Around 2004 or so, in a Spring copy of AARP magazine, it was shown that the Social Security System was NOT a Ponzi scheme.
All Ponzi schemes collapse, and as SS had not collapsed it was not a Ponzi Scheme. The Ponzi scheme gets new investors at the bottom and the money works it’s way to the top. The SS forces investors into the scheme like it or not.
A few pages on in there was also an article by Jane Bryant Quinn on how the SS system was set up. Without using the word “Ponzi” she showed it was set up just like a Ponzi scheme, with forced investors at the bottom.
The promise of the SS system,....
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/usa1964-2.html
Self-Supporting
“The program is designed so that contributions plus interest on the investments of the social security trust funds will be sufficient to meet all of the costs of benefits and administration, now and into the indefinite future—without any subsidy from the general funds of the Government.
“Both the Congress and the Executive Branch, regardless of political party in power, have scrupulously provided in advance for full financing of all liberalizations in the program.”
Now we are hearing about how the SS system is about to fail.
Read later.
:^) "Since it's not voluntary, it's not a Ponzi Scheme." Heheh, JBQ sounds like a genius. /s
The Baby Boom is riding its demographic bulge through the pages of history (/stolen) and most realized they would need more later in life.
Because of that among other things, interest in and direct or indirect investment in equities (the financial kind, not the mythical political kind) has been on a roll for at least 40 years, even as industrial growth has shifted offshore.
Free-market savings/CD interest rates (de-regulation) came along in time to mitigate some of the disasters of the Carter years, and yet not long ago I heard a lefty relative complain that the current quite Demagogic Party approved Fed rate-setters were emulating Paul ("Tall Paul") Volcker.
The defeat of Carterism was followed by Ronaldus Magnus, and rates falling out of bed (in the words of that Canadian guy I can't recall his name) and sleeping on the floor during that same 40 year period.
The Chinese have an export-based economy that's been falling apart for the past three years, not entirely because of COVID. In order to maintain the CCP's trade surplus with the US, it has to keep its own currency from rising in value, so it buys US gubmint debt. If either one stops, so does the other. We've turned them into a rat on a wheel, and kept them there for decades.
The Chinese are experiencing demographic collapse, despite the denials by Chinese trolls, and there's going to be social turmoil there, but they are ruled by a big fist gov't which will do whatever it thinks necessary to ensure its own survival -- famine, mass executions, mass relocations across their Heihe-Tengchong Line, war, whatever.