If you are mentally and physically healthy, taxpayers should not pay you to retire at 65. [More]
Yes, of COURSE it’s a Ponzi scheme, which is another reason the government is so desperate to bring in foreigners to keep it going, and of COURSE it’s better for them if people have something productive and fulfulling to do.
But no taxpayer is paying me to retire. This is what I have had taken out of my paychecks since 1969, when I started earning “reportable” income, and not just what was robbed from me, but it shows what my employers had to cough up as a cost of my employment. That’s money I never saw.
That’s money I earned and money that’s owed me.
Should there be a better way going forward? Absolutely, because it can’t be sustained forever, and when it goes it will be catastrophic.
That’s another reason the elites are building bunkers.
You never want to be the last one to leave the party.
The Social Security trust fund is a legal fiction. It contains nothing but IOUs promising to repay monies “borrowed” to finance FedGov’s talent for spending money it doesn’t and probably never will have. The money people are getting paid today is not the money they’ve been paying in since they were first employed. That money was long ago paid out to others and/or to fund FedGov’s chronic need to promise folks benefits that no one wants to pay for. Even worse, in order to pay current benefits, FedGov is at the point where those IOUs have pretty much been cashed in and future benefits will have to come from current tax receipts or add to the rapidly increasing FedGov debt. Look for either tax rates to increase to politically unsustainable levels, or for Federal finances to enter the long predicted “death spiral” seen in third world sh*tholes like Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. If the BRICS countries succeed in replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with something else, essentially kneecapping FedGov’s ability to finance its debts at other countries’ expense, look for that spiral to come sooner rather than later.
One defining characteristic of all Ponzi schemes is that the contributions of the current batch of contributors (victims? suckers?) is used to finance payouts to a previous batch, but always more than the previous batch paid in. If the plan’s managers didn’t promise you payouts bigger than your contributions, why would you participate in the first place? And that’s the insidious part of Social Security. Neither you nor your employer(s) were given any choice about contributing. If the money had been invested in some profit making way, the scheme might be sustainable as most 401k plans are to cite one example. But if you add in a component where the people running the scheme get to siphon off from the income generated, the odds that the scheme will collapse of its own weight.
One difference between all other Ponzi schemes and Social Security, is that FedGov can create new money out of thin air to pay out in benefits, but as we’ve recently seen, those additions to the global pool of money are the driving force behind inflation, the new dollars, being essentially worthless, dilute the value of every other dollar in circulation. The dollars you paid in in the 1960s, when gasoline was $0.22 per gallon are not the same as the dollars you would get from Social Security today when gasoline goes for more than ten times that price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme