Posted on 06/04/2026 9:08:41 AM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Social Security’s finances may be in worse shape than thought.
The Social Security Trustees — who release a report each year on the health of the program that supports about 70 million retirees and people with disabilities — have been relying on overly optimistic forecasts for future fertility rates, according to a blog report from the Cato Institute.
Those forecasts are at odds with projections from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — the nonpartisan federal agency that provides Congress with independent analysis of budgetary and economic issues — which both have much more sober forecasts for fertility rates.
Fertility rates and longevity are important to the finances of Social Security. Under a “pay-as-you-go” system like Social Security, taxes from current workers pay the benefits of current retirees. As fewer young people enter the labor force, there are fewer active taxpayers to support each beneficiary at a time when people are living longer — and taking benefits for longer.
“The Trustees are likely understating Social Security’s insolvency problem by assuming Americans will start having far more children than current trends suggest,” according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“Optimistic population assumptions translate into optimistic financial projections. In a pay-as-you-go system like Social Security, higher assumed fertility means more future workers paying taxes to finance benefits and thus a smaller projected shortfall,” the Cato blog report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Means testing will destroy retirement investment. Why save anything if you just get punished for it?
That’s why I keep saying I’m gonna laugh my ass off if things continue on this course and they get cut off. I simply do not care anymore.
You can rest assured that you and all the other Boomers will all get paid until you die. The super majority of the Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha that your generation is impoverishing will have no hesitation voting for everyone your generation's early demise.
You left out GenX—lot of us who understand the situation and would take a big hit so our kids and grand kids have a better future.
My folks were born in the 1920’s and they gave up any semblance of being comfortable to provide a better future for their kids.
Ironically my older siblings are typical boomers and purely invested in comfort and entertainment “what they are owed”
Ida Mae Fuller- the first social security benefits recipient.
Fuller worked under Social Security just shy of three years, from the spring of 1937 to November 1939, and paid a total of $24.75 (equivalent to $522 in 2025) in Social Security taxes.
During her retirement, Fuller collected a total of $22,888.92 (equivalent to $526,010 in 2025) in Social Security benefits.
Fuller died in Brattleboro on January 27, 1975, at the age of 100
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/ponzischeme.asp
Definition
A Ponzi scheme is a financial scam that sustains itself by shifting money between investors rather than generating real profits.
Key Takeaways
-A Ponzi scheme relies on a growing stream of new investors to create an illusion of profit.
-Some of the new money is used to pay earlier investors, making the scam look legitimate and highly profitable.
-Most of the money is pocketed by the scam's operator.
-The scam collapses when the supply of new investors slows, and the supposed profits evaporate.
*******
You may question the "most money pocketed by operator" bit, but the administrative overhead of SS is way over what they pay out to beneficiaries. E.g. Employees with lavish benefits, buildings, IT infrastructure, security, etc.. There's a GAO report a couple decades ago (I really need to find that again!) that indicated only 10 cents on the dollar goes to beneficiaries. In other words, if SS would hardly qualify as a charity as 90% of the money goes to overhead.
The only thing that matters in the West...whether it is in the US, Canada or the UK.
They don't care as long as they get paid while we're getting screwed over.
…and the House just approved $8-billion for Ukraine
You think the people who save enough over the course of their life to have retirement earning above the median wage would trade that to subsist on social security instead? I don’t know your age or what your social security schedule looks like, but for everyone <50 years old they’re not even scheduled to get a dollar for each dollar ‘contributed’.
The nation can afford a welfare program to prevent the elderly from having zero income (the structural deficit is stable, so if outlays are reduced the system survives ‘as-is’), but it can’t afford to operate a welfare program that counts people with incomes above the median wage as beneficiaries.
It was always a political pipe dream that everyone can ride in the welfare cart.
Infertility rates, pre-born genocide and miscarriages, plus infant death rates of the vaxxed will lower our population, however, the invaders (some from 30 years ago) are pro-life because they want their religious/governmental laws to become the law of the land here.
God is just.
Yet another reason to take social security at age 62. It seems inadvisable to wait.
also consider that a lot of those getting minimum payments will have to work till they drop and still pay into SS and pay taxes on those SS income payments.
Yep. I’m 56. So you’re telling me its supposed to blow up in about 10 years? And people want to pull the plug then? How about no.....not after I was FORCED to pay into it for decades. I would have been OK with pulling the plug on it in the 90s....or with slowly continuing to raise the retirement age like they did in the mid 80s when they started raising it from 65 to 67. But I simply will not hear any arguments by anyone that the door should be slammed in my face right as I get to the point of collecting after paying and paying and paying all these years.
This is why Ponzi schemes are wrong. The new levels expected to pony up and pay off existing participants may not materialize.
Rather than kicking the can down the road the USA should start the transition to a self invested SS system rather than a piggy bank with an IOU.
too busy crying to laugh...
“Reality is, the richest cohort in the country is the same cohort that receives SS welfare.”
Reality: Richest cohort receives zero SS.
You are correct but those who are currently collecting SS are unlikely to admit it. We (boomers) are really screwing over the younger generations and leaving them with a huge unpayable debt.
They’ve been there - and I don’t think we want them to go back..
https://abcnews.com/US/2-doge-staffers-social-security-agency-violated-hatch/story?id=129393252 (Jan. 2026)
Two members of Elon Musk's DOGE team at the Social Security Administration were referred for possible Hatch Act violations over allegedly secretly communicating with an advocacy group seeking data to overturn election results, according to a Justice Department court filing disclosed Tuesday. "SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA's DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired," wrote senior Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro. "The advocacy group's stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States."
One of the DOGE employees referred to in the filing also signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to help match state voter rolls, according to the court filing.
The filing also said that DOGE team members used Cloudflare, an unapproved third-party server, to share SSA data outside agency security protocols, doing so in a way that left SSA unable to determine what information was shared or whether it still exists.
"Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period," the filing reads.
"Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server," says the filing.
Clearly malfeasance, but no one will be punished, because………DOGE.
Take the money they waste on ridiculous studies and put it in the Social Security fund.
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