Driving while old

Safety
61

I did read your reply and all your reasons are valid for left foot braking. But considering how many race drivers now use left foot braking, I’d say the in-car data doesn’t lie, it clearly IS faster, with all due respect, or it wouldn’t be so common. The time it takes to move the right foot to the brake is time not spent either on the gas or on the brake. Being able to poise the left foot over the brake pedal to apply the brake the instant the throttle comes off, is an advantage.

As a side note, I was never a left foot braker in my race or track-day car until the current one. Its an automatic so I don’t need the left foot for the clutch anymore so I use it on the brake. I am still getting used to it, though, so I don’t think I’m faster…yet. :wink:

62

I’ve been a left foot braker ever since after drivers training in 1964. The instructor said to wait until after the course to resume with the left foot. He didn’t know I’d already been driving quite a bit before that. Of course except when driving a manual-then its left foot clutch, right foot brake. Works for me.

63

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

http://images.myparkingsign.com/img/dp/lg/no-parking-on-the-grass-sign-stake-kit.png

64

That is all well and good, but the folks who think that government is already “too big” would surely not be willing to pay for the tax increases that would be necessitated by employing a greatly-increased number of driving evaluators, as well as the additional support staff that would be necessary if everyone was retested every ten years.

In the current political climate, I would say that a proposal like yours would be dead upon arrival, based on the increased expenditures that it would necessitate.

65

I am a right foot braker, wit 3 million miles of driving tractor trailer driving with 5 to 16 speed manual transmissions I am unwilling at my age to try and retrain my reflexes because, in an emergency you don’t have time to think about what you are doing.

I think with automatic transmissions, a driver who was trained from the start with left foot braking would be faster getting on the brake. Unfortunately I have followed many of them at night with their brake lights constantly flashing because they have a bad habit of lightly resting their foot on the pedal.

2 Likes
66

I’m not sure why you’d need a “licensed optometrist” to tell if you can read an eye chart or not. To FIX it, sure…but needles expense for “pass/fail.” That’s like saying I have to be a General Practitioner to measure your height and weight.

1 Like
67

I agree. The eye test at the DMV screens drivers for further examination. It is typically meant to get drivers with failing uncorrected vision in for a checkup and possibly corrective appliances. It also happens to flag those that can’t see well enough to drive under any circumstances. When I get the examination for my reissued license, they ask me to remove my glasses and read the chart. I always say “what chart?”, and I always get renewed since I can see well with glasses.

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68

I did not have the option to continue working at age 57. My federal civil service disability retirement paid a SS supplement until age 62 so I took SS then. If I waited 8 years till age 70 (if I made it) I would throw away at least $144,000. SSA does the math. They are betting a certain percentage of us will not make it past a certain amount of time past 70.

69

In California when your license expires and you are 70 or more, it seems like you have to go to the DMV to renew it, rather than simply paying online. They tested my vision with the usual charts, then sent me to another person who chatted briefly and then told me to take the written test, in my case on a computer. I had to do both the regular and motorcycle test because that’s the license I have. After passing that I was given a receipt, took it to the cashier, and paid my fee.

I suspect the people that work there are supposed to decide whether, based on behavior and the conversation, the person should take a driving test. Maybe. The new license is good for 5 years.

70

Social Security is generally betting on us dying at about 83 years old. If you start at 62 the total money you get up to 83 is the same as the total you get if you start at 70. So, if you live past 83, you start to win.

Everyone gets to make their own choice. After 70 your benefits don’t go up if you wait. I think it’s all a reasonable idea.

71

Yeah, like I said, it looks like the data was deliberately “massaged” to produce a desired outcome.

72

All true. The thing is that SSA hasn’t upped the age requirements to keep up with the chances that people will live longer.

Also, I’m not looking at breaking even or not breaking even, don’t care, won’t help me. I’m looking at bigger checks that I’ll probably appreciate after some years of inflation, not to mention getting larger COLAs (higher principal x interest rate). I don’t want to look for a part-time job when I’m 83 if income is too low.

Dad lived into his 90’s and Mom is 93. Since my wife is quite a bit younger than I am I am also looking at increasing her income when I keel-over.

It’s hard to wait for benefits (I’ve been waiting 6-1/2 years, so far… money on the table). It reminds me of somebody placing a dog-treat on a dog’s snout and telling the dog to “stay,” and you can see the dog drooling. I could be making a mistake.

Who knows for sure? Like they say, “Tell me how long you are going to live and I’ll tell you when to start taking benefits.”

I figure if I wait until the maximum, I won’t regret it. If I go belly-up too soon, I won’t be here to regret that. :wink:
CSA

73

When SS started, people died at age 65. Most of the older people were widows. Its target market was sympathetic old ladies no one wanted in the poorhouse. Whether you had paid in didn’t matter so much. Then we go and live longer (an unintended consequence of giving money to old people - surprise!) and make the whole system go bust. The ‘New Republic’ pointed out that it kept young people from feeling badly about letting their parents live in poverty.

74

Not to veer further from old people driving, but when FDR started SS, there was no money. So it was funded by people who were working. I think it started out something like 8 people working and contributing to one person drawing SS. Then in past years it was down to 3 people contributing and now its down to 1 to 1. This cannot be sustained by anyone’s math, regardless of the average age of death. So a while back, contributions were increased to be put into a lock box fund for the future. Only problem was the money was borrowed by Congress to meet current expenses and replaced with IOUs. That’s why some of us have become terribly fiscally conservative. We have increased Medicaid, disability, and other programs, but just borrow the money-put it on the Visa. Someone else will worry about it. We need to face the music and the sooner the better. I for one am ashamed of our Minnesota representatives. Maybe they will wake up.

75

My financial analyst ran the numbers for me, the benefit between claiming at 66, when I want to retire, or waiting till 70 when my wife wants me to retire for full benefits was a break even at age 86. If I live longer than 86 it will be worth the extra 4 years of working. Now I am in good health 62, no meds, but thinking at 86 I probably will be in my homestead cabin in the woods, and have things worked out well enough by then, though I think driving will be limited to a horse and buggy.

76

Or the people that text while driving. I just managed to avoid an accident last week because of a driver that that was looking down at their smart phone. I however do not do such silly things and pay attention to the road. BTW I just turned 75.

77

In '86 Rs & Ds & Reagan increased the tax SS levied. The ‘lockbox’ image was invented by Gore for the 2000 campaign.

SS can’t distribute more money than it collects.

The notion that Congress ‘borrowed’ it is a delusion Rs like to propagate. Congress has never borrowed money. People lend the government money by buying bonds our Treasury offers . When people stop buying our bonds we’ll no longer have deficit spending - or maybe Congress will borrow some. Nothing other than the ‘full faith and credit’ or the US secures these bonds, not real estate, not equipment, not the SS trust fund. If the Treasury welshes on our debt and debtors sue our courts will throw the case out, tell them they can go whistle for their money, that they can’t attach Yosemite or Air Force 1 or the White House or the Alaska pipeline or a few miles of Interstate… or a single penny of the SS trust fund.

President ‘King of Debt’ Trump can repudiate the debt, if Congress will go along; he’s suggested he would. That’d wipe it out: would that make us better off? That’d learn all them Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Singaporese, who hold trillions of our debt, how much our full faith and credit is worth. I’m sure we could hire a band to play some music while we face them.

If young people decide they don’t want to pay SS next year or 2027 or whenever they get tired of keeping their parents off the streets they can reduce benefits to $0 - and tell us to shove off when they find us rummaging through their trash cans looking for table scraps.

78

What sort of DoubleSpeak is this? “I didn’t “borrow” money; you “lent” it to me?!” When everbody knows it’s two ways of saying the same dang thing!

And it was D, not R, that first proposed the “lockbox,” so don’t twist history, if you please. (Back in the late 90s, when the Dems were the “party of fiscal restraint.”) And it’s factually correct to say that the SS “surplus” has been spent: it was made part of the “general fund.”

If you ran any company’s pension fund the way that Social Security has been run, your CFO would be immediately tossed in jail–and for good reason. There’s a fact you don’t GET to spin, RT.

1 Like
79

The Treasury offers the bonds for purchase. No one has to buy any; the government doesn’t have to repay them. Some European countries’ governments held bond sales in the late oughts and had no takers. Everybody else (local governments, businesses) issues bonds in fixed amounts secured by something, such as the right to collect the tolls on a tollway, or the right to seize a water work, or for the government to levy a tax to repay the debt: the government (read: taxpayers) or business is on the hook. If no one wanted to buy US bonds there’d be no national debt: it’s a willing transaction. The Treasury can only issue as many bonds as Congress authorizes.

That’s what I wrote: Gore is a Democrat.

No, it isn’t. In order to make the debt seem smaller, at the behest of LBJ, with Democratic support, the government started telling us the national debt was smaller by the amount in the SS trust fund; no Republican has changed that practice since.

That doesn’t mean it was spent, nor does it make a difference. If people want to stiff us oldsters, all they have to do is pass a law. If they get their $10K back as cash and the national debt goes up 3 trillion (current SS trust fund is about 3T), or the national debt decreases 3T, makes no difference in how many homes we have to live in, cars to drive, food to eat…

Quoth Wikipedia [quote]On November 7, 2016, debt held by the public was $14.3 trillion or about 76% of the previous 12 months of GDP. Intragovernmental holdings stood at $5.4 trillion, giving a combined total gross national debt of
$19.8 trillion or about 106% of the previous 12 months of GDP. $6.2 trillion or approximately 45% of the debt held by the public was owned by foreign investors, the largest of which were Japan and China at about $1.09 trillion for Japan and $1.06 trillion for China as of December 2016.[/quote]
The SS trust fund is about 3T of ‘Intragovermental holdings’, so you can have a different opinion of the debt.

When states borrow money, they secure it with property or a stream of revenue (tolls, taxes…). The Feds can’t do this. I think we should start: that great military we have! Interstates! college educations!: that’s what we’ve bought with all that debt. We’d be poorer without them.

[quote=“meanjoe75fan, post:78, topic:100498”]
If you ran any company’s pension fund the way that Social Security has been run, your CFO would be immediately tossed in jail[/quote]
Which would include a lot of Republican CFOs. And it’s not the case. Corporations default on their pension obligations through bankruptcy; many do - nobody goes to jail. Taxpayers sometimes make up some of the losses through the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

80

I really don’t want to get into this but when states and local units of government borrow money, they issue bonds for sale. These bonds are only secured by the health and revenue stream of the government in question. There is no property or any other security in a bond issue. There have been some cities that have defaulted on their sewer bonds for example and the bond holders don’t get to dig up the sewer pipes. That’s why the better the credit rating of the government entity, the lower the interest they need to pay on the bonds.

Just to correct the record.