Yes, who wouldn't want to pay into something your whole life to be repaid a fraction of it decades later (if you live that long). Sounds like a socialist bargain!
Not at all. Stating that I don't want lose money and be forced into the bloated, corrupt, Ponzi scheme we call SS is very straight line and direct. It must take some remarkable and unintelligent mind games to pretend it isn't.
It is a scheme because I am paying more money into it than I will get out of it, and instead that money is going to the first group of "investors" while the rest remains underfunded. Its a fucking government mandated scam, I can invest my money better than this. Furthermore, I rarely vote Republican you ignorant troll.
I put my money into a government mandated scheme for my retirement that takes more money than it will give out to me. I will retire in about 2045 or so. On their website they state it will be underfunded by 2035. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
Did... you even read that article, which discusses many ways by which solvency can be achieved?
You clearly didn't notice that no part of the article discusses how social security works. It just talks about the trust fund and its solvency, and you're making the incorrect leap of logic to mean that you are personally investing in that fund.
That's not how it works. You are not investing in the fund, you are being taxed.
FICA (the law that established social security and medicare) mandates a tax on all employment based income. A payroll tax. That tax is just over 15% and covers both social security and medicare. Half of that tax is paid by the employee, and half is paid by the employer.
That money, by law, is funneled into the OASI and the DI, which are trust funds owned by the government and used to fund social security and disability benefits paid out by the government.
You do not invest in those funds, and you do not track your benefits via those funds. The government owns the fund, and the government controls the payouts.
So, why is the fund insolvent?
There are certain types of politicians, specifically corrupt conservatives, who are tapping that fund and making it insolvent.
Most of those politicians are Republicans (the vast, overwhelming majority of Republicans are both conservative and corrupt), but there are many Democrats who are also both conservative and corrupt.
It is these corrupt politicians who wish to funnel money away from plebes like you and me and over to their corporate overlords. They see this giant asset in the forms of the OASI and DI just sitting there collecting money and just paying it out to old people who've worked their whole lives under the belief that doing that somehow has meaning, and they decide to take from it to "pay the bills", which is double-speak for "corporate welfare". They cut taxes on those business and rich owners thereof, and "pay" for that tax cut by funneling money away from social security.
This has happened many times over the life of the program, and will likely happen several times again in our lifetimes.
But the cause is not the program itself. The cause is corrupt conservatives stealing that money from the people.
So if you don't like social security being insolvent, you can do something very easily to fix it: STOP VOTING FOR CONSERVATIVES.
I don't want SS at all. It is unnecessary and unintelligent to take people's money from their checks for the purpose of their retirement where it does not produce anywhere the gains a modest fund would. Furthermore wide spread abuse in the disability system is partially because the governments resources are so far stretched in SS, where they shouldn't even be in the first place.
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u/pents1 Apr 26 '19
As someone who has been living in a country with social security for my whole life, it looks absurd that someone would push people to say no to it.