Posted on 09/08/2011 6:23:38 AM PDT by Graewoulf
Everyone here is focusing on the “ponzi” attribute. I want to complain that it has been a horrible investment even if it does pay out at current rates! Remember that everything you put in is matched by your employer. That payout from your employer is their cost of employing you and therefore could have been part of your employment package. Based on that I have been contributing on average 10% of my salary for 35 years and I will get back a revenue stream of about 25% of my current wage.
During that same period I was salting away 12% of my salary in retirement accounts. That should provide an income stream of 60% of my current wage. So the Social Security payback is less than half of what my private investments will be able to do.
The population graphic demonstrates with clarity how the below 40 population growth is basically a straight plunge down, NOT an expanding pyramid base. Thanks for the visual.
When I was a child there were 3 things my father always preached:
1. Social security would run out of money by the time I could collect it.
2. They would have to make up more phone area codes because there were not enough numbers to accommodate the growing population.
3. Everything will have a bar code.
Spot on. Target destroyed. We cannot take half measures here. We’re attacking the Democrat demi-god FDR and all he stands for.
That policy was wrong and wrongly executed. It’s been done better elsewhere - Texas (counties) & Chile (an entire nation).
You left out Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.
Any system that depends on constantly getting in not only new “investors” or “contributors” but a growing number—merely to stay afloat-—is without question a Ponzi scheme.
SS is a tax, it has not been an investment since it was taken from you by Gov’t regulations. What you invision as having been “put aside” in your name was spent long ago. The same thing is true with Pensions, Turbo tax Timeh recently dipped into federal pensions during the debt expansion debate, using the money to pay Federal obligations during the months of June and July as “negotiations” to borrow more money were underway. Unions long ago looted their pension funds.
Printing money, and repeating the scheme is the only way to avoid a collapse.
But printing money drives up inflation, encourages more Gov’t spending, and more recently resulted in a credit downgrade, which increases the money required to service the debt. These converging factors will require some real pain to change their Greek like collision course.
CNBC “conveniently” skipped over that segment in their video highlights so far.
Valerie Jarrett is on there, however.
8^)
Bernie Madoff should have printed more money, duh! ;)
Yes it is a Ponzi scheme. Those who find that term too strong are those who prefer to tell America not the truth, but soothing lies.
Social Security is voluntary. You don’t have to sign up. Of course, if you don’t then you don’t get tax breaks, can’t get a job, etc.
Yes indeed, SS is worse.
Mutt’s crew is hoping this will sink Perry, trouble is even us getting our measly SS “return on investment” know its a damn leftist ponzi scheme. Just because its from the GOV and has most of us hooked, doesn’t make it OK.
Perry hit that nail right on its pointy little head. If that’s all Mutt’s got, he’s sunk.
If you were hired after 1986 in the Federal Gov’t, you pay into Soc Security as the retirement system changed to FERS.
My apologies for an Error in my post: MCNBC Tv was not the source. The correct source is CNBC Tv on the program Squawk Box. All other facts are correct, IMHO.
But no President, no Congress, and no Supreme Court has ever said, right out, that your FICA taxes belong to you.
If they did that, it would be a Ponzi scheme.
But the truth about SS is easily available to anyone who wants to know.
Santelli da man!
Our amigos from south of the border are filling in the missing 50 million contributors.
Let’s check out what wiki says:
[A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering returns other investments cannot guarantee, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going.]
Hmmm, sounds very familiar to Social Security.
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