In any Ponzi scheme the amount of the fraud is the difference between the total amount of money collected from the marks minus the amount returned to the marks to maintain the charade. How kind of the Federal Government to make this number available to us. If memory serves the number for Social Security is on the order of two trillion dollars. This represents the net tax revenues raised by the payroll tax not paid out to beneficiaries and therefore available to the politicians to buy votes by other means. This should reveal to all but the willfully blind why this fraud has had such powerful bipartisan appeal.
Agreed. And you’re right, it does provide a meanful number to the amount pillaged from the people. If we used only today’s money (a conservative number), and an average salary of 40K, then $2,000,000,000,000 is equal to roughly 50,000,000 years of work for one person, or one year of work for 50 Million people. Now then the number of baby boomers is approximately 75K (At least there were about 76K born), so lets say after mortality, 60 Million persons.
The number of retired would swiftly and decisively overwhelm the number of producers, which is why some expert are saying the true SS liability is over 200-300 trillion dollars. Tht amount of money is incomprehensible. That’s why it must be figured in man hours. Because if you said every man, woman and child in the country would have to slave for nearly 25 years (Using 40K mean salary X 300 Million people X 25 years=300 Trillion) to pay that kind of liability (Paid out at 40K per year, but SS is admittedly less), then you see why it cannot work. Only if the rest of the world is willing to donate their labor (as their governments have been taxing them and lending us), could it even work. And that’s not going to happen in those numbers. The game is up.