Everyone here is focusing on the “ponzi” attribute. I want to complain that it has been a horrible investment even if it does pay out at current rates! Remember that everything you put in is matched by your employer. That payout from your employer is their cost of employing you and therefore could have been part of your employment package. Based on that I have been contributing on average 10% of my salary for 35 years and I will get back a revenue stream of about 25% of my current wage.
During that same period I was salting away 12% of my salary in retirement accounts. That should provide an income stream of 60% of my current wage. So the Social Security payback is less than half of what my private investments will be able to do.
SS is a tax, it has not been an investment since it was taken from you by Gov’t regulations. What you invision as having been “put aside” in your name was spent long ago. The same thing is true with Pensions, Turbo tax Timeh recently dipped into federal pensions during the debt expansion debate, using the money to pay Federal obligations during the months of June and July as “negotiations” to borrow more money were underway. Unions long ago looted their pension funds.
Printing money, and repeating the scheme is the only way to avoid a collapse.
But printing money drives up inflation, encourages more Gov’t spending, and more recently resulted in a credit downgrade, which increases the money required to service the debt. These converging factors will require some real pain to change their Greek like collision course.