Social Security has always been an old age welfare program. From the very beginning the money payed in by workers went out to pay for those workers' elderly relatives. That money you payed in never went into an account with your name on it. Instead, it was payed out to Grandma and Grandpa and your parents. Any excess was sucked up into the general fund.
Whatever Social Security you receive will be payed by your children. Social Security is simply a scheme of transfer payments from the young to the old.
Well, no.
Both my parents and grandparents paid into SS. All their lives. There were a few people that did not and did receive money from the fund but that did not last for very long.
Any excess was sucked up into the general fund.
Exactly. As I said just because it was stolen for government vote buying shenanigans does not mean it is "welfare" anymore then your tax refund is "welfare".
That's not entirely true. I'm against the SS system, but if we're going to argue against it, let's get our facts straight.
You do have an account with your name on it. The SS fund owes you, even if they don't have the cash in their general fund to cover every person they owe to date. In that sense, they're no different that a bank not being forced to maintain every penny needed in a vault in case all account holders walked up to the bank Monday morning and demanded their entire savings. Just like the bank owes us because we have an account balance, the SS owes us because we have an account balance with them too.
And just like a bank, the SS fund is allowed to invest the money to make money to help pay for overhead costs (of which there is too much) and pay out to retirees more than was put in. The problem is the SS law allows the SS fund to invest into only one type of investment: U.S. treasuries. It's not correct to say that the rest of government raided the SS fund or anything like that. What is correct is to say that way too many times people in Congress said things like: "who cares if we spend too much money? The SS fund invests in US debt anyway so we're "helping" retirees." What a joke.
Basically, until the Federal Reserve's decade binge in expanding their balance sheet (quantitative easing), the SS fund was the largest U.S. debt holder. (China is the largest foreign owner of U.S. debt, though every now and they Japan takes the top spot.)
So, yes, the SS fund is in many ways the world's largest ponzi scheme. Yes, the first recipients didn't pay into it, and each recipient depends in large part on current workers. And if you live an average life span you receive more than you put into it, but not nearly as much as you would have if you invested just half as much in a simple S&P 500 index fund (more so if you count your employer's half too). And it's insolvent, especially with the Dims who created the mega ponzi scheme are in many case the same Dims who, when they got older, helped convince Americans to quit making so many babies (the population bomb scaremongering before global warming and covid). Basically we don't make enough future "investors" for the ponzi scheme to keep paying its promises.
Regards,
Rules of a socialist program/policy:
The primary beneficiaries of a socialist program/policy are the politicians.
The secondary beneficiaries are the contractors and bureaucracies that support these socialist programs/policies.
The tertiary beneficiaries are the actual recipients.
You see that SS was set up as a slush fund for the congress critters.