Posted on 01/21/2018 9:46:42 AM PST by Kaslin
Social Security is, barring an immediate and massive overhaul in how benefits are paid to the back-end of the Baby Boomer generation and beyond, on its deathbed. There can be no mistaking that fact.
Veronique de Rugy explains at Reason:
Since 2010, [Social Security] has been running at a cash-flow deficit – meaning that the Social Security payroll taxes the government collects aren't enough to cover the benefits it's obliged to pay out. That should have been a signal that the time had come to look at reform.
Instead, we've spent the last seven years ignoring the problem. To get by, the program started tapping into assets set aside beginning in the 1980s for rainy days. Prior to 2010, the program collected more in payroll taxes than was needed to collect benefits at the time. The leftovers were "invested" in Treasury bonds through the Old-Age Trust Fund, which is now being drawn down.
The 2010 mark for this cash-flow deficit didn't occur willy-nilly. It could be argued that our government hastened, or at the very least exacerbated, this cash-flow deficit with its "payroll tax holiday," a bipartisan effort instituted in late 2009 that persisted until 2013. This political maneuver slashed payroll taxes by roughly one third, from 6.2% to 4.2%. The uncollected 2% (not peanuts in a country the size of ours) happens to coincide with the moment in time in which the government's payroll tax receipts couldn't cover its Social Security liabilities. The cost of this "payroll tax holiday" is estimated to be $240 billion in tax revenue, some of which, at least, would have otherwise gone to pay out Social Security's beneficiaries. Much of this $240 billion in uncollected revenue necessarily became issued federal debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Too complicated for most to understand.
KISS-keep It Simple Stupid.
IIRC, the average SS recipient draws in benefits everything they have paid into the system in about three years while drawing from the system for over a decade in retirement.
If you don’t understand how that simple math dooms the system, no amount of esplain’n will help.
The social security system is a Ponzi scheme. It was doomed the day the first payment was made to the first retiree.
“I would ideally like to defer til 70 but it makes me want to take whatever I can get when I turn 62 in 5 years.”
I’m 63 now and planned on waiting as well. Gives one pause to rethink my strategy. Most of my retirement will come from savings.
Not to worry.
the obese generation will die off not needing a pension
1. Class warfare will be used saying that if you make a certain amount from non SS funds, you will no longer be entitled to full SS benefits. “You don’t need the money!”
In addition, if you are receiving spouse/survivor state pension benefits, another provision called the Government Pension Offset, can take away all of your Social Security benefits.
I went in to the Social Security Office early last year to enroll and start receiving my benefits. Boy was that overweight female government worker pissed at me. She told me that I cheated the system. I did not cheat. There was actually a time when Social Security participation was not mandatory; and during that time I did not participate. I went in to the IRS and received a tax number to file my taxes with, but no social security withholding was ever taken from my paycheck and this went on until the early 70s when Congress made Social Security participation mandatory.
When she told me that what I did was not “fair”, she was further incensed when I replied “Fair, there’s that communist word again, fair.” Before the 70s social security participation was not required. You paid into it if you wanted a pension plan, and if you didn’t, then your retirement was up to you. Mandatory participation was only imposed when they decided to start stealing from the Social Security Pension Fund to fund their pet projects, foreigners and everything else.
As originally designed, it would not have been half-bad. But it quickly became like all other government programs, a transfer of money from those who earn it to those who don’t.
SSI has become an unacknowledged welfare system for minorities. The “crazy check.”
The bastards never intended to set up a social security lock box. There was never an account for each person. It was intended from the start to be the primary identification system for each individual. (It says on my ORIGINAL card, “not for identification.”) The SSN is now the universal ID number for each person.
Medicaid needs to be the first to go.
That is true. It seems that those who never worked and never put into the system are the ones taken care of first.
I'm also hearing that there will be no social security for those who worked all their lives. Government says they will be out of money.
But the government is never out of money when it comes to paying out welfare.
Borrowing from the SS accounts has been going on since LBJ.
Bush is certainly not the first to do so.
Unfortunately its SOP for the government now.
I’ve read that now because so much of the budget goes to entitlement programs (like SS) and interest on the debt. There is very little discretionary funds available for the government to use to pay for an unforeseen (unplanned) for policy “event”. (Like Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) Borrowing from the SS (and others) is its only recourse.
“The social security system is a Ponzi scheme. It was doomed the day the first payment was made to the first retiree.”
Now, now just because Ida Mae collected nearly 1,000 times as much from SS as she contributed no need to call SS a Ponzi scheme!
I’m expecting the government to reduce my SS by some sort of means testing - say reduce my benefit $1 for every $2 over X amount of military retirement. All of my planning continues to assume $0 from SS.
If that is true, then it gives the lie to the claim, “I paid into that system and it is my money!”
They’re never killing SS. That would be a guaranteed incumbent killer. It’s functionally the general fund anyway, all this “social security account” business is just accounting fiction. It won’t go broke until the whole freaking fed goes broke.
Actually it’s not a contract. There have already been lawsuits about it, the money belongs to the government, you are owed not one penny, they can do with it as they will.
“Now, now just because Ida Mae collected nearly 1,000 times as much from SS as she contributed no need to call SS a Ponzi scheme!”
So did my mother——paid into SS for about 4 years in the 1940s,started collecting in 1969,at 65,and lived to be 91.
.
My accountant keeps saying, oh it’ll still be there, they’ll increase the payroll tax and cut the benefits to 75% at the most, but I can’t help but think “THEY” will find some way to get their hand in my pocket.
But he also laughed at me when I said 15 years ago I think they’ll find a way to tax net worth, not income, and that’s exactly what has happened in other countries when people wake up to find they’re victims of a “haircut”. Never underestimate what the Dims will do to heap bennies on their voter base.
So... why is there a “death knell” for SS but not for welfare? I mean we all pay in to SS but the recipients of welfare seldom if ever contribute to the piggy bank from which they suckle.
“So did my mother——paid into SS for about 4 years in the 1940s,started collecting in 1969,at 65,and lived to be 91.”
I only have to live to about 190 to get the same sweet deal they got.
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