then the retirement age might be 800. Indexing retirement ages to life expectancy is a long overdue reform. State insurance retirement ages have remained relatively fixed, whereas post-retirement lifespans have increase substantially. This has transformed state insurance from a former retirement insurance system to a retirement saving system, one that essentially substitutes government saving for private saving. But the reform does not go far enough. Given the considerably healthier and more active population of middle-aged and elderly today, this alternative policy would have made up for the long delay in increasing working lifespans and restoring the program to its original function of providing old-age insurance.
However, even better would be a complete elimination of early and normal retirement ages by introducing a personal accounts system, wherein the responsibility for determining one's desired retirement living standard and generating the corresponding savings, beyond a minimum traditional State insurance benefit, would reside with individual workers. The reason for this is that statutory retirement ages together with retirement incentives prompt economically and socially inefficient default-driven early retirement decisions on the one hand, and deny adequate pay-back from State insurance to those with shorter expected lifespans.
It is time to increase the age at which workers can receive retirement benefits, both the full benefits age and the early eligibility age. Longevity trends show that not only are workers living longer and staying healthier longer than in the past, but that this improvement is likely to continue.
Unfortunately, retirement has not kept pace with these changes. Congress has not changed the age at which workers can receive full benefits since 1983 (when it was increased from 65 to eventually 67 in 2022), or the early eligibility age of 62 since 1961, and both the program and the workforce have changed a great deal since then. While increasing retirement ages is not a step that should be taken lightly, increases in longevity combined with the fact that the program’s finances are unsustainable make this change both fair and necessary. However, unlike 1983, when only the normal retirement age (NRA) was increased, this time the early eligibility age (EEA) needs to be increased as well.
Retirement eligibility ages should be increased simply to reflect the longevity increases that have alreadytaken place. Additional increases may well be necessary in future years to reflect additional advances in average longevity, but even if the growth in future longevity increases slows or even stops, advances since the last change in the program’s retirement ages justify raising the NRA to 68 by 2023, and the EEA to 65 by 2032. After those eligibility ages are reached, both the NRA and the EEA should be indexed to automatically rise along with longevity.
In addition, those who are willing to work beyond their normal retirement age should be exempt from paying any further payroll taxes, as should their employer. The combination will provide additional employment opportunities for older Americans. Increasing longevity is not a situation that exists only in the United States. Across the world, countries are recognizing both that their workers can and should delay retirement and that doing so will reduce the cost pressures their public pension systems face.
The increase in life expectancy since 1950 has been substantial. A person born in 2011 can expect to live almost 20 years longer than one born in 1950. When the Social Security program was created in 1935, an adult man who reached age 65 could expect to spend about 13 years in retirement, which was 16 percent of his life; a woman averaged 15 years, or 18 percent of her life, in retirement. However, at that time only 54 percent of men (and slightly more women) aged 21 were expected to live to age 65.
Lately we see older citizens fall victim to financial scams. Elder financial abuse has grown to epidemic proportions. Actor Mickey Rooney elevated the profile of the problem when he won a restraining order against his stepchildren. He claimed they used intimidation to get access to his money and later told Congress how that can happen to a vulnerable senior.
The aging population has made more seniors a target for scam artists and, sadly, members of their own families. The fact is that they’re living longer and are more dependent on support. Scams and fraud targeting the elderly are increasingly a problem. Seniors are often pitched financial products they don’t need including reverse mortgages and annuities. Salesmen prey on isolation and loneliness or diminished capacity. About one-third of the perpetrators are family, friends, or neighbors.
Dehumanization of victims takes place in the process of financial abuse and further destruction of financial security that occurs. In almost all instances, financial exploitation is achieved through deceit, threats and emotional manipulation of an elder. In addition to this psychological mistreatment, physical violence frequently accompanies the greed and disregard of financial abuse.
Elder financial abuse tends to be a grossly under-reported crime, because of the shame of becoming a victim, the fear of reporting a family member, and the perceived risk of a loss of independence if the circumstances became known. Women are particularly vulnerable. Women outlive men, and we’re still seeing a generation of older women who depended on the male spouse to manage finances. They often trust people they shouldn’t trust. Elder financial abuse is going to get worse. It is a problem that will only continue to grow bigger.
Mark Hinkle points out both Republicans and Democrats are determined to kick the can as far down the road as possible, until we are overtaken by events, and it becomes impossible to pay people what they have been led to expect. Their attitude is the height of irresponsibility, even cruelty. It's not just the politicians -- Republican voters may claim they want to cut spending, but they are in denial about Social Security. In a Gallup poll, only 34% of Republican-aligned voters said they supported cuts in Social Security. They weren't willing to cut much else either!
Hinkle muses that whenever Social Security reform comes up, politicians fall over themselves to say they won't cut benefits for retirees and people nearing retirement. Hinkle declares Social Security is effectively a Ponzi scheme, and all Ponzi schemes unravel eventually. People are not going to receive what they've been led to expect -- we know that. But the politicians' claim that only young people should suffer is unfair.
Hinkle believes that we all need to recognize Social Security for the disastrous Ponzi scheme that it is, and we all need to share the burden of cutting it. Unlike Republicans, Hinkle proposes that we reduce government spending now by making the following three changes to Social Security:
* First, increase the retirement age to 72.
* Second, remove the automatic increase in benefits. From now on, an act of Congress will be required to increase benefits.
* Third, allow people of any age to opt out. The government should not say to Americans, You must participate in our retirement Ponzi scheme whether you want to or not, or else we'll throw you in prison.
Hinkle asserts there is no way to make Social Security strong or protect it for the future. Those are politicians' lies. You can't fix a Ponzi scheme. You can only terminate it, or try to prolong it so that future generations suffer even worse.
In the past, some Libertarians have proposed selling off government assets for a one-time bailout of Social Security. Hinkle is afraid a bailout would just provide a short-term reprieve, and then we'd be right back to the same problems we face today.
Hinkle asserts that we should start winding down Social Security now, and suffer some pain and disappointment, so that future generations will be able to live and retire with freedom and security. Libertarians declare that retirement planning is the responsibility of the individual, not the government.
THE LAST YEARS OF MY LIFE
By Basil Venitis
Gone are all the power years
Avoid now any strife
Shifting now slow gears
The last years of my life.
Life is a real game
Peace and prayer are now rife
Have accomplished my aim
The last years of my life.
Euthanasia is coming
Marching now with a fife
Thank you much for all the hugging
The last years of my life.
All alone and no wife
Looking back at my life
Wondering about afterlife
The last years of my life.
SHAME ON GREECE!
THE KLEPTOCRATIC ALLIANCE OF PASOK MAFIA AND NEA DEMOCRATIA MAFIA SHOULD NOT PRESIDE EU
THE FREAKISH GOVERNMENT OF GREECE STOLE MY COMPUTER, MY FILES, AND MY LIFE IN COLD BLOOD
OCTOBER 18, DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR THE VICTIMS OF KLEPTOCRATIC REGIMES
EU practices double standards in civil rights. It’s freakish for EU to interfere in the civil rights of foreigners, but condone the abuse of my civil rights, a citizen of EU! EU should get its own house in order and quit lecturing others.
It’s been now three years since the freakish Greek government stole my life, my computer, and my files. Nobody cares, nobody gives a damn! I have done absolutely nothing, and I am being persecuted by the Greek government without any reason. This is against all rules of civil society and treaties that Greece has signed.
On October 18, 2010, a gang of six brutal policemen of the violent Greek Cyber Crime Unit (CCU) broke into my home in Athens and stole my computer, software, files, documents, and personal data.
The policechimps locked me in jail for a night, they humiliated me with handcuffs, fingerprints, mug shots, and lies, leaked false information to the media parrots, and the fucking Greek government initiated sham ex-officio court proceedings for a stack of stupid fictitious freakish charges!
There was neither pillow nor toilet facility in my jail cell. I had to urinate in a bottle! I, a 68 years old with high blood pressure, was not allowed to keep my hypertension pills with me. There was neither toilet paper nor soap in the whole CCU jail.
GREECE, A FAILED STATE, THE BLACK SHEEP OF FOURTH REICH, THE PARIAH OF OCCIDENT, ENEMY OF BLOGOSPHERE
Ex-officio law suit, autepageltos αυτεπαγγελτος, the most dreadful word in justice, means the state sues somebody without involvement of the accuser. This terrible scheme has been used by the freakish Greek government to persecute me. Mariliza Xenogiannakopoulou, Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, sued me, and she wouldn’t show up in court, because the state took over her position!
At the ex-officio law suit, the accuser just hits and runs! This hit-and-run justice is the most disgusting kangaroo justice on Earth. In all civilized nations, the accused is in a position to face his accuser eyeball to eyeball, but not in Greece, a failed state. The fucking accuser slings false accusations against you, the freakish state takes over, the accuser disappears from the kangaroo court, and the trial is postponed infinite times! venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com
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