Posted on 08/14/2023 9:23:38 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
On Aug. 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law. Eighty-eight years later, our Social Security system is among the most successful and popular government programs in history.
Nearly every worker pays premiums (Federal Insurance Contributions or FICA) for Social Security. In return, they receive insurance benefits when they retire, become disabled, or lose a family breadwinner.
Social Security is secure, efficient, and the most important source of retirement income for the vast majority of Americans. Social Security does have one major flaw, though: Its benefits are too low.
The average Social Security benefit is only $1,700 a month — considerably lower than in peer nations. That is not enough for working families to enjoy a secure retirement or make ends meet when tragedy strikes in the form of serious and permanent disabilities or death.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Why not add full benefits for all illegals and their families even if still back in the source country. Drug dealers, sex traffickers, and all other criminals included. Not to leave out terrorists, Chinese nationals, and everybody and anybody in the world. There that should do it.
What really needs to be done is to logically phase out social security and replace it with a workable and self-funded, not robbable real pension plan and also eliminate the fleecing of America by Wall Street 401K program.
Many workable pension plans exist around the world. Ours is not one of them. Reform is too late for most of the Boomers though. They are going to have to embrace the suck and hope someone can take care of them as they die.
And from the About Page at that website it says
Mission
The mission of Social Security Works is to,
Protect and improve the economic security of disadvantaged and at-risk populations
Safeguard the economic security of those dependent, now or in the future, on Social Security
Maintain Social Security as a vehicle of social justice
yours:
If someone is retiring with only ss, then that is either tremendously bad luck over decades or decades of poor decisions.
mine:
Sociable Insecurity was never intended or designed to be a retiree’s sole source of income. President Roosevelt sold it as a Supplement to your own preparations for your own retirement (savings, investments, any private pensions, etc.)
100% agree with you
Our SS taxes are spent by govt for current budget
Chile invests SS tax in stock market. Chile retirees are very happy.
Even those with just the average ss benefit or less than the average ss benefit, life choices helped determine that. Could there have been a better truer investment for what they paid into ss? Yes, sure. But even then, some of their life choices would determine the outcomes of that.
Most often it is the compounding factor of time - earnings compounded over time, is what builds any retirement benefit, or retirment nest egg.
Learn how to invest on your own with diversification across many mutual funds across many asset classes. Learn the age withdrawal and transfer and conversion rules to implement without paying penalties for the tax breaks. Make it so that by the time you retire, your total balance is at least 25 times your annual budget (so that a 4% withdrawal strategy can meet your needs and wants). Make it more than that if some or all of your investments are in tax-deferred accounts. After all of that, you, not SS, get to decide what age you retire. And if SS is still around it'll be icing on the cake.
Supposed to increase by a whopping 3% next year. But what is given is easily taken: Medicare is supposed to go way up to compensate for last year and this year increases.
If you live on SS, you will remain poor and have to struggle in your retirement years, before being buried in a paupers grave.
one of her incessant mantras is to “make the rich pay more”
While I think it is outrageous for the 1% to control as much as they do I do not see fleecing them as the solution to problems.
I do think that money unprofitably employed is just wrong.
The 401k plan created by Reagan was far more successful.
The Uniparty has worked very hard to cripple it since it was created.
Pretend we’re in the 70s. Let’s take 50% of my SS monthly contribution and put it into a stock market that has risen from approx 700 in the 70s to 35,000 today. The other 50% would remain in the traditional SS program. Which 50% would do better?
“My advice is to budget, save, and invest.” The first two everyone can do, but the last one is not universally possible for 100% of folks.
“Put enough in the Roth 401K to get the company match (if they have one).”
Again, fine but only if the 401K style is how retirement savings are met in the company you work for, but not relevant when your company has a different retirement plan you and your employer contribute to.
Just go traipsing though the endless money orchard picking armsful of cash to pay beneficiaries.
Or something like that.
It’s like she thinks electricity originates in the “hole.”
So It starts - I noticed Potenkim Joe is nominating the left-wing former governor of MD O’Malley that never saw a tax he did not like to head the SS administration.
Without little doubt, there will be a push to increase SS benefits right before the elections to suck in struggling seniors under the build-back better nonsense gaslighting.
Your entire post is sound it seems to me.
The problem is inflation. Our government leaders are printing and giving away hundreds of billions of dollars like they were spare kittens.
When gasoline goes from $2.00 to $3.60 in a couple of years that is not six percent annual inflation; it is not nine percent either.
And that is why $1,000 will not buy even 100 complete hamburger meals anymore.
I have no idea how much money a middle class person will need during a 30-year retirement; and neither does the president of the United States.
“Learn how to invest on your own with diversification across many mutual funds across many asset classes. Learn the age withdrawal and transfer and conversion rules to implement without paying penalties for the tax breaks. Make it so that by the time you retire, your total balance is at least 25 times your annual budget (so that a 4% withdrawal strategy can meet your needs and wants). Make it more than that if some or all of your investments are in tax-deferred accounts. After all of that, you, not SS, get to decide what age you retire. And if SS is still around it’ll be icing on the cake.”
The majority of folks do not have the wherewithal understanding and knowledge of the investment world to do that and therefore for most folks managing all that is best done with their funds available for it turned over to qualified investment advisors/managers.
One of my siblings understand how unqualified he was to do all that himself, turned his retirement investing over to an investment management company and has done extremely well by it - better than average every year for many years now.
Advice - know your own limitations and pay experts/professionals to do what you are not expert in.
I disagree. If your employer doesn't have a 401K (or 403B or 457), then invest elsewhere. My step 2 for investing is a Roth IRA -- which you get outside of work.
...but not relevant when your company has a different retirement plan you and your employer contribute to.
What employers do that anymore? Besides government employers. Again, if someone is getting a pension don't depend on it, just like SS. Save and invest as though the pension doesn't exist, when you later get the pension count it as gravy on top. That way you, not the employer, call the shots.
Raise Social Security Benefits-
More SS taxes come into Goobermint-
Goobermiont swipes it all and writes IOUs -
Rinse-Repeat
It’s not your money. It’s just another TAX.
The payout is for Goobermint to decide for whom, and how much, at it’s sole discretion.
If you can’t stand in front of it with a gun and protect it, it never really was yours anyway.
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