[Boonie]

Those aren’t entitlements...I’ve paid into them since 1965...It’s MY money...

[entropy12]

Social Security has always been a Ponzi scheme. Current workers pay benefits of previous workers who are retired and collecting benefits.

[kabar]

This graph shows that the average man and woman (average defined in the study as average income over their working lives and living to the average life expectancy) who start receiving benefits in 2010 get over 3 times more in benefits than they pay in to the system! Of importance, the study accounts for inflation by calculating all past taxes and future payments in 2010 dollars to provide an accurate comparison.

If the notion that Medicare recipients are simply "getting back what they paid in" is false then where is the money coming from? Simply, the excess received is being borrowed from younger generations and the cost is more than we can bear.

40% of all Medicare expenditures come from the General Fund. The premiums paid for Medicare Parts B and D cover only 25% fo the costs.

[eeriegeno]

Those aren’t entitlements...I’ve paid into them since 1965...It’s MY money...

Oh it IS an entitlement! You and I have paid into those programs all of our lives and are entitled to collect from that 'insurance plan'!!!

Welfare, food stamps, etc are NOT entitlements because recipients did not earn the benefits, they collect without contributing.

[Reily]

And the money went right out the door to the then current crop of retirees!

As long as there are sufficient numbers of those paying in(i.e., working) the system sort of works.
The creators of SS made certain assumptions about the paying in demographics & the receiving demographics mainly they wouldn’t change much, well they did!

Another problem the original poster person for SS - Ida Mae Fuller put about $25 into the system but received about $23K. She lived far longer then “assumptions” allowed for. Unfortunately for FDR’s brilliant scheme their were (& are!) 1000’s, 10,000’s and thanks to modern medicine 100,000’s of Ida Mae Fullers. It’s system that can not work. I think deliberately done to make the “retired” demographic a permanent government dependency. “Evil” insurance company executives warned FDR’s Congress (and FDR & his cronies) it would not work.

What truly get’s me is that the SS system was supposedly a copy of the Bismarkian system. This system worked and seems to have continued to work through defeat in 2 world wars and a world-wide depression. The explanation of ‘Well their Germans!’ isn’t really good enough.

[neocon1984]

Actually, it’s only a portion of your money.

If you invested your SS taxes into the stock market, you could expect a 7% annual return (i.e., doubling the investment value every 10 years),

Any idea of what your return is with SS?

1% at best!