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“Social Security and Medicare, however, were set up as separate trust funds”

Bush proposed personal accounts, which would be your own property, but the idea went no where

sorry my friend, but that is simply not the reality. the so-called “trust funds” are a fiction. the only “assets” in the funds are IOUs from the Treasury, a promise from the State to pay itself. these are pay-as-you-go programs (with your taxes paying the benefits of current retirees, and you dependent on future taxpayers for your benefits) and can be cut at will by washington

That's right; there are some key points...

From paycheck withholdings for SS, there were annual surpluses all along. More cash came in every year than was paid out in benefits.

This was, by the laws they set up, only invested by the funds in Treasury debt, purportedly so it would be in a "safe" investment.

But follow the cash: this means that SS cash was exchanged for Treasury (special non-marketable) bonds. The Treasury then successfully "borrowed" all that CASH from the "funds".

So there is a pile of paper in the fund that purports to be worth a few trillion, but it can't be sold for cash. It can only be redeemed by the Treasury (cash goes from Treasury back to the fund). And YET - Treasury lives hand to mouth on taxes and borrowing - it has no "stash" of cash. Money goes out of the Treasury faster than it comes in.

Up until recently, the fund cash surpluses always meant that the funds "reinvested" what Treasury redeemed, so Treasury really did not have to redeem - and the funds were always coming with extra new cash to buy even more bonds.

The only way there ever was to redeem the "investments" for cash was to go hat in hand to the Treasury/Congress looking for cash - the funds just never had to. Now they're starting to have small deficits, paying out more than they take in, and this will continue for a few decades, getting more significant each year until a peak in a couple decades.

Yes, the trust funds were always a fiction. Really, a crime. Because Congress and key officials who were proponents knowingly represented as an "investment" a fund that was merely a new tax for Congress to spend part of. If a private concern created such an investment the officers would be prosecuted and jailed (if they weren't connected to the corrupto-bankers).

It's a swindle on such a grand scale that the perpetrators should be jailed for life after being stripped of all their assets.

The Federally-forced-at-the-point-of-a-gun employee and employer contributions into the SS is running at 12.4% of every working individuals pay, up to $113,700 per year - even if they pay zero Federal Income Tax.

If people earning say $25,000 per year put $3,100 away per year and kept reinvesting it at even modest gains, having contributed over $150,000 just in principal, they'd have some kind of nest egg at least - one that I'm SURE most people at that earning level would never dream of having.

Instead, having $3,100 per year sent in to the gubmint in exchange for being able only to accept a below-subsistence level payout when they reach a retirement age, and being convinced to think they could rely on that and that it would be "impossible" for them to save anything on their own at their pay level after all taxes are withheld, we see a large part of the elderly population have no financial gain at all to show for a lifetime, just a near-helpless dependence on an increasingly totalitarian state which operates as a front for international finance.