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I recently retired and got a statement of what I paid into SS over my 40+ years of work. That's very misleading, however, since my employers had to match those payments. So I doubled my contribution and then took my monthly benefit and tacked on a 3% raise (on average) for every year and calculated a "breakeven" point. I will break even if I live to be 127 years old. However, even that's not right.

If I took those same payments, but put them into an interest-bearing account at 5% per year, I could more than triple my currently monthly payment and never exhaust the funds! Indeed, I would be able to leave the balance to my kids. As it is now, if you die young, the gov't gets to keep everything you paid into the system.

Bush tried to privatize SS and everyone said: "Oh, I don't want that responsibility." Gees, people. How tough would it be to buy long term T-bills or CD's? But, no, people would rather sit on their lazy ass and let Congress spend their money. Absolute lunacy.

RE :”Bush tried to privatize SS and everyone said: “Oh, I don't want that responsibility.”

Pelosi was bragging about how that was a winning issue for them. At the time I knew it wouldn't fly. Why? Bush was running huge deficits and purposefully convinced the country national debt is good, that Obama will use now. The other problem is interest rates. (I have been watching Peter Schiff) Aside from massive government deficit spending the monetary policy was print-print-print meaning savings interest rates were low while we had phony stock market and housing booms that were just paper values. So in a climate like that even honest hard working people , everybody, is likely to get sucked in and burned. And we were. Thanks to GWB we will never have privatized SS.

Yes, Obama and Pelosi are our worst nightmare. But they have power because GWB was completely clueless. And fitting the crash happened before he got out.