There is a war on social security and America is losing the battle. One constant in the fiscal cliff negotiations is the agenda to cut your retirement benefits by a ruse, a lowering of the inflation adjustment.
A shocking claim was made by various press sources that those at the bottom of the American economic pile have living expenses which are double their income.
The bottom fifth of the U.S. income distribution -- 24.4 million households -- on average earned $10,074 in after-tax annual income and spent $22,001 last year,
After 72 hours of non-stop mega millions lottery news coverage, we discovered the best investment strategy to secure your future is to buy lottery tickets. One never knows and it's best to place your fate in the hands of improbable odds. While the chance of hitting it big are 176,000,000 to 1, we checked the numbers and discovered getting your retirement 401k to where it needs to be has even worse odds and also correlates to winning a lottery. See the correlation graph below.
Remember the days when we had grand public works, when people worked at one job and were rewarded? A corporation actually cared about their employees? When buying a home was the ultimate American Dream?
Readers of this site are surely aware state budgets are in huge trouble. This evening, the news went prime time in a 60 minutes segment, A Day of Reckoning: State Budgets Crisis. Currently States, all 50 of them, have a $500 billion deficit hole combined.
Most people probably think of Social Security as a retirement system, which it is in part. But at the same time it is also a welfare system, which explains why the retirement part is so minimal as compared to actuarially based pension systems. That is, the welfare aspect costs money, to the detriment of the retirement aspect.
My aim is to flesh out the details of this a bit. My source of data is the official website of the Social Security Administration: www.socialsecurity.gov.
ELEMENTS OF THE WELFARE ASPECT
1. SSI (Supplemental Security Income) and Disability
There is a war on social security and America is losing the battle. One constant in the 
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop. 
Remember the days when we had grand public works, when people worked at one job and were rewarded? A corporation actually cared about their employees? When buying a home was the ultimate American Dream?
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