That would be the equivalent of the biggest bank-run the world has ever seen. Fed.gov certainly won't allow that.
That would be the “Mother of all bank runs”, and would result in your payout being made worthless by Venezuelan style hyper-inflation.
if a class action lawsuit is not possible, then imho a law should be passed allowing retirees to borrow against their individual social security accounts, since it is (after all) their money that is (allegedly) being held in trust for them by the federal government, and as retirees they have reached an age by which the “account” has “matured.”
i would go a step further and institute no penalty be ascribed for people who borrow against their social security account but do not repay; the only adverse action needed being non-payment of their monthly social security benefit.
if students are allowed to skate on their federal student loans, then retirees should be in front of them in the line, since students have no skin in the game and thus certainly less moral justification for receiving what amounts to be free money from the federal government while retirees who have already given social security payments to the federal government and are relying on those payments for their well being are forced to live under freeway overpasses.
The short answer is- no you cannot sue or claim theft. Many years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Social Security payments are taxes. So the government can do what they want and say what they want to say, without fear of legal complications. To even the most causal observer, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
Social Security is not going to “go broke”. It will be adjusted using the by now standard CPI adjustment and raising the retirement age ploys. But it is not going to suddenly stop sending out checks (direct deposit these days). YMMV.
As for people that complain about the government stealing their social security, get over it. The money was never yours the instant it came out of your paycheck.
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They don’t care about you, in fact, they pretty much detest us.
Any Union Pension, they save.
They are paying Pensions in Ukraine.
They have been moving money to the big Cities, even though they know the money is flushed down the toilet on programs designed to scam, and they’ll need more Cash in 12 months.
It’s worse than people think.
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>>all hope of retrieving the value of the amounts held in trust is dissipated.
There is no “lockbox”, the government never held anything “in trust”.
>>can the US government be held accountable in courts of law for this THEFT???
No. Government benefits are not an obligation (except, apparently, to non-citizens) and can be withdrawn at any time. I’m fairly sure courts have already ruled on this.
“bankrupt by 2030”
Well, not quite bankrupt by 2030. But benefits will need to be cut not long after that, since politicians won’t do anything to fix the issue.
Social Security is neither an investment, an insurance policy nor a contract. It is a tax and social spending program which Congress can modify or even cancel at any time. Your only replose is a political one by changing Congress.
The money taken from you over your lifetime is long gone and your only hope of getting money out is by taking it from future generations of workers. It's a Ponzi scheme backed up by guns.
“obtain it in a reasonably short amount of time”
LOL, you can’t do a “bank run” on the federal government. And no, you can’t just sue them to get your money. The lawsuit would be tossed out of court unless you have followed the proper procedure to petition the proper agency to address your grievance, and that agency didn’t handle it properly. And since you are not actually being denied any money that is due to you (yet), you have no actual damages to sue for anyway, only speculative damages at some nebulous point in the future. That’s not actionable.
You have a better chance figuring out how much they will screw you for, putting together a team of similar disgruntled geriatrics, and robbing a federal bank to get your money. Worst case scenario they catch you, and then they have to pay your room, board and medical expenses anyway.
Looking like you might have to settle out of court...
The other 50% content themselves with pickleball.
If the Dems screw up SS, you'll get whiplash from the amount of Dem voters over 62 voting GOP.
First of all, Social Security is not going to run out of money in 2030, 2033, 2037, or any other the other years being bandied about.
Worse case scenario - if nothing is done between now and then - is that the Social Security cash reserves will be depleted. There will still be enough coming in from FICA taxes to meet 74% of the projected obligations.
So people who are in the system will not get no check at all. They will get a reduced check. So if your current benefit is $1,000 a month (to use a round number), your check would be reduced to around $740 come 2030, 2033, or whenever that cash reserve runs out.
Obviously that is not a great thing. But it's hardly what the alarmists are saying (that people will get no benefits at all).
Most likely there will be a "last-minute" solution to the problem. Raising the retirement ages for younger people is possible but that would not solve the problem in the short term as it would take years for that to start having an effect.
What I see happening is the cap being raised on FICA taxes. Currently, the "max FICA" income limit is set at $160,200 for 2023. So once you reach that income threshold, the FICA stops coming out of your paycheck.
Each year, that gets bumped a little, but you might see a proposal to have that raised a lot - maybe as high as $500,000. So that would capture more FICA taxes from those currently making between $160,000 and $500,000 (a LOT of money by the way) which would save the system for the forseeable future.
I'm not advocating any of the above. I'm simply stating what the likely solution to this will be. Yes, more TAXES!
And that should make everybody angry, especially when we are shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars overseas every year to other countries like Ukraine.
Nice rant.
They will pay you every dime of your social security. They will just print what they need.
The lesson from Weimar is that the purchasing power of your pension cheque will be less than the stamp on the envelope it came in.
Time to get out of fiat.
bkmk
Not an accurate way to look at things.
At the level of the federal governments, dollar-denominated assets, liabilities, payments and receipts aren’t really what you think.
They are simply adjustments and projected adjustments to the money supply: taxes and other inflows are the destruction of dollars, and spending and other outflows are the creation of dollars. Reducing the money supply increases the buying power of the remaining dollars (i.e., constrains inflation and interest rates) and increasing the money supply does the opposite (i.e., unleashes inflation and interest rates).
The ONLY reason the federal government can’t have infinite “spending” is because of the hyperinflation and catastrophic high interest rates that would cause.
Taxes and tax policies (including progressive things like tax rates and regressive things like the FICA cap) are, along with the direct monetary policy the Fed controls, policy ways of distributing the pain of limiting the growth of money supply caused by spending.
So ... the federal government cannot go bankrupt, it can simply be in a position where it is causing unpopular levels of inflation.