Unsustainable? If they hadn’t been spending the surplus on other government programs, there’d be money in the bank to sustain it
The Rat bastards that created it and bled it dry may just find out that theft begets punishment.
Just so. I paid far more into the Social Security program over a lifetime than I’ll ever get back in SS payments. Plus I paid income taxes on the money I put in in later years, and then have to pay income taxes on the same money again when it is returned to me.
Yes, the system is broken, but because the politicians have used our contributions to make presents to their friends, given it to illegals, and all the rest of their law-breaking crimes.
The solution is not to make people pay into the system for a lifetime, and then to rob them of their return.
The “surplus” was always a fiction. It was always tax and spend. There never was any “investment” other than empty government promises.
No money has been taken from SS. All the money collected from the payroll tax is deposited immediately into T-bills. Benefits are paid and any surplus is retained in the SSTF in the form of non-market, interest bearing T-bills. There is currently more than $2 trillion in the SSTF.
SS is a pay as you go system with today's workers paying for today's retirees. SS has been running in the red since 2010, i.e., the benefits collected exceed the revenue collected. The shortfall is made up by redeeming the T-bills in the SSTF by the General Fund. The SSTF will be exhausted by 2034, at which time, by law, benefits will be reduced to the revenue collected.
SS is going broke for several reasons. In 1950 there were 16 workers for every retiree; today, it is three and by 2030 there will be two workers for every retiree. The retirement of the baby boomers, 10,000 a day for the next 20 years, and the fact that people are living longer means that the system is unsustainable unless you raise taxes, reduce benefits, or a combination of both.
The SS DI Trust Fund goes bust in 2016.
There is no bank. That’s exactly what doomed SS from the beginning. It violates very single rule of sustainable investments. No diversification, no mechanism for growth of principlal, in fact, there are no tangible assets of any kind, just numbers on a ledgersheet. And if they ever had tried to invest any of the FICA revenue into any type of sensible investment vehicle, Krugman and the rest of the Tooth Fairy believers would be stamping their widdle feet and screaming ‘Wwhhaa, Privitization, waaah!’
There was never any possibility that Social Security could be a solvent enterprise. I gave up on it when I was 25, and pursued a career that doesn’t require FICA contributions. 3 decades later I was able to retire with a pension income of 88% of my monthly working income. That pension was funded with the 15% of my income that would have been spent by Uncle Sam invested in a diversified portfolio run by a heavily regulated pension fund.
IMO government employees should all contribute to SS - including all Congressmen - and be forced to retire on SS benefits at least when they reach 67. No more taxpayer funded retirement plans or multiple retirement sources which they now receive as they move from one government job to another. If that were to happen I can guarantee you that SS income would be in a lock box and not the general fund.
Actually, it wouldn’t be self-sustaining even if government didn’t rob the fund daily. But that hardly matters as long as the government is willing to borrow or print money to keep that free government cheese coming. And even though the reciepents would have been tremendously better off with private retirement plans, most Americans see any effort to reform SS as a threat to what they erroneously see as a free government xheck.