My sons are 37 and 41, even if nothing is done to the current SS system, they (and YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS) would still get about an 80% payment. What you KNOW is wrong. One problem is that the very rich don’t pay as big a percent of their income as the less well off. The amount of income on which you have to pay into SS is the amount that 90% of the population earns. That limit is currently $108,000 or thereabouts Thus a person who earns $500,000 does not put any money into SS for $392,000 of their income. Raising the cutoff to 95% or even higher would go a long way to solving the SS problem. I’ll bet there are a lot of ex Wall St. types who wish more of their income had gone into SS, now that they are lucky if they can get a $60,000 a year job, or worse yet are unemployed.
Are you sure you are on the right board? Why should the high achievers pay SS tax on entire income when their benefits are limited based on $108k level? That is a form of wealth distribution. Your post would do well on Democratic Underground.
No, we’re going to to get nothing. The little government “account statement” claims we’re going to get something, but independent assessments say we’re going to get NOTHING. Remember, there’s nothing in the SS “Trust Fund” right now so they’re going to have to increasingly raid current payments.
The other thing is that the little account statements they hand out do NOT take into account the huge baby boomer population that is in the process of retiring. It’s based not on projections but on current conditions, i.e., “you will only get this money if nobody else retires between now and then.”