It's on the south side of Bright, around the corner from Jersey.

Only in the twisted universe of entitlements is the same exact budget as the prior year considered a "cut," much less an "unprecedented" and "intolerable" one.

I love how you've twisted "pay as you go" to mean "pay for them as they go." Very creative.
Nevertheless, projections show the "trust fund" being empty in 20 years and with only two payers for every recipient, we can all look forward to even higher taxes to pay for a generation that has milked this country for everything it could get. Best to increase the payout age now (70) and start looking for ways to increase appreciation and lower the amount being doled out.
As a friend who's a big supporter of SS says, "Social Security was never meant to be a retirement fund. Just a supplement." It's about time we started treating it as just that.

"pay as you go" implies that you're somehow paying for yourself. That the money you put in today will be returned to you with appreciation.

pay-as-you-go? [pey-uhz-yoo-goh]
?noun
1. the principle or practice of paying for goods and services at the time of purchase, rather than relying on credit.

That is not how the system works. To learn for yourself, go to the social security faq. Here are a few quotes.

"Social Security Benefits are Paid as a Legal Right and not According to Need

The Social Security program is not and was never intended to be a program to provide benefits based on need. Rather, it is a system of social insurance under which workers (and their employers) contribute a part of their earnings in order to provide protection for themselves and their families if certain events occur. Since each worker pays Social Security taxes, each worker earns the right to receive Social Security benefits without regard to need. This is one of the basic principles of the Social Security program and is largely responsible for its widespread public acceptance and support.

The fact that Social Security benefits go to some people who have high incomes has been a source of criticism. However, these persons pay into the program and play an important role in its financial base. Moreover, benefits of higher earners are subject to the income tax as a result of the 1983 Social Security amendments."

"Social Security Benefits are Weighted

The method of figuring benefits is weighted in favor of workers with low average lifetime earnings and those with families. This is because the program attempts to achieve social adequacy as well as individual equity. The goal of social adequacy assures that individuals receive a level of benefits that reflects their lesser ability to prepare for the risk. The goal of individual equity means that a person receives a reasonable return on his/her investment in Social Security.

Thus, while it is true that higher earners receive higher benefits, lower-paid workers receive higher benefits in relation to their earnings in employment covered by Social Security than do higher-paid workers. (Earnings replacement rates are about 60 percent for minimum wage earners, 42 percent for average wage earners, and 26 percent for high earners.)"

you may also want to check out howstuffworks.com

"In almost every financial situation that we deal with on a regular basis, there is the idea of an "account". For example, when you put money into a bank, it is understood to be "your money" and it goes into an account with your name on it. The same thing happens when you contribute to your 401(k) plan at work -- you have an account with your money in it, and if you change employers the money in the account is yours. You also have accounts for your credit card, mortgage, car loan, and so on. In any of these accounts, you add money to the account and take money out of it, and whomever holds the account keeps track of how much you have or you owe.
The Social Security system is nothing like that. In the Social Security system, the money you pay into the system gets immediately paid back out to the people who are currently getting Social Security checks. This arrangement came into being because of the way the system started. In 1935, when Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, there were a lot of people who needed benefits (because of the Great Depression), but there was no money to pay those benefits with. The idea at the time was that people currently working would pay into the system, and their money would immediately go back out in the form of benefit checks. Each generation of retiring workers would get paid by the people currently working, and therefore the system would fund itself forever despite the fact that the system had no money to start with.

This clever idea worked great in 1935 (and for many years after that), but it is going to have a problem in the future for two reasons:

In 1935, there were many more people paying into the system than those receiving benefits. The ratio of workers to retirees meant that workers did not have to pay much into the system in 1935 to support the retirees (this table shows that up through 1950, only 2% of income (1% employee, 1% employer) was withheld for Social Security, compared to 15.30% (7.65% employee, 7.65% employer) today). In the future, the retirement of millions of baby boomers will hurt the ratio -- there will be so many retired people that the working people will not be able to support them. If the population had grown steadily this would not have been a problem, but there is no good way for the design of the Social Security System to handle a population spike like the baby boomers.
Many people have become so used to the idea of a 401(k) plan (where your money belongs to you and grows to a large sum over time through investment compounding), that the idea behind the Social Security system becomes hard to swallow. Currently a worker pays 7.65% of his or her gross income into the Social Security system (with a cap at a gross income of around $70,000), and the employer pays another 7.65% for the worker as well. If you could take that 15.30% of gross income and invest it in a 401(k) plan for the same period of time, it would generate an immense sum of money based on historical returns -- far more than a person with average income (or greater) would get from Social Security. A retiree's Social Security benefit is calculated using a complex formula rather than an account balance, because there is no "account" in the traditional sense.
You might have heard that the Social Security system currently takes in more money than it pays out in order to try to handle the baby boomer problem. What happens with the excess money the system collects? The Social Security system buys U.S. Treasury bonds with the surplus. Essentially, the government (in the form of the Social Security Administration) loans the surplus to itself.
In future decades, when it comes time to start drawing on the collected surplus, the government will pay itself back through tax revenue (or additional borrowing). The Social Security system will start cashing in the bonds, and the government will have to make good on them with tax revenue. That sounds weird because it is weird -- Whether or not it will work is a source of significant debate right now. The effect it will have is that it will shift the payment of Social Security benefits over to the government as a whole. The government as a whole, rather than the Social Security system, will have to repay the treasury bonds that the Social Security system will be cashing in. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens!"

of course, if you read this ladies site, you may have a different definition of "pay as you go" than I do. One where you are not paying for yourself, but for someone else. However, she immediately concedes that this is all just a welfare PONZI scheme.

Social Security Benefits Program
From Sharon O'Brien,
Your Guide to Senior Living.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!
How Does the Social Security Benefits Program Actually Work?
Although many people believe that the Social Security taxes they pay are held in interest-bearing accounts and earmarked for their own retirement, in reality Social Security is a pay-as-you-go retirement system.
Today?s Workers Fund Today?s Retirees
In other words, the Social Security taxes paid by today's workers and their employers are used to pay the benefits for people who are currently retired, and for other beneficiaries such as workers who become disabled or the families of workers who die.

Today, there are 3.3 workers paying into Social Security for every person who receives benefits, for a ratio of 3.3 to 1.

By 2030, that ratio will be 2 to 1.
Part of the reason for the steep decline is that the oldest of the 79 million baby boomers will begin retiring in 2008.

At the same time, birth rates are declining.
For now, Social Security is still taking in more money than it pays out in benefits. Any money that?s left over goes into the Trust Funds.

Currently, the Trust Funds have large reserves, but by 2018 those surpluses will start turning into deficits.
The benefits owed will be more than the taxes collected, and Social Security will have to dip into the Trust Funds to pay benefits.

In about 30 years, there will be nearly twice as many older Americans as there are today. Those changing demographics put Social Security benefits in jeopardy.

Happy reading.

the cops in this city are a joke.

Social Security, as we know it, is unsustainable. And it is certainly not "pay as you go."

sounds like a good argument for people to pay a little extra for high speed internet.

also, must agree that there should be some competition for broadband, cable and phone service in JC. Does anyone know why there isn't?

There may be the additional problem of spoofing.

(?-p? spoof?ing) (n.) A technique used to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the intruder sends messages to a computer with an IP address indicating that the message is coming from a trusted host. To engage in IP spoofing, a hacker must first use a variety of techniques to find an IP address of a trusted host and then modify the packet headers so that it appears that the packets are coming from that host.
Newer routers and firewall arrangements can offer protection against IP spoofing.

When using wireless connections, it's very easy to be deceived into thinking you are hooking onto a random neighbors wireless signal or free wireless at a coffee shop when, in fact, it is a spoofer. And once you hook into a spoofed host, they can steal just about anything off your computer. While this wouldn't be the city's fault, it may be the unlucky result for naive users trying to log-on.

Also of note, many airports and other stores provide an encrypted number for a fee in order to log into localized wireless services. If you wanted to offer citywide wireless, why not charge a small fee to cover costs. Otherwise, we are conning people into thinking they have another entitlement. And we all know how hard entitlements are to get rid of.

For the record, I don't think any tax money should go towards this, particularly with the dire situation in JC. Get new union employees on 401ks, streamline operations, and trim the budgets first. Pave streets, protect the populace and run city bureaucracries efficiently second. Then go for the gimmicks.

I see him all the time cutting through Van Voorst on the way to the PATH. Personally, I prefer the yellow pimp zoot suit. It just looks so wrong, it must be right!