Michael

Let's get something straight. Just because the government stole your money out of your paycheck for 40+ years (and they did) does not mean that you should be entitled to money from mine as a form of restitution. You should have been an adult and planned for your own retirement. It is not my job to bankroll yours out of my wages, nor is it any other young American's. If you built your retirement plan around a government program, that's on you. Ya should've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. You had multiple options: save your money, open a Roth IRA, max a 401(k), invest in stocks or precious metals, etc. Nobody stopped ya. The money that you “paid into” Social Security (SS) is gone. Gone like the wind, buddy. It's gone like a freight train. Gone like yesterday. Gone like a '59 Cadillac. Gone like all the good things that ain't ever comin' back. That's because you paid a TAX (ever heard of the FICA?) and the money forcibly withheld from your paycheck went into the “general welfare” fund. It was not set aside just for you in a private lockbox with your name on it or invested in the stock market. It was spent the second it landed in the hands of the greedy bastards running our government. They way SS works is that the money “contributed” by newer “investors” is used to pay older “investors.” It operates like a private sector Ponzi scheme, but only it is involuntary and mandated by law (which, if anything, makes it worse than a Ponzi scheme). And if anyone in the private sector attempted to set up a retirement plan for their employees like this, he or she would be handcuffed and sent to prison. The money collected by payroll taxes were taken from one group (workers) and handed to another (retirees), exactly like public welfare, exactly like Medicaid, and exactly like any other wealth transfer program. People will claim that the program ran a surplus for decades, but they haven't been held in cash since 1939. By law, any surplus must be lent to the federal government by purchasing Treasury bonds. In return, the “trust fund” gets a stack of IOUs. But IOUs are not real money. It's just a piece of paper essentially stating that “The Treasury owes SS 'x' amount.” As I said, the actual money collected by the payroll tax was spent the moment it arrived. The so-called “trust fund” contains no physical cash, no gold, and no stocks. So, when it comes time to pay benefits to retirees, the federal government has to redeem that bond with real cash, which means either (a) borrowing money, (b) raising taxes, or (c) cutting spending to generate a budget surplus. According to a 2024 Cato Institute analysis, the SS retirement and survivors program relied on ~$1.08 trillion in Treasury interest, bond redemptions, and transfers to cover cash-flow shortfalls between 2010 and 2023. In 2023, payroll taxes covered just 85.2% of the SS program costs. Taxes on benefits covered another 4%, leaving a 10.8% gap financed through trust fund interest and bond redemptions. Cato's analysis also suggests that the program is projected to add $4.1 trillion to federal deficits over the 2024–33 period, including associated interest costs. 🔗cato.org/sites/cato.org/file… So, when someone says, “I paid into it,” what they're really saying is, “I paid a tax, the government spent it, and in exchange I got the government promise to tax future workers to pay me back.” If our payroll tax dollars were actually invested in the market instead of funneled to current retirees, the returns would be astronomical, and it'd allow families to build generational wealth. Say you start working at age 22 and retire at age 67 (a 45-year career). Your half of the payroll tax (employee side, 6.2%) on a median income of, let's say, $50,000 is ~$3,100 a year. Invest that annually in a broad index fund at the historical market average of ~10% annual returns, and by 67 you've got ~$2.2 million. Add the employer's matching 6.2% and you're sitting on about $4.4 million. Even assuming more conservative annual returns of 6% or 8%, that combined investment would grow to $1.32 million or $2.46 million, respectively, over 45 years, before inflation, fees, and taxes. Compare those figures to what SS actually pays out, a median earner's effective return is closer to 1–2%, and for younger workers it's projected to be negative. That is, people my age will have “paid in” more than we will ever get back. What's more, if you die before your spouse does, he or she can collect your SS benefits until they die. However, neither your kids nor grandkids can. If you actually “paid into” a legitimate trust fund, there'd be money left over for them. There isn't because you paid a tax. The system benefitting you is not going to be here to sustain us. According to the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, the retirement and survivors trust fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2032, after which continuing revenue would cover approximately 78% of scheduled benefits unless Congress acts. The worker-to-beneficiary ratio has cratered from roughly 16:1 at the program's start to under 3:1 today, and it keeps falling as the boomers retire and birth rates drop, the latter of which is multifactorial (e.g., families requiring less manual labor and systematic destruction of the nuclear family largely because of feminism and hookup culture (both of which are an undesired side effect of social media). 🔗heraldtribune.com/story/news… People are also living longer than ever before. In 1935 when SS was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, average life expectancy in the U.S. was ~61 years and the retirement age was set to 65. In layman terms, that meant the average person would not live long enough to collect SS benefits, and if one did, he or she likely wouldn't collect for long. Today, however, average life expectancy in the U.S. ~80 years but the retirement age has only been raised slightly to 67 (and that's only for people born after 1960). 🔗ourworldindata.org/grapher/l… 🔗ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v76n… That means that retirement age (or really, just the age at which one should be eligible to collect benefits, not necessarily actual retirement) today should be much closer to 80. Now, even if you adjust for infant and child mortality, which were admittedly more prevalent in the 1930s, Americans who survived to age 65 in 1935 could expect to live another 12–14 years, on average. Today, someone reaching age 65 can expect to live another 19–21 years. The number of Americans age 65+ has increased from ~9% of the U.S. population in 1960 to ~18% today. Either way you square it, the minimum age at which a person should be able to collect SS benefits ought to be raised into the low-to-mid-70s, even if they retire years earlier. Here's another hard-to-swallow pill. 💊 The Supreme Court has ruled that you actually do not have any contractual right to the SS benefits you're now demanding. In Fleming v. Nestor (1960), the Court held that Social Security benefits are not an “accrued property right” and that paying the payroll tax does not create a contract with the government. 🔗supreme.justia.com/cases/fed… The Court also upheld SS as being a general welfare spending program in Helvering v. Davis (1937), treating the payroll tax and benefits payments as two legally separate things. Essentially, the Supreme Court states that the “insurance” policy was packaging, not law. 🔗supreme.justia.com/cases/fed… Your benefit is a statutory entitlement. It is a political promise that Congress can modify or eliminate at any time, and you have no legal recourse when it does. So, when you say you “paid in” and are therefore owed a check, the highest court in the land has already said that's not how it works. And spare me the “I didn't vote for this” routine. Few people alive today did as it was enacted in 1935. But your generation and the generations before you kept voting for politicians who kept this system alive. You personally may not have (and KUDOS to you if that's the case!), but you'd be an exception. Every politician who has dared touch this third rail has been severely punished for it. During the 1964 election cycle, GOP nominee Barry Goldwater proposed making SS voluntary, and the Lyndon B. Johnson campaign turned it into one of the most effective attack ads in American history. Barry lost in a landslide. 🔗time.com/archive/6832308/nat… In 2005, President George W. Bush proposed partial privatization of SS with “personal accounts.” Specifically, he suggested that young workers could choose to divert up to 4% of their payroll tax into a personal investment account that they could then pass onto their heirs. That's not complete reform, but it was better than nothing. 🔗georgewbush-whitehouse.archi… And of course, the Democrats and many Republicans shot the proposal down and ran attack ads claiming that seniors would lose all of their benefits. These ads, of course, were misleading, if not all-out fraudulent, but it worked. The backlash Bush received from seniors and the AARP was so bad that Congress never brought it to a vote and his approval numbers slid. 🔗factcheck.org/2005/02/moveon… In 2011, Texas governor Rick Perry (who I actually had the pleasure of meeting in April) called SS a “Ponzi scheme” and “monstrous lie” during the presidential GOP primary, and it sank his frontrunner status. 🔗cbsnews.com/news/rick-perry-… Any candidate who so much as whispers about raising the retirement age (or age at which one can collect the benefits) or letting young workers keep some (or all) of their payroll tax money gets branded by Republican boomers and virtually all Democrats as demonic. They say something to the effect of, “You just want to throw grandma off a cliff!” But I am not running for public office, which means I do not have to beat around the bush. I can be as open and honest about this issue as I want and the only thing it will cost me are some fans who cannot cope with the facts I outlined above. Emotional blackmail will not work with me. It didn't with the COVID Nazis. It isn't going to now. Realistically and morally, I want us to band together and look for a way out of this unsustainable system that is as painless as possible for everyone. The status quo is unacceptable and everyone knows it even if they refuse to say it out loud. However, the more I see older people (primarily boomers) double down on this government-run Ponzi scheme because they want to squeeze every last drop out of this lemon instead of making sacrifices to reduce the burden on their kids and grandkids, the more I am inclined to not care about the consequences some might face if we cut it. Deep down in my heart, however, I do have a moral compass (thanks, Mom) and I do not want to put anyone out on the street. I do not hate old people. As a matter of fact, I relate better to them because I am an old soul in a young person's body. One of my two grandmothers actually relies on SS for her retirement income (she has not been great with her money since my grandad died 16 years ago). The other one receives it, too, but definitely does not need it. But the other's situation, like anyone else in the same boat, is not taxpayers' problem. As I said, I do not hate old people. There are a lot of great old people. Many follow me here. But I do have resentment towards older generations who stared down the barrel of economic collapse and refused to do anything at all to enact or vote for reform because it personally would inconvenience them. Again, that doesn't mean you're one of those people specifically. I'm speaking in broad terms. We need to figure out how to abolish the SS scam and it needs to be bipartisan. People need to take their biases out of the equation and look at it objectively. I am not a parent, but having had wonderful parents to raise me, I cannot for the life of me understand why any parent or grandparent would not immediately do anything they could to ensure their descendants' lives are better than their own.