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The real problem, avoided by the likes of gramps as well as the folks in the posted video is that not only could gut the amassed wealth of all the rich people, but you could gut the annual government budget until nearly nothing was left, and we are STILL behind the 8-ball in terms of servicing debt.
It's been this way for some time. The only way out WAS inflation. However we pushed that off to the future with a bunch of money supply expansion schemes that were unsustainable. But they did expand the money supply wildly through leveraged debt across the board, and now if we generate enough inflation to ease debt burden, It's pretty clear the fallout form that will be rather devastating.
So, move to the gold standard? I'd like to see a proposal that explains how to transition without devastating the economy. Heck, I'd like to see how it even fixes the problems we have. When on the gold and silver standard, we still had leveraged investing, fluctuating money supplies, fractional reserve banking, etc. So if you want something more concrete, you need not just gold, but barter for gold. every transaction cash on the barrel head, and the only cash is gold or like goods in trade. Sure, maybe YOU (an abstract you) purchased enough gold to feel like you will come out on top in that scenario, but I hate to tell you that you don't have enough to cover the people who make your food, fuel, and other necessities of modern life as well as those who transport them to you. Nor the hospitals, doctors, etc you might need to enjoy your new position at the top of the heap for a while. We won't even mention things like roads, shipping, etc.
I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a solution that isn't just a different version of speeding up the collapse of society. The only answer I have is the disruptive use of disruptive technology. But it's still the collapse of society, just perhaps more gentle.
Simple: Raise the retirement age to 72 and then modify it to the average age of death every 10 years. End of problem.
Everything you talk about will happen anyway.
It's a shame our politicians don't have the will to lead and make the decisions that need to be made to save us from collapse. But, the collapse has already started and the problem is too great to fix at this point, even if we had leaders with the nerve to take care of business.
Yeah, not really. With medicare, medicaid, and social security (MMS from here on out), can be funded two ways. Pay as you go, or by investing in debt. Pay as you go is eased by your suggestion (not sure if it actually fixes it sustainably, but I'll grant that it does for the sake of argument). However, if you pay as you go with MMS, you effectively remove a funded guaranteed investor for treasuries and just shuffle the debt elsewhere in the budget. Granted, you also reduce some of the expense of MMS, but arguing from your side of the political aisle, you also effectively remove the social safety net aspect of MMS.
At that point you might as well simply say we can make a huge dent in the problem by eliminating MMS but still collecting the taxes for it and using it only to service debt. Which would pretty much result in whoever voted for such things being ousted in short order.
But you didn't fix anything really. You stopped MMS from being a problem by making it useless, but revenue neutral. MMS was financing debt that simply serviced existing debt. You haven't helped pay that existing debt down or avoided the problem of not being able to pay to kick the can down the road if inflation triggers higher interest rates.
Problem not fixed.
No, the program's problems are simply that they are not being applied as intended. They were only to be used by people who outlived their savings and individuals were expected to make their own nest egg that had to last until they passed the average age of death, at which point they would only receive benefits for a one or two years. The problem is that today we receive benefits for over a decade in most cases.
I'm not arguing your position. I'm just saying that:
1) It diverges from what the populace expects, so I don't see it happening.
2) It doesn't eliminate the problem of unservicable debt. Largely because MMS hasn't to date been incurring huge amounts of debt outside the periodic bailout, and has been a place to shuffle IOUs to kick the can down the road. Stopping MMS form becoming a huge debt generator doesn't mitigate issues caused by other things generating huge amounts of debt.
If you manage to forgive all debt held by MMS somehow, it might make some kind of a dent and allow a little can kicking.
3) The last two years of your life are when you incur the majority of your medical expenses. That means your plan doesn't really reduce the bulk expense for medicare. Your plan also does nothing for medicaid as that is purely social safety net stuff and not age based. It helps SS, but that is slightly less than half the budget for MMS. I doubt your plan achieves pay as you go status for anything but SS.
So problem not fixed.
For existing debt: Go back to the tax setup we had when we were running a surplus in the 90s or, and I would prefer, change to an almost flat tax structure that treats all income equally (earned, investment, gifts, whatever) and institute a budget freeze until all debt is payed off.
Instead of providing social security and medicare for our seniors wouldn't it be more cost effective to kill them on their 65 birthday. Just image how much more of a tax cut that would provide the rich.
Gramps
Sadly the only proposals on the table at this time do exactly the reverse, they will benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else.
The only people about to have their 'wealth' confiscated are people who work for federal, state, or local government, school teachers, people on Medicare, Social Security, or Medicaid, people who depend on health insurance from work for their medical care, the elderly or disabled, and people who don't earn enough to be able to absorb the higher costs for nearly everything that is coming as a result of gutting the government and handing its functions over to politically connected businesses.
Why not discuss the ramifications of THAT, since that is what is about to happen?