Comments about ‘My view: Constitutional Amendment A: Planning for the future’

There seems to be no end to the schemes and scams created to steal the taxpayers money.

My ignorance of the actual workings of such a trust fund prevents me from characterizing it as a scam but it sure raises my built in defense mechanism against such.

Given that republicans are supposed to be against tax hikes and that our economy is less than perfect just where will the money come from. Is there more in teachers retirement plans available to be cut?

I think people should pay for their own government. Why should we set aside cash from the taxpayer of today to cover the debts that we are passing on to our children? Why not just use the money of today to pay off the debts now?

Would a sane person put money into a savings account at an extremely low interest rate if he also had loans where he pays hundreds of times the savings interest rate?

Every action taken by our government(s) is at the behest of and for the profit of businessmen politicians.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but it seems to make good sense to me.

Norway did something similar with their North Sea oil revenues.

When you have a wasting asset, extending the benefits is reasonable. Otherwise we just consume the asset. In the interim we get used to either low taxes or high spending and then have a sudden shock when the asset is depleted.

BTW, had we done something similar with Soc. Sec. in the 1980s it would be in great shape today.

Seems like a wise way to prepare for the future. The process needs to be transparent, however. Transparent and monitored. The taxpayers need to remain aware of all aspects of state financing, not have projects like this hidden under layers of bureacracy.

There are a few problems I see with this proposal.

1- the budget shortfall it creates until 2044 or whenever the interest generated catches up to the annual amount pulled out of use.

2- the inflexibility of the mandate. Yes, there are ways to access it in an emergency, but this seems too restrictive for the time we're in; see #3:

3- the fact that this earns less interest than we pay on our current debt. According to the Utah Debt Clock, our state has $19.5 billion in debt. This is where we are truly stealing from future generations. The greater favor we can do for them is to pay off our debt now, then have our state representatives learn to stay within a budget.

If you made $40K each year but spent $46K annually, would you put money aside into a low-yield savings account while you were $39K in debt? Those are the numbers that Debt Clock translates to.

The smart thing would be to pay off debt as fast as you could with everything available, then live within (= BELOW) our means.