The Greatest Generation was all for the too-good-to-be-true transfer of wealth that was the SS/Medicare Ponzi scheme.
My father, a wonderful man, a WWII vet, always said that he received more in SS & Medicare than he ever put in. He also said he wasn’t going to send the checks back, either, lol.
My baby boomer husband and I have been paying into these programs for over 40 years and have never been on food stamps, welfare, or medicaid.
In other words, there’s plenty of blame to spread around various generations.
“The Greatest Generation was all for the too-good-to-be-true transfer of wealth that was the SS/Medicare Ponzi scheme.”
Social security is fully funded for the next twenty years or so. It has paid hundreds of billions in excess for the last twenty years, since Reagan raised the contributions to “save” the program. It is not a Ponzi scheme. Medicare is a problem because medical costs have risen far faster than anyone could reasonably have anticipated. Still, if you eliminated both programs, and the payroll taxes that fund them, the government would continue to run a massive deficit. The problem is not that SS/Medicare is a Ponzi scheme—it’s the the whole of government is a Ponzi scheme. We’ve been promised we can have what we want (most recently, two wars in the Middle East and free prescription drugs for seniors) without having to pay for them. And who keeps voting for the politicians that promise us that we can have more from the government and cut our taxes as well? We do. No one wants to do the math.