Social Security isn't a pension fund. It never was.
And if you bothered to do the math you might see that if you had control of that money and the money that your employer matches that you would actually be able to retire with a **** of a lot more money than Social Security will pay you.
SS was established for people
too stupid to save for their own retirement ... once they were too old to work, they lived on in abject poverty, or with one of their children ... something conservatives seem to like ...
CBS News looked into the ROI about ten years ago ...
"What's the Return on Your Social Security Taxes?" -- Feb 28th, 2011:
"How's it shake out? If you retired last year [2010] as an average wage-earning man, for example, you could expect a lifetime benefit worth $417,000 in today's dollars on $345,000 in taxes. If you were a woman with the same work history, you could expect to collect $464,000 on the same taxes."
So ... that's your solution to the debt ... strip the SS Trust Fund and take the 15.3% payroll taxes ... then quit paying benefits ... wise, very wise ...
No it was established to give the government more money to play with. And I'm not a conservative or a republican so let's see if you can have a conversation without your need to attach partisan labels on everything
And you don't quit paying benefits to the people who have already been duped by the government line.
do the math and see what a person who works for 40 years and calculate what his retirement account would be worth using the average stock market return in that 40 year period.
I'll simplify it for brevity. Assume an average 50K a year salary. Social Security on that is 258 a month with your employer match that's 516 a month
The average stock market return since 1971 is 10.8%. I'll use lower amounts.
in 40 years that will be worth
1283000 at 7%
1673286 at 8%
768615 at 5%
if we use the 10.8% actual average we get
3606892.
And we can still make the deductions mandatory and simply give people an option where to put their money. That way the people not the government would own their own retirement accounts.
There's a reason the government doesn't want this. Can you figure out what that reason is?