Should Social Security benefits be portable between Countries? This issue could be a stealth attack

[Baobab]

As part of the ongoing services negotiations it appears that the issue of social security benefits portability has raised its head. In the future a great many workers are likely to be here working for their employing corporations- foreign firms. We've already agreed to let corporatios move their employees around at will- 20 years ago, but for various reasons the talks have stalled and started up a number of times, and the numbers still are small.

Currently people in this situation pay Social Security tax but never get any Social Security benefits since they by definition are temporary- here for no more than five or seven years in the case of managers. India has estimated that currently, despite the numbers of workers being fairly small, relative to Americans working here, India has estimated that its workers are currently losing around 1.6 billion dollars a year.

The tendency is towards globalization but under almost any way of looking at the issues, Americans are likely to lose in the short term. However, as this works both ways, ultimately it may be important to Americans to have benefits portability if Americans are forced to go elsewhere for work. (because of the high cost of living here) Its complicated because the practice under Social Security of giving beneficiaries more money than whatever interest is earned if they make less would be barred. So people could end up losing all their savings in a non-government Social Security scheme and in fact its likely that would happen, IMO, given the demographics.