Your "pay in payout" math is wrong. You're forgetting there should be growth and compounding. Even a small savings account would do better than the government. The problems isn't that we are running out of money...it's that it's been stolen. At some point we have to stop blaming people for not "paying their fair share" and ask "what have they done with all that money".
Yep. I have retirement accounts that are worth more than the sum of my contributions. That’s what I was always taught “investing” was all about. Some of my accounts are worth many multiples of my contributions.
How would your investments be doing without massive bailouts of every market in 2008 and even bigger in 2020? And further more, when they need to bailout again soon, how will you react?
I never got a bailout. I just didn’t panic every time the traders and the bankers got taken to the cleaners.
But let’s remember that most of the ‘bailouts’ were caused by the Gov’t. Remember Barney “Let’s roll the dice on liar loans” Frank? I sure as heck do. He and his adherents were 100% responsible for 2008.
And the 2020 escapade was caused by the government foolishly shutting down the economy on account of an Influenza Like Illness. And further destruction wrecked on the economy by the Autopen Administration.
When did the REPO market start to break? It broke in 2008, and was breaking again in 2019. Also the market started plunge again in late 2018. Fed starts lowering rates from an already pathetic 2.5 in 2019, stop QT. What came first, the virus or the financial crisis? The traders and the bankers never got taken to the cleaners. They were bailed out, along with your investments. You decry welfare but not when its for you. Its always someone elses fault, that should be on the tombstone of boomers.
No, the banks all repaid the funds that in some cases, the feds forced them to take, remember? The idea was that no one was supposed to know who needed a bridge loan.
Among the few who really did get bailed out, it mostly wasn't taxpayer funds. It was mostly chicanery like Obama stealing from bondholders to make auto unions whole. The taxpayer funds that were used went mostly to bail out pension funds like Calpers and some Canuck gov operation. I don't remember the details exactly.
If everything was fixed, and everything was great, why did low rates and QE continue until 2022? Tell your self whatever you want, but the actions taken belittle your narrative
Probably still better than the return on my SS “contributions”, but I’m not able to run an experiment so the answer really is unknowable. Do you think you know? If so, how would you know that without knowing my asset allocation?
Only damned fools lost money in 2008. You could see the collapse coming years in advance. I used the collapse to refinance my house. I took two years off the mortgage.
Then again, some people believed Barny Frank and George Soros and got in big trouble. That's what you get for believing Barny Frank and George Soros.
The majority of this post and this blog, is that welfare is generally bad and leads to degraded human beings. Why is welfare for the stock market ok? How long did it take the markets to recover from 1929? How long did it take the stock market to recover after 2008?
I've found over the years since 2008, that attributing what is mainly human flaws (greed, lust) towards boogiemen, as generally unproductive. Just like blaming certain generations is unproductive, unless you want to keep people divided and unclear what they have in common.
Additionally, are the matching employer contributions included in the "pay in" portion in el gato malo's illustration? As a former business owner (now retired) I can tell you that all employers are required to match employee contributions for Social Security and Medicare taxes, effectively doubling the "pay in" portion. Those employer contributions and the growth and compounding you mention increase the "pay in" portion exponentially.
As an employer myself, the numbers seem pretty screwy. SS is well over twice medicare, for example. But $11k for SS might be in the ballpark. That's only a lifetime average of $75k. $12k was a pretty respectable starting engineering salary when I graduated, and that same engineer could have pretty easily have hit $100k by now.
For reference, I graduated in Dec 1999, and got a job paying $66k / year. It was only 2024 when I got a *retardedly* large raise and job title shift that moved me to a salary that had improved upon that, and the "improvement" relative to inflation was a whopping 0.25% per year. And in the meantime, that's already been wiped out.
And frankly, I just expect to never collect anything from SS. I'm paying it, because I don't have an option, but I'll never retire, until I reach the point where I can't work and put myself in line for cremation. Maybe I'll get a couple of weeks of rest before I have to go. Or I'll just die at my desk. That's also an option.
True enough. Nor do I see him factoring in the lifetime of inflation Boomers have lived through. We paid in with dollars that were worth a lot more than the same dollar now. My SS benefits sheet showed I was paying into the system back in the 60's.
And I recall when a mortgage couldn't be had for under 15% back in the 70's.
I know my kids are unlikely to get SS, and I've told them that their entire lives. Heck, I may not get it for my entire life either. But the more $ I can keep out of the hands of government, the more they can inherit. And my current SS check does the heavy lifting for that in my day-to-day life.
> The lifetime of inflation Boomers have lived through.
Hunh. Maybe y'all should have bloody well *done* something about that. I bet y'all'd be catching a whole lot less shit these days if that had been dealt with while it was still tenable to do so.
as a long time "boomer" . . . I resemble that statement.
Hey, this is not "our" fault, nor yours, nor any citizens'. Pure and simple look at your Congressional representatives. Surely, if any of the last half century of Congresses had put forth a SS saving bill before ANY president, this would have been solved. . .
I just fail to see why #1 el gato leads with the right punch being its all the BOOMERS fault and
#2 why there is so much piling on by later generations?
We had no more control as individuals or as a group than YOU do now over any government bureaucracy run program-- entitlement or otherwise.
> I just fail to see why #1 el gato leads with the right punch being its all the BOOMERS fault and
> #2 why there is so much piling on by later generations?
Greatest and Silent Generations are dead. You're what's left, and you're *way* larger than us in Gen X. Still. Which says something numerically, given how old y'all are.
Y'all could have voted for folks who wanted to fix this. Y'all could have *run* as folks who wanted to fix this. And actually *yes*, I *am* going to run (despite **really** not wanting to) as someone who wants to fix **this** and so much more in '28. I was too late to come to the realization to be in the fight for '26.
I doubt I'll win (and in fact, I'll be straight up *shocked* if I win) but if I do, Congress is going to acquire an absolutely *dickheaded* autistic hacker who is going to push to simply *end* all the things currently on tap.
I can not be bargained with. I can not be reasoned with. I don't feel *pity*, or *remorse*, or *fear*. And I absolutely *will* not stop... *ever*, until these systems are dead.
And if I don't manage a win in '28? Well... "I'll be back."
#1 WE did vote against all this, but we had to SHARE our vote TOTALS with the liberals who won because there were not enough NUMBERS of us.
#2 YOU will have the exact same problem when you find(hope you don't) that there are not enough NUMBERS to reward your effort and give you a win.
#3 pointing the finger at an entire CLASS of humans when possibly a majority of them agree with your viewpoint alienates those who MIGHT vote for YOU. Kind of like shooting yourself in the foot or ass or . . .
If you get elected, recall what happened to MT Greene. She was not autistic but alienated herself unneccessarily because she could not keep her xxit together.
Yeah, sorry. "Not being a dick" isn't on the menu. I'll dial it *down* if I can, but this is *not* my career. I actively *do not want* the job. I'm just going to roll up my sleeves and do it because apparently everyone else is too retarded to get it right.
Oh my gosh do you think we DIDN'T vote for that? But did the politicians ever do what they said they were going to do? There were schemes to allow some portion of SS to be invested...do you think enough of our representatives ever supported that? Or did they scare people into thinking Grandma was going to be pushed over a cliff in her wheelchair? It's just another way politicians buy votes. My older relatives were talking about how SS was not going to be around for me even back when I was a teenager. I still remember Al Gore talking about "the lockbox." The money paid into SS never should have gone to pay other things. It's disgusting. Not too mention how much of SS pays disability now---not just for retirement.
Who stole it? Oh yea, we all did, by allowing our politicians to keep writing checks they didn’t have the funds to pay for. If you can write checks “heaters” without any consequences, you would do that on your own personal bank account.
Any one with a financial background could see back in the 1980’s the Social Security system was a ponzi scheme. Not enough workers to cover the benefits of those retiring.
Unfunded liabilities are on the horizon and everyone needs to accept the pain that is coming. We have allowed it. It is time to take the medicine.
Not sure I "allowed" my government to do any of this. My votes usually got cancelled out. What was I supposed to do, start a revolution?
I don't accept personal responsibility for things that were not under my control. Blame society all you want, but that doesn't make me responsible for my idiot neighbors.
Amen. As an example 85% of the voters want voter ID.
Don't be a sap. It's not your fault that politicians don't give a rat's patoot about you. After all, they got theirs -- cadillac pension and lifetime health insurance, the ability to convert unused election warchests to their own income, lobbyist payola, plus all the sweet, sweet insider trading. There's a reason that they can come in broke and be multi-millionaires within a decade.
Very true. As a "boomer" I was appalled, but hardly surprised, that my generation who were "all in" on the shots have screwed up everything. They can't question authority. Sadly neither can any of the other Gen-?. A nasty cat had a great VENN diagram about it LOL.
Heck all it takes is a cheesy slogan "Elbows Up", a new face at the top (Carney) and the idiot boomers vote for the same Liberal Party that just screwed them over.
The citizens of Israel are even stupider than Canadians. They didn't even get a new face at the top. Same old Quisling, Mengele, war criminal Bibi.
Most of what you say is true, but I just don't agree with the idea "we" allowed it, WE voted in politicians who we THOUGHT would handle things ethically, judicially, with our country's well being in mind. But the Progressive / liberals voted in gold diggers 180 degrees opposed to our country these days! Then, get them together in this mess of idiots we call a Congress and it is a straight on "Lord of the Flies" kiddy chaos mob of fraudsters with a light sprinkling of Ron Johnson's . . . allowing us to believe there is SOME chance of redemption.
This, and all the follow ons, would be a logical response/comment if the money that was "paid in" i.e. deducted from paychecks as well as employer contributions, were deposited into discreet "individual retirement accounts" where they were then allowed to compound and grow over time. That, in fact, would be a much better system than what was established under FDR in the 1930's. Instead, it was constructed as a Ponzi scheme from the very beginning, with something like 5 workers funding the benefits of each retiree in the 1940's with, as Gato noted, a very short expected time that the retiree would actually draw benefits. The system was never constructed to handle the subsequent demographic changes that have ensued since the 1940's: large post WWII generation (Boomers), advances in medicine and nutrition resulting in much longer life expectancy, post Boomer reduction in reproduction rates resulting in smaller generation cohorts. Consequently many, many more people over the age where they start drawing on Social Security and drawing for a much longer time. With far fewer workers per retiree funding the system. The fact that this is unsustainable is not a surprise to anyone that has been paying attention for the last 25 years. So protestations of "My money has been stolen" and "I paid in, don't claim I didn't pay my fair share, and don't you dare try to reduce my benefits" are just nonsense. The Boomers have literally been the WORST generation in history and spawned the second worst generation in history - the Millennials.
Maybe a solution would be to put a capital gains tax of something like 70% on all homes sold by anyone born before 1965 and use those proceeds solely to fund the Social Security benefits of anyone born before 1965. In that way, it would essentially be an intragenerational wealth transfer from those Boomers that have benefited the most over the last 50 years to their fellow Boomers that have the greatest need. And leave the rest of us out of it.
Long term capital gains are, to a large extent, a tax on inflation. If Boomer Joe paid $85k for a house in 1978 and sold it for $453k in 2026, he'd owe nothing if you adjusted his basis for inflation or $257k if you taxed nominal dollar basis as the current code does at your proposed 70% rate. The whole thing is insidious.
“The fact that this is unsustainable is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 25 years.”
Try “for the last 80 years.” I knew this as a sophomore in high school in 1980. The system was always going to collapse. And everything they have ever done to “fix” the system has simply prolonged the timetable and guaranteed that the devastation will become more catastrophic.
But the system was never intended to be sustainable over the long term. It was meant to buy votes right now. Concentrated benefits/distributed costs is a scam that will always work with the majority of people because the beneficiaries are highly motivated and the opposition is not.
There have been halfhearted atttempts to “reform” social security. Republicans tried floating alternatives in the 1990s. They just caved when the usual suspects objected to their cash cow being threatened.
“ if the money that was "paid in" i.e. deducted from paychecks as well as employer contributions, were deposited into discreet "individual retirement accounts" where they were then allowed to compound and grow over time”. Nothing wrong about doing that all by yourself. Except of course the employer contributions. But if the employer didn’t have to do that, maybe he’d pay you more, or hire more folks, or buy new equipment, or design a new product, or…. Hmmm.
"The Boomers have literally been the WORST generation in history"
This is off the hook, Hank.
As if it was OUR fault we were born to the "Greatest Generation" who authored the SS bill and did so under duress of the worst depression in US history. Boomers did nothing but pay in to the SS and FICA as we were all FORCED to do as soon as we got a SS #, again required to get a damn job.
The real problem is Congress, their continued legacy of FAILING to act:
-- failed to design the SS admin as an adaptable system monitoring birth rates, inflation, wages, mortgage rates, and death rates among others and then reacting to them with intelligence without delay.
-- failed in every Congress in the last 40 years to act decisively to head off the catastrophe predicted LONG ago.
-- failed to reduce benefits 40 years ago to build the trust fund levels to a point that retirement draws would equal paycheck draws.
I could go on but suffice it to say, blaming a "generation" is pointless and solves nothing. Both you and el Gato.
> As if it was OUR fault we were born to the "Greatest Generation" who authored the SS bill and did so under duress of the worst depression in US history. Boomers did nothing but pay in to the SS and FICA as we were all FORCED to do as soon as we got a SS #, again required to get a damn job.
It's your fault for not voting the bastards who authored that *out*, and for not *replacing* them with folks who would do so.
> The real problem is Congress, their continued legacy of FAILING to act
Well... MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED FOR BETTER CONGRESSMEN!
In 1980, the so called "Greatest Generation" was 45 million people. In 1970, the "Silent Generation" (who ultimately also deserve some blame for this) were 48 million people. In 1980, the Baby Boomer population was 79 million people.
In 1980, Gen X (or the "Baby Bust") -- the eldest of whom was 15 -- had a population of 65 million people.
By 1990? Greatest Generation -- 43M. Silent Generation -- 38M. Baby Boomers -- 79M. And yes, Gen X -- some of whom were finally old enough to vote -- still just 65M people.
Yeah. Sorry that it hurts to take the blame. But it was, in fact, literally your generation who could have fixed things, and didn't.
Does Gen X share some portion of the blame, for not just running you down and kicking our grandparents to the curb? Yeah, probably. But the fact is that we *were* outnumbered here. and by the time we recognized the problem, the folks who should have already fixed it were entrenched in the system.
> -- failed in every Congress in the last 40 years to act decisively to head off the catastrophe predicted LONG ago.
> -- failed to reduce benefits 40 years ago to build the trust fund levels to a point that retirement draws would equal paycheck draws.
Hunh. You mean... in 1986? Well... the very *first* members of Gen X were able to vote at that point... But it was mostly "Greatest", "Silent", and the Boomers in charge at that point, and *all* of the Boomers could vote by then.
Yeah, you make a good point. I just can't *imagine* why folks look at the Boomers with disgust and rage.
Citizens vote for who SHOWS up on the BALLOT. Citizens (99% of them) have NO control who is ON it.
If Jo Blo is the most honest guy in the world, loves his country, has a resume' that blows away everyone in the world and is NOT on the ticket, I can NOT vote for Jo.
If I vote for JIM BLOUGH who is really close to Jo in most respects but I am OUT voted because liberals voted in Jane Wampum, a Commie, is that my fault?
What did they do with it? They paid then current retirees' benefits and lent the excess to the government which pays it back with interest (taxes on current workers)....
What have they done with all that money? They faked 5 moon landings in three years and started wars all over the world. We know how to launder money if nothing else.
No need to rummage in the details. That's just to distract from the big picture. The parallel cancer program has provided profits to reap and culling to trim the recipients. The new turbo boost is kicking in as planned.
Yeah, I couldn't help but notice how effective Covid was at killing older people and had to wonder if it wasn't designed that way... but then again, older people have a harder time fighting disease. The clot shots were not effective in this regard in killing and disabling working young people, instead of targeting the elderly for elimination. Disable a 25yo and it costs you much more than you'd save by killing off a number of 75yo people.
"but, and this is a huge but, this does not mean that they do not also have some valid points as well. they do.
in 2021, housing was at generational levels of affordability, but in the last 4-5 years, housing has become stratospherically expensive. that’s a real issue and if you, boomerisimos, were in their shoes instead of owning homes and benefitting from this, you too might find the fit not to your liking."
We Boomers didn't do that. Covid's money-printing did that.
"you paid far, far less than you will take out and during a long period in which you held unchallenged political control of the US."
I controlled *nothing*. My political voice was never heard. "Unchallenged political control of the US" was NOT in our hands; it was in the hands of a small cabal of people who almost NEVER did what we wanted (and STILL don't; see Thune et al).
I was forced at the business end of a gun, metaphorically, to "contribute" (what a fucked up description of money CONFISCATED from me) to SS. I had NO opportunity to take those funds and invest them where they would've provided returns FAR greater than SS, AND, would be assets I could pass on to my heirs, unlike SS which, if I die tomorrow at 65 and without having taken even one dollar of benefits, everything I "contributed" remains in SS to pay out to total strangers.
So fuck that "blame Boomers" shit. We were FORCED to play this fucked up game, and I'll damned if I'M gonna sit by passively and be blamed for it.
Covid money-printing certainly added fuel to the fire, but housing costs really shot up when our government allowed 21 million people into the country over four years - there was no plan for housing supply with that massive surge in demand. So prices soared. Add to that food, utilities, healthcare - and well, "everything". Apparently, "compassion" has a cost. Who knew?
And I submit that most Boomers want ALL illegal aliens deported and ALL fraud rooted out and the perps prosecuted, sentenced, and executed. Well, not the Leftist Boomers; they don't want any of that.
In which case, this column should be directed at Leftists, not Boomers. Because ALL Leftists, of EVERY stripe, want the things that help destroy America.
Totally agree. I was all for when Bush wanted to privatize part of SS, as I wanted to do this ever since seeing how it was confiscated from my meager earnings in the 1970s. Yet Bush rolled over when he was criticized for even bringing it up, when he could have defended it and pushed it through. I've been against this money-printing for years, and was aghast when the last bout was caused by the "Inflation Reduction" Act. It's rich that bad cat wants to blame a generation for the business end of a gun, as you so accurately depicted it. I'd love to just get what I put in, adjusted for inflation, and walk away. And don't get me started on Medicare.
I disagree. Bush was an idiot in a myriad of ways but I was very impressed with the strong effort he made to reform/fix SS. NO ONE ON EITHER SIDE CAME TO HIS AID. The Republicans and Democrats both suck
You are saying the same thing I said, but giving him more credit for trying to reform SS. At this point, it doesn't matter how much effort he put in--he still rolled over.
I agree with you in general. I never planned on living on SS so I do have other means. Other part of the problem is SS has become a monster. Coworker had a loser ex-husband who left her with three kids. When he died, after never paying child support, her kids got $3k/mo from SS until they graduated HS. Even though she remarried and was relatively affluent. The whole system has been whored out and was never meant to be what it has become. Mark my words, they will come for your retirement funds.
Bingo! Yes, they will indeed come for our retirement funds. It’s already started in California. Once they get people to accept the idea that taking “a small percentage” from “billionaires“ is a good idea, it won’t take very long until everyone’s retirement accounts will be taxed at higher and higher rates. Politicians will be glad to oblige the masses calling for those of us who have prepared for retirement to “pay their fair share”. I really don’t see how we avoid collapse.
Never believe a poiitician when he/she says it's ONLY a small percentage. Once it's on the books, it never comes off. It never goes down. But it always goes up.
You didn't know my mom was the Boomer Mastermind behind all of Social Security's mistakes? She really should have done better.
I think the Los Angeles mayotal election is proving that the common man has no recourse in the political field. That fraud has always existed, it is just more blatant now with the internet of constant news.
And you know the "blame Boomers" crap is just that when the millennials and snowflakes who throw the label around classify anyone older than 45 as a "Boomer." When you ask them what age demographic makes up Boomers, you get the "zzzz" moment in the eyes of "I can't compute" because they don't even know. I'm a proud Generation X (there are some videos of us on YT that hit the nail on the head.) I made my own way. I paid for my bachelor's and master's degrees and paid my small loans back because I signed that I would. I don't expect anyone except me to take care of me. I made some boneheaded financial decisions in the past so have to work a long time now to save up enough, but that was my fault and I have to live with the consequences. I don't throw a temper tantrum because I don't get my way.
I'll always remember talking to a grad school classmate on our FB group several years ago and she was whining in favor of wealth redistribution. I work in financial planning so have many clients who have large portfolios from hard work and sacrifice over the years. I asked her "so you are saying that one of my clients who worked for every penny they saved should be forced to give you some of the accumulated wealth because you didn't?" She unashamedly said "yes, I do." I left the group never to return. And she in her late 60's now.
Don’t forget the impact on home prices when BlackRock, et al, bought up vast quantities of houses; and then there’s high mortgage interest rates, and the high cost of over regulation, NIMBYS, the college loan scam, needing to house the above noted 20,000,000 +\- illegals, the unbelievably massive amount of entitlement fraud. And I could go on.
You need to blame big money, not the “boomers” the whole artificial generational construct is part of the distraction / confusion / fear / anxiety / identity / anger system used to prevent us from focusing on such things as the massive transfer of wealth that occurred during Covid - from all generations. Your enemy is not the boomers, it’s nebulous and it’s hiding behind complexity.
Covid money printing was an animal of the political system that tolerated money printing for dozens of different reasons over the years, I don't give anyone who ignored deficits a pass on that one.
Its because you tolerated it in 2008, in fact, what was really different between 2008 and 2020? They used fear in both to get you to let them do what they wanted to do.
Heck, even go back to the 1980's. The defense spend deficits were huge (at the time) and things improved out of the malaise, so everyone quit thinking about them for a while, then moved on to all out denial when faced with the political consequences of reining them in.
Indeed they were. Go back even further to the 70's. Was the Bretton woods agreement a contract between the united states and the rest of the world? How do you define a default on a contract? If gold isn't worth anything, why wouldn't we gladly give it out in exchange for paper money? My point is, we can go back ages and point fingers, sacrifice and standing for something is what is needed now.
Sooner or later someone will have to put a stop to it by whatever means they can muster. The longer it goes on the worse it gets. You didn't. We (X) didn't.
If it falls to the kids to do it, because it's become so dire they have no other choice but to risk their necks when the corruption is worst and most difficult to remedy, how kindly do you think they're gonna look upon us? How much do you think they're gonna care about "I couldn't do anything"s and "don't blame me"s?
I'd consider adopting some contrition and apologies over belligerence and deflection if you don't want to be left to rot in a ditch after the dust settles. Or maybe you'll get lucky and die off before that happens. Lucky for us (X), we'll just blame you and say sorry we fucked up and failed to stop you. Everybody gets off scott free.
We, X, have never controlled the Presidency. We've been on the planet since 1965 and never had a President younger than we are. The Boomers have held the Presidency every year since 1993, except for Biden. I suspect a Millennial or Z President will rewrite the order of society, but an Xer President would cut benefits to X in a second so long as the Boomers get hit too. We can hope.
Since we were never allowed to invest these monies in equities we were deprived of our only defense against the real culprit, theft by inflation. I’m pretty sure my father was critical about SS back in the 50’s. Simply put the huge amounts of earned money given to government oversight was a bridge too far, an attempt to inoculate us against the natural foe POVERTY and since long term studies were never done we ended up surprised by the greedy nature of both the elected and the electorate. Yes, you must kill this beast and hope in the process you don’t bleed out also.
"'Unchallenged political control of the US' was NOT in our hands; it was in the hands of a small cabal of people who almost NEVER did what we wanted..."
That small cabal still depends on democratic legitimacy. Hence, everyone voting to continue their status quo these last four decades has some responsibility for upholding it. If that wasn't you, congrats, you don't fit into Mr. Gato's generalization. Don't take it so personally.
We’ve already seen this movie. Remember defined benefits pensions? That’s basically what Soc Sec is. Now we have 401k and Roth instead. Soc Sec needs to transition similarly. It will be painful and take a long time but is probably the only way to save Soc Sec. Didn’t some South American country already do this?
No. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme not a defined benefits pension. A defined benefits pension has to be funded with investments. Social Security is just an out and out scam. You pay an income tax AND a payroll tax; they promise they’ll give some of it back to you later. In the meantime the spend it on windmills, solar panels that are net economic losers, and bullet trains that never get built. Well, some solar stuff that never gets built either (e.g., Solyndra, etc. )
Yep. But it needs to be across the board. No more defined benefits programs for anyone. Especially government employees, who are on both sides of the negotiation table.
If private sector wants to try to run one, be my guest, but the hatchet men and hostile takeovers of the 80s proved that to be a game for suckers. Nothing is easier to get financing for than a big pile of money.
They made it illegal to do to a private pension what they themselves did to social security. The feds throw you in jail if you attempt their accounting tricks.
I’d be a little more sanguine about SS cuts if it weren’t for the trillions in annual fraud depleting the treasury.
I’m not going to be too happy copping a haircut when hundreds of billions are being allowed to be stolen and sent overseas to enrich people who hate me.
What frosts me is that whatever means testing or paygo or whatever else is applied to SS, we will still be taxed to provide the defined benefit programs for gov't retirees. And it's not just the money. It's that those retirees are bidding up prices that the rest of us have to pay to live.
It has to be across the board or it absolutely wrecks the supply-demand curve. The high incomes near the capital retire and use their pensions (Fauci gets about half a million, for example) to bid up prices where others are trying to make a living.
Everyone who voted democrat forfeits their share of SS and Medicare. They voted for infinite illegal aliens with unlimited government benefits, and the money has to come from somewhere...
(Only sorta facetious here. I wonder how many old people protesting ICE would fling down their signs and scurry away if their checks were being docked.)
2000 POTUS debates. Gore: lockbox on SS. W: yes unless shtf. It did didnt it? And thereby the lockbox was opened. Also, W tax cuts implemented realizing the debt would be retired otherwise.
Yep, and I’d add when the government became the charity champion of the country we crossed the line of common sense. It’s also de-incentivized self reliance and personal responsibility.
Even worse is that it drastically cut or removed entirely the sense of moral and civic duty that used to be present in communities. Churches and civic and fraternal organizations that used to do the heavy lifting of charities are shadows of their former selves. Businessmen would try to find some way of accommodating pretty much anyone's handicap. And along with this decline went the sense of pride in community of the giver, and gratitude of the recipient.
Precisely. The Amish, who aren't part of SS or Medicare, seem to have better sense of community (for that matter, so do the Somalis who grift the public system to support their extended clan networks). Because they don't tax the young to transfer wealth to the old, the young of childbearing years can still afford children. Family sizes are 6-8 children on average.
People who believe in the promises of the State will disappear in the face of that demographic wave.
And yet, having a window into the absolute fuck-fuck circus that is military spending, I'd say they're just flat out wasting our money and enriching their friends. I wouldn't mind so much if there was *any* sort of fiscal punishment for utter failure to deliver.
The biggest cradle to grave for a LONG time has been the "defense" budget. It's mostly a welfare program for military contractors who build overpriced weapons systems. Contrast what Iran spent on its cheaper drones and missiles versus the cost of JASSMs and reaper drones. It's only recently that the cost of SS passed the military budget and that might not hold.
Now, do you oppose the socialistic formula in SS that pays higher percentage of lifetime earnings to poor people? That seems a lot like socialism.
Ok, cool. We cut military spend by 24% ($240 billion on the current budget). Social Security is funded for 57 whole days. ($240 billion/$1.53 trillion ~= 15.6%). If using the hypothetical FY 2027 budget, it would be 85 days.
Any other ideas, or are we going to keep avoiding the elephant in the room that is entitlement outlays?
I’m 70, and have paid into the system for 50 years. My SS income is now $ 14,184 per YEAR. That’s right, I now live on a little more than $14,000 per year. You think that’s too much?
dont be angry at the math. calculate what your ss income would be had you taken that tax and put it in the s&p 500 over your lifetime; then be mad the government stole that future from you.
I have savings and assets. It’s just the income that’s small. But I want Gen Z to realize that I’m doing alright BECAUSE I have savings and assets, not because I’m living like a king from Social Security. I lived frugally all my life, paid off the student loans, paid off the credit card debt, paid off the mortgage. If they want to retire in comfort, they have to do the same.
It's far too little to live on, and no one who worked for 50 years should be in such a position. To the extent he thought that he could, he chose not to make decisions such to avoid his future being tied to political fate instead of more closely related to his own control. I know everyone in power told you otherwise with earnest protestations of "lock boxes", but take it from another Gen X'er, people in power lie, often, and especially when it concerns money.
@GBill- what did you do for a lving? That's awfuly low. My husband was (retired and now back at it) a diesel mechanic and his SS is way higher. He will be 70 next month.
Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!
It’s clear you’d be much better cash wise if you’d had private savings. Then there is the Medicare benefit to consider as well. Whew, it’s certainly not sustainable, the solution will not be easy, because the people that have contributed for decades are going to get harmed, going forward it should be replaced by individual accounts imho.
I understand, my point was not clearly stated, my apologies. I’m currently watching several mid 70 thru early 80 aged friends/family and another 54 year old on as disability spend millions of dollars on healthcare all on Medicare. I’m not claiming to have an immediate solution, I’m saying we need to start finding one asap. This was a good topic by El Gato it’s certainly important.
So long as we have Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCrap and cadillac lifetime health for government workers, we cannot do anything about prices. At a zero price, there is practically infinite demand, and nothing we do on supply side can fix it.
Fed Gov't family here! The Gov't people who work in politics in DC have very different benefits than Civil Servant gov't workers. Those rules changed about 30 yrs ago. My husband and my neighbor were hired by the gov't 6 months apart and a lot of her benefits (under the old system) are much better than my husband's.
OK, I stand corrected. I mostly see it locally anyway, where retired highway workers and teachers make several times what retired CNC operators and engineers get from SS, while the former paid in between 0% and 3%, while the latter paid in about 18%.
I have a personal calculation to back this idea. There are 18 states that do not fully participate in SS. Ones I recall offhand are MA, ME, CT, GA, LA, TX, CA. I know someone who worked for one of these states back in the 90s and got 18% of their salary put into a private account. That person went on to work on Wall Street at a top salary for many years, so high that the years working for the state government would not have counted as the 35-highest-earning years. In other words, the money paid to SS during those state-government years would not have increased their benefits by one penny. The balance with the state plan was forgotten until recently, when it was found to be about 300k.
If you take 4% of 300K, which should be a safe withdrawal level forever, you get $12000 a year, $1000 a month. How bad a deal is SS? paying in for four years in the 90s would have cost this person $1000 a month in benefits.
I was entrepreneurial, so there were many years of extremely low income, while I tried to create viable companies (good try, but no cigar). Plus, times of industry recessions (unemployment-insurance income only), which lead me to try my hand at going solo. In 1987, for example, my total income was $6000. I have an engineering degree and a master’s degree. I’m no slouch. I ended up with enough assets to live on. But I want young people to realize that Boomers aren’t raking in $80,000/yr from SS. The people who are getting that kind of benefits are the Somalian freeloaders who get free housing, food stamps, medical care, etc. - yet still commit fraud to get more!
It was two years ago that I had to do a deep dive on the US tax system for a venture I was undertaking. There's the slave system where 14.21% of your nominal income is taxed away for SS and Medicare (92.35/107.65), and then the rest gets taxed. A married couple gets a standard deduction of about 32k and then everything above that level is "profit" and subject to tax. A business does not pay tax on income until all costs are accounted for, and then at a rate capped at %21, I think.
I hope you will teach the young people about the importance of taking an entrepreneurial approach and avoiding the slave system as soon as possible. The precious experience you acquired will be critical for them.
Look. My husband and I are Boomers. Yes, we paid into SS over the years, but we are made of sturdier stuff. So if SS goes “belly up” we will not boo-hoo or engage in a pity-poor-us party. We grew up sacrificing. We can and will do it again without complaining. We also squirreled away monies throughout our working lives for just a time as this. You see, our parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression and WWII. We were taught by example to be frugal—something younger generations do not and, possibly should, though, cultivate. Boomers didn’t cause your problems. We didn’t vote for Wilson or FDR. Stop the whining. We live in the best country the world has ever known. Adults find a way. Grow up and be an adult—or whine about some other generation.
No, you're talking about the Greatest Generation. They're the ones who put in place the corrupt, asshole politicians who've created, nursed, and expanded the current paradigm. Blame them.
We Boomers wanted to privatize the g/d system, the the pols put in place by the Greatest Generation refused.
[Edit: I meant to blame the Silent Generation but blamed the Greatest Generation because I thought they preceded the Boomers; my apologies to the Greatests. And thanks to Thomas Schmidt, below, for setting me straight.]
Would it help if the 25-40 million people receiving benefits, who are not entitled benefits, were removed from the system? How about all the illegals who were invited in and given benefits without having paid in one cent? Or the millions of people collecting SS Disability for many, many years who aren’t disabled? I’ve known several. It’s easy to game the system. How many people pay in for years and die before collecting one cent? Who gets their stolen money?
Shitting on the Boomers is getting old. Until you’ve driven a 20 year old car, lived in 1000sf house with two kids and one bathroom, shopped in thrift stores and consignment shops, eaten more tuna casserole than you care to remember, and scrounged change from the sofa cushions for gasoline…and never complained. It was just the price of being young and starting out. But we scrimped and saved and did without many things we wanted. I never drove a new car until I was in my 40s. Many of us worked two jobs for years. Now finally we get to enjoy the fruits of our labors and we’re resented for it.
Gen Y and Z are the most privileged generations ever. When $7.00 daily coffees, $700 monthly new car payments, $40 Door Dash meals and $150 a month cellphone fees are considered “necessary” then there’s an issue. Of course, they’re not fully to blame. Someone raised them to feel this way.
Blaming won't get us anywhere, but the only Silent President did not do a lot to fix things with his immigrant invasion.
The mentality of WHY the Silents so honored the Greatest is covered in the Fourth Turning is Here. Well worth a read, because they talk about the reset that will rework society to redirect assets towards the young. Maybe that reset means de-mythologizing WW2... but the change has to come or the society ends.
I guess what I mean is, your generation had the opportunity to reverse course and fix it, and did not. I clearly don't mean you personally, because if here its highly we are like minded on this issue as confirmed by the above statement.
of course not, but do you think the taliban cared that that a bunch of people in the towers also didnt agree with american foreign policy? rubber always meets road at some point.
Golftdibrad, you could not be more wrong and you obviously have not read all the points being made by others: do you consider yourself to be “in control” due to your voting history? Do you think you have “control” over how your politicians of choice vote? Do you have “control” over how your social security monies are spent? Do you have separate savings and investments or are you trusting your politicians of choice to be looking out for you in your senior years? No one generation is inherently at fault…the self serving politicians of all generations are at fault…and you, sir, are forced to contribute to them with every paycheck. So you are also participating in the griff and therefore are responsible. But, you are in control, right?
You have no idea what you are talking about. Gen X is about to be more numerous than Boomers. Maybe 2 more years if the clot shot keeps pace. Millennials and Z have always been larger. And if you adjust for the fact that Boomers cover a 19 year span, while X is a mere 15 year span, Boomers have never been a majority on a per-year basis except before '65.
Cry some more whiner! Jealous much that our children, Millennials, are more respected than your lame generation that thinks The Breakfast Club and 80s music are great! What a joke; you are pathetic!
You misunderstand. Gato (and whomever I replied to) is saying his generation can't affect things because there are too few of them. Yet the peak year for boomer births is a little over 4 million, the leanest year for X was a little over 3 million. Not drastically different. And as boomers die off, X will soon be more numerous than booms, while the other generations already are. Even though they comprise fewer years. If you add in immigration, boomers are already the smallest cohort.
His article explains what the problem is -- life expectancy. But the solution to that, increasing retirement age, is not going to make you happy. You are already angry that we are still holding the top positions, and not retiring and letting the younger generations take over.
"We can and will do it again without complaining. "
Wel, yes, you and similar minded folks. But, believe me, the Democrat Party is full of Boomers who will bitch and whine and say they can't afford to live. I say, if after a working life you have not saved enough - outside of SS - no one should shed a tear for you. Maybe it is time for you to become a Walmart Greeter!
"We were taught by example to be frugal—something younger generations do not and, possibly should, though, cultivate."
You were born in a year when a US dime was 90% silver, and you still keep that sound money in your head when it has LONG since passed. Being frugal means economizing on items spent now to accumulate more fiatbux. That was sensible until the 70s and became so again in the 80s. It's time has passed and your advice to younger generations will leave them with a niggardly-lived life and a pile of worthless assets.
EGM posted the Kevin Spacey video a few months back that IS the way to do things: buy high-quality assets that yield a return. The kids are doing the right thing by not being frugal with fiatbux.
There is a real problem with this obsession about generations. The boomer generation covers those born from 1946 to 1964. There were many changes during those years that meant that the experiences of those born in them differed dramatically, The same goes for other generations,
That's not what I think of as "frugal". It's more of a "Do I really need that thing, or can I live without it?" I think the word you are thinking of is more "miserly" or "hoarder".
The smarter kids are doing what we always thought frugal meant -- wise investing. The average kid, though, is doing what our average boomers did -- piss it away as fast as possible, and have nothing to show for it.
"Frugal means being prudent and intentional with money and resources, avoiding waste, and maximizing value without sacrificing quality. It is a value-driven approach aimed at freeing up resources for long-term goals rather than a fear-based focus on spending the absolute least amount possible."
It's the latter approach I see with, e.g., my own parents who are blessed with enough money to afford high-quality nutritious food but who consistently focus on price over quality. In that sense, the Millennial spending on avocado toast is being more frugal than they.
The tragedy is that saving money in silver coin once WAS a form of frugality and I think my parents remember this. Saving fiatbux is folly.
And what makes it so? We sure like to destroy the shit out of other nations trying to better themselves. This certainly keeps us on top. Does that truly make us better? We don’t offer our citizens healthcare but we sure know how to blow things up. Is that what makes us better?
I mention this because what you display is so very very boomer. Before you call me a lefty understand that I am anything but. I am a person who asks pertinent questions and I do not fit in any of your boxes.
There are many reasons why we are the best country in the world, and MANY of them are contained in the First Amendment. But we could do even better still, did government stay in its Constitutional limits.
What makes you think I fit into your boxes? The whine is strong with you, Luke! Oh, and if you don’t like living in this country, you are free to choose a better one. Shut up.
So you have no answers for my out of the box questions. Instead you stick your fingers in your ears, scream and call names. There is indeed a box for you.
No, it's just that most adults have come to the realization that there are some things that, while unpleasant, must be done. By someone, sometime. And usually the sooner the better, before it gets worse.
Had Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc. taken the Iran situation seriously, most of the ME problems we have today would have been much less.
Are you factoring in all the fraud of the social security system? I lived across from a guy who drew SSDI benefits at age 26.......he was not disabled, just gamed the system. Does this come into play at all?
I paid $142,000 into the system in my lifetime. I am more than happy to draw out exactly what I paid in and be done with it....but I am not permitted to do that.
I'm on the cusp between boomer and X. I have heard SS is running out of money for my entire life.....not sure what to believe anymore. But I don't worry about it. I have no plans to retire. I'm 62. I'd be bored to death not working.
Exactly. We have heard this running out of money warning for as long as we have worked. My ex and I made financial plans and saved as though we would never see a penny of what we paid into the system. And now it seems we are being called greedy for amassing enough to support ourselves over a 20 - 30 year possible retirement period (The reality is no one wants to hire you after 65 or so). We lived very simply in our twenties to forties, foregoing much of what I see my children's generations splurging on, in order to be secure now. I am growing weary of this effort to create war between generations.
Yep, same here. And seeing how things are going, likely our savings, which we sacrificed vacations and worked overtime for, will be used against us as justification to be the ones who first (and perhaps, solely) experience the first reduction in SS benefits.
I, too, was told SS would be bankrupt. I was in 7th grade and we had a speaker talk to our class who was very adamant.
But we shouldn't be satisfied to only receive back an amount that is not adjusted for inflation. Your estimated portfolio value today, using a future value of an annuity calculation (regular contributions growing at a constant rate):
At 7% annual return: ~$700,000–$800,000.
At 10% annual return: ~$1.5–1.8 million (or higher if contributions were back-loaded).
I am at the tail end of boomers, and I take precisely zero personal responsibility for the disaster that's coming. The weapon aimed at me is a dud.
I'm staring retirement in the face (and looking forward to it, oh boy) and I've arranged myself in such a way that the projected 24% cut to SocSec will be noticeable but not death-dealing.
I am among the very many who have recognized the difficulty presented by SocSec since I was in my 20s -- so very long ago -- and there was a time when I attempted to re-arrange myself in a surprisingly drastic manner so as not to be forced into the ride. It didn't work. It really, really, really didn't work.
So now I have finances in the usual assortment of resources one expects to find for a late-career, high-value professional and they, not SocSec, will be my primary retirement economic driver. Yes, SocSec is and can be important, but if it disappeared entirely tomorrow, I'd work it out. The economic skill of life is not sitting around while waiting for other people to fund oneself; it is finding the way to do it on one's own. And even in the aftermath of that former failed effort, I have done all right.
Park that mantle of responsibility where it belongs: Among feckless politicians, never real statesmen, who refuse to do what's right.
SocSec was never right in the first place, definitionally and /ab initio/. It was a socialist program by design, and as in all such matters, eventually we run out of others' money.
The cat's math is wrong due to the absence of investment income in his figures, as has already been established. What is also wrong is his idea that people who have designed a retirement based upon a promise CAN afford a 25% pay cut. As soon as my Millenial children discover that we can no longer afford an independent life and are moving in with them their attitude on this issue will change quickly. The biggest issue with Gen Z and Millenials is their insufferable "Peter Pan" syndrome (thus the wildly childish income expectations). If the little shits would grow up a bit, this issue would look different.
There is a third option. The government can put the money back. The same way they can fund wars. Even if it is a symbolic no interest accrued repayment. The gains on the money actually being invested over the next 10 years will fix the hole in the bucket and raise future retirees out of poverty.
...which is collateralized with tax money. They don't print for free, they have to be good for the interest on the borrowing of the printed dollars, which is covered by revenue.
It’s true, it pisses me off to see how fast China is moving forward. And NOT because I am upset with China. They have 300mph trains all over creation. We have nothing but embezzled money trails everywhere. The Zionists/Neocons make sure we are constantly spending our money and technology on wars. The Neoliberals are just as bad and most of the time they work together at the betterment of themselves.
Boomers didn't exist when SS was created, and when SS was created, it was a bullshit dishonest government confiscation scheme from the start.
Consider: retirement age was set at life expectancy.
That's right. The government took your money for Social Security KNOWING that, at least as originally structured, most people would NEVER collect much, if anything. Because they wouldn't retire...until they were likely to die!
Think about people with diseases like, say, Huntingtons. They will never collect at 65. Yet they are forced to pay in. SS taxes the young, poor, and sick to transfer benefits to the older, wealthier, and healthier.
"...to transfer benefits to the older, (some) wealthier, and (some) healthier who themselves were forced without any choice or say in the matter to contribute their OWN hard-earned wages...in order to transfer THEIR benefits to the older, wealthier, and healthier."
Yes, it's a deceptive system. I mentioned elsewhere about the bias towards poorer people in the system, where they get 90% of covered salary while the richer people get a marginal 15% of their highest earnings back. But that obscures the fact that the unhealthy young (I think here of some Type 1 Diabetics I know) pay taxes to support the wealthy and presumably healthy (because Didnt die young from disease) old. That older generations are wealthier is obvious. Individuals within May vary, as you point out.
First, there is no SS trust fund and there never has been one. It's a lie, so why did you even put that in this post. It's a total fabrication. All SS taxes are immediately paid out and anything left over is put into the general fund. Please don't pretend voters have any control over what congress does so the fact that what we pay in SS taxes is never invested to grow in value is the governments fault. All the fraud we see in government proves there is enough money for SS if the government stops allowing it to be stolen. I know plenty of people my age and older who still have to work and if they didn't have SS they'd be homeless. Stop blaming them and put the blame right where it belongs on the politicians who have been looting the USA foreer and for allowing a lot of other crooks to do the same.
The problem begins and ends with we, the people, ever allowing to ourselves to become dependent upon a government program. That was the poison pill that was swallowed in allowing even the concept of Social Security to even happen, and, inevitably, as it goes with nearly all government entitlement programs, it has created an across the board demographic of very-soon-to-be-wanting dependents of every stripe.
In short, when you lie down with the government, you’re going to wake up with fleas.
This isn’t intergenerational. This is political. Put the blame where it belongs — on the Democrat Party.
FDR gave us the Social Security (SS) in 1935. It was at the time, ‘old age insurance’. Originally a 1% hit on your earnings. And the payouts were not taxable (just like insurance). Yes it was ‘pay as you go’, but the accurate name for that is Ponzi Scheme, which is a fraud and would have been illegal even back then for any private actor. The Boomers weren’t even born yet.
The Democrats have constantly expanded the program and subtly backdoored the population. In the 60’s Johnson pulled the SS Trust Fund into the General Revenues meaning he stole the principal while adding Medicare and Medicaid to the mix. He also made payout taxable. BTW, that’s when the Boomers were still in Grade School, High School and College. They had literally no influence.
Then in the 80’s the Republicans tried to fix the system. (BTW this is the first time Boomers had any say in this and even then not much.) Because they were trying to be ‘bipartisan’ they couldn’t get it straitened out. But they increased the retirement age, increased the taxation of benefits, pulled in the Civil Service, and made this an explicit part of the retirement calculations for the general public. Ten years later Clinton expanded the taxable portion of the assets.
Speaking of taxes - the payroll tax has always increased. Now it’s 15.3% including the Medicare Tax.
The Republicans tried to institute private accounts. The Democrats blocked them. The actual return on investment of SS for a middle class worker is about 2%. For the stock market 9%. Private accounts would have much better for them. But SS and Medicare are mostly transfer payments. The middle class puts in more than it gets out. The Lower Middle Class and poor get much more than they put in.
And while we’re at it, let’s consider the rampant fraud in the Medicare system and how it somehow gets recirculated back into Democrat Party coffers.
This isn’t a Boomer vs Gen Whatever issue. That’s false framing. It’s a corrupt Democrat money grab which the Republicans have been ineffectively trying to constrain since 1935.
When the R's suggested the privatization of SS, the howls of injustice and accusations of corporate greed were deafening. The R's chickened out, perhaps wisely, knowing that the D's had scared Ma and Pa into believing they were about to be robbed. Something something honor among thieves....
Anyway, the math is pretty simple, I did it fast, but intuitively this seems about right. Between 2005 and 2025, the SS "trust fund" received between ~$600B and $1,300B from actual people that would otherwise have received the cash that they or their employers forked over to Uncle Sugar. If they had instead taken that cash and put it in the S&P, which returned ~11% CAGR over the same time frame, that strip of payments would be worth about $48 trillion today. Invest that $48 trillion into something paying just 5.5% and the interest alone would be more than double 2025 projected FICA withholdings from all sources. That ignores whatever the "trust fund" was supposedly worth in 2005, it's just the payments that were made after the privatization effort failed.
We were robbed, fiscal conservatives and the mathematically literate were acutely aware of it from the time FDR proposed this garbage, and boomers had the opportunity politically to embrace reality, but they chose unequivocally in 2005 to embrace the engineered failure that was their education and follow the D's and the sugar rush of seeing that yellowish tan envelope in their mailbox. You've been Pavloved, congrats.
The D's wanted to keep looting your payroll and keep you beholden to their money printer. Pure and simple.
I never thought the system would survive this long. I always planned my retirement to be adequate to my needs without social security. I always voted against the Democrats, especially the ‘lockbox’ idiot Al Gore. Trouble is that you can only do so much. Given how much Democrats cheat (take a look at LA, California and Minnesota in general), it is likely that most of us wanted the system fixed. But the Corrupt prevented it. But again, it wasn’t the Boomers. It was the Democrats. So quit blaming the wrong people. And let’s not let the Generation Whatever Democrats off the hook. They’re gigantic part of the problem.
Whoever didn't laugh the D's out of the building when they postured the federal fisc as a stable alternative to the diversified American economy is to blame. Voters had a choice, and they failed the marshmallow test in 2005. It may be unfair to lay that on any one demographic, but a responsible path was within a politically plausible option and voters chose to believe the people that lied them into the situation in the first place.
Your "pay in payout" math is wrong. You're forgetting there should be growth and compounding. Even a small savings account would do better than the government. The problems isn't that we are running out of money...it's that it's been stolen. At some point we have to stop blaming people for not "paying their fair share" and ask "what have they done with all that money".
Yep. I have retirement accounts that are worth more than the sum of my contributions. That’s what I was always taught “investing” was all about. Some of my accounts are worth many multiples of my contributions.
How would your investments be doing without massive bailouts of every market in 2008 and even bigger in 2020? And further more, when they need to bailout again soon, how will you react?
I never got a bailout. I just didn’t panic every time the traders and the bankers got taken to the cleaners.
But let’s remember that most of the ‘bailouts’ were caused by the Gov’t. Remember Barney “Let’s roll the dice on liar loans” Frank? I sure as heck do. He and his adherents were 100% responsible for 2008.
And the 2020 escapade was caused by the government foolishly shutting down the economy on account of an Influenza Like Illness. And further destruction wrecked on the economy by the Autopen Administration.
When did the REPO market start to break? It broke in 2008, and was breaking again in 2019. Also the market started plunge again in late 2018. Fed starts lowering rates from an already pathetic 2.5 in 2019, stop QT. What came first, the virus or the financial crisis? The traders and the bankers never got taken to the cleaners. They were bailed out, along with your investments. You decry welfare but not when its for you. Its always someone elses fault, that should be on the tombstone of boomers.
These days, there is no such thing as a natural financial crisis. They are all created by market manipulators.
If you don't bail them out, the can't manipulate, can they?
No, the banks all repaid the funds that in some cases, the feds forced them to take, remember? The idea was that no one was supposed to know who needed a bridge loan.
Among the few who really did get bailed out, it mostly wasn't taxpayer funds. It was mostly chicanery like Obama stealing from bondholders to make auto unions whole. The taxpayer funds that were used went mostly to bail out pension funds like Calpers and some Canuck gov operation. I don't remember the details exactly.
If everything was fixed, and everything was great, why did low rates and QE continue until 2022? Tell your self whatever you want, but the actions taken belittle your narrative
Probably still better than the return on my SS “contributions”, but I’m not able to run an experiment so the answer really is unknowable. Do you think you know? If so, how would you know that without knowing my asset allocation?
Probably significantly better. The federal government f&cks up everything it touches.
Then i expect you to lead a protest when they propose the next bailouts. When you subsidize something, what generally happens to the price?
Only damned fools lost money in 2008. You could see the collapse coming years in advance. I used the collapse to refinance my house. I took two years off the mortgage.
Then again, some people believed Barny Frank and George Soros and got in big trouble. That's what you get for believing Barny Frank and George Soros.
The majority of this post and this blog, is that welfare is generally bad and leads to degraded human beings. Why is welfare for the stock market ok? How long did it take the markets to recover from 1929? How long did it take the stock market to recover after 2008?
Don't get me started on the massive power grab by the federal government as a result of the housing collapse that THEY orchestrated.
And remember, George Soros has made his fortune on engineered economic collapses. He is the ultimate puppet master of useful idiots.
I've found over the years since 2008, that attributing what is mainly human flaws (greed, lust) towards boogiemen, as generally unproductive. Just like blaming certain generations is unproductive, unless you want to keep people divided and unclear what they have in common.
The bailouts were an Obama mistake, one of many.
And did you fail to notice that even bigger bailouts took place in 2020 under Trump? If so, perhaps that was the point of the virus.
Additionally, are the matching employer contributions included in the "pay in" portion in el gato malo's illustration? As a former business owner (now retired) I can tell you that all employers are required to match employee contributions for Social Security and Medicare taxes, effectively doubling the "pay in" portion. Those employer contributions and the growth and compounding you mention increase the "pay in" portion exponentially.
As an employer myself, the numbers seem pretty screwy. SS is well over twice medicare, for example. But $11k for SS might be in the ballpark. That's only a lifetime average of $75k. $12k was a pretty respectable starting engineering salary when I graduated, and that same engineer could have pretty easily have hit $100k by now.
But how does that compare against inflation?
For reference, I graduated in Dec 1999, and got a job paying $66k / year. It was only 2024 when I got a *retardedly* large raise and job title shift that moved me to a salary that had improved upon that, and the "improvement" relative to inflation was a whopping 0.25% per year. And in the meantime, that's already been wiped out.
And frankly, I just expect to never collect anything from SS. I'm paying it, because I don't have an option, but I'll never retire, until I reach the point where I can't work and put myself in line for cremation. Maybe I'll get a couple of weeks of rest before I have to go. Or I'll just die at my desk. That's also an option.
Bingo
True enough. Nor do I see him factoring in the lifetime of inflation Boomers have lived through. We paid in with dollars that were worth a lot more than the same dollar now. My SS benefits sheet showed I was paying into the system back in the 60's.
And I recall when a mortgage couldn't be had for under 15% back in the 70's.
I know my kids are unlikely to get SS, and I've told them that their entire lives. Heck, I may not get it for my entire life either. But the more $ I can keep out of the hands of government, the more they can inherit. And my current SS check does the heavy lifting for that in my day-to-day life.
> The lifetime of inflation Boomers have lived through.
Hunh. Maybe y'all should have bloody well *done* something about that. I bet y'all'd be catching a whole lot less shit these days if that had been dealt with while it was still tenable to do so.
as a long time "boomer" . . . I resemble that statement.
Hey, this is not "our" fault, nor yours, nor any citizens'. Pure and simple look at your Congressional representatives. Surely, if any of the last half century of Congresses had put forth a SS saving bill before ANY president, this would have been solved. . .
I just fail to see why #1 el gato leads with the right punch being its all the BOOMERS fault and
#2 why there is so much piling on by later generations?
We had no more control as individuals or as a group than YOU do now over any government bureaucracy run program-- entitlement or otherwise.
Come on, Man!
> I just fail to see why #1 el gato leads with the right punch being its all the BOOMERS fault and
> #2 why there is so much piling on by later generations?
Greatest and Silent Generations are dead. You're what's left, and you're *way* larger than us in Gen X. Still. Which says something numerically, given how old y'all are.
Y'all could have voted for folks who wanted to fix this. Y'all could have *run* as folks who wanted to fix this. And actually *yes*, I *am* going to run (despite **really** not wanting to) as someone who wants to fix **this** and so much more in '28. I was too late to come to the realization to be in the fight for '26.
I doubt I'll win (and in fact, I'll be straight up *shocked* if I win) but if I do, Congress is going to acquire an absolutely *dickheaded* autistic hacker who is going to push to simply *end* all the things currently on tap.
I can not be bargained with. I can not be reasoned with. I don't feel *pity*, or *remorse*, or *fear*. And I absolutely *will* not stop... *ever*, until these systems are dead.
And if I don't manage a win in '28? Well... "I'll be back."
#1 WE did vote against all this, but we had to SHARE our vote TOTALS with the liberals who won because there were not enough NUMBERS of us.
#2 YOU will have the exact same problem when you find(hope you don't) that there are not enough NUMBERS to reward your effort and give you a win.
#3 pointing the finger at an entire CLASS of humans when possibly a majority of them agree with your viewpoint alienates those who MIGHT vote for YOU. Kind of like shooting yourself in the foot or ass or . . .
If you get elected, recall what happened to MT Greene. She was not autistic but alienated herself unneccessarily because she could not keep her xxit together.
Good luck. Don't be a dick.
Yeah, sorry. "Not being a dick" isn't on the menu. I'll dial it *down* if I can, but this is *not* my career. I actively *do not want* the job. I'm just going to roll up my sleeves and do it because apparently everyone else is too retarded to get it right.
Consider it "necessary alienation".
Oh my gosh do you think we DIDN'T vote for that? But did the politicians ever do what they said they were going to do? There were schemes to allow some portion of SS to be invested...do you think enough of our representatives ever supported that? Or did they scare people into thinking Grandma was going to be pushed over a cliff in her wheelchair? It's just another way politicians buy votes. My older relatives were talking about how SS was not going to be around for me even back when I was a teenager. I still remember Al Gore talking about "the lockbox." The money paid into SS never should have gone to pay other things. It's disgusting. Not too mention how much of SS pays disability now---not just for retirement.
Who stole it? Oh yea, we all did, by allowing our politicians to keep writing checks they didn’t have the funds to pay for. If you can write checks “heaters” without any consequences, you would do that on your own personal bank account.
Any one with a financial background could see back in the 1980’s the Social Security system was a ponzi scheme. Not enough workers to cover the benefits of those retiring.
Unfunded liabilities are on the horizon and everyone needs to accept the pain that is coming. We have allowed it. It is time to take the medicine.
Not sure I "allowed" my government to do any of this. My votes usually got cancelled out. What was I supposed to do, start a revolution?
I don't accept personal responsibility for things that were not under my control. Blame society all you want, but that doesn't make me responsible for my idiot neighbors.
Amen. As an example 85% of the voters want voter ID.
Don't be a sap. It's not your fault that politicians don't give a rat's patoot about you. After all, they got theirs -- cadillac pension and lifetime health insurance, the ability to convert unused election warchests to their own income, lobbyist payola, plus all the sweet, sweet insider trading. There's a reason that they can come in broke and be multi-millionaires within a decade.
Scumbug politicians
Very true. As a "boomer" I was appalled, but hardly surprised, that my generation who were "all in" on the shots have screwed up everything. They can't question authority. Sadly neither can any of the other Gen-?. A nasty cat had a great VENN diagram about it LOL.
Heck all it takes is a cheesy slogan "Elbows Up", a new face at the top (Carney) and the idiot boomers vote for the same Liberal Party that just screwed them over.
The citizens of Israel are even stupider than Canadians. They didn't even get a new face at the top. Same old Quisling, Mengele, war criminal Bibi.
To each their own. Good luck!
Most of what you say is true, but I just don't agree with the idea "we" allowed it, WE voted in politicians who we THOUGHT would handle things ethically, judicially, with our country's well being in mind. But the Progressive / liberals voted in gold diggers 180 degrees opposed to our country these days! Then, get them together in this mess of idiots we call a Congress and it is a straight on "Lord of the Flies" kiddy chaos mob of fraudsters with a light sprinkling of Ron Johnson's . . . allowing us to believe there is SOME chance of redemption.
but,
NO. There is not.
This, and all the follow ons, would be a logical response/comment if the money that was "paid in" i.e. deducted from paychecks as well as employer contributions, were deposited into discreet "individual retirement accounts" where they were then allowed to compound and grow over time. That, in fact, would be a much better system than what was established under FDR in the 1930's. Instead, it was constructed as a Ponzi scheme from the very beginning, with something like 5 workers funding the benefits of each retiree in the 1940's with, as Gato noted, a very short expected time that the retiree would actually draw benefits. The system was never constructed to handle the subsequent demographic changes that have ensued since the 1940's: large post WWII generation (Boomers), advances in medicine and nutrition resulting in much longer life expectancy, post Boomer reduction in reproduction rates resulting in smaller generation cohorts. Consequently many, many more people over the age where they start drawing on Social Security and drawing for a much longer time. With far fewer workers per retiree funding the system. The fact that this is unsustainable is not a surprise to anyone that has been paying attention for the last 25 years. So protestations of "My money has been stolen" and "I paid in, don't claim I didn't pay my fair share, and don't you dare try to reduce my benefits" are just nonsense. The Boomers have literally been the WORST generation in history and spawned the second worst generation in history - the Millennials.
Maybe a solution would be to put a capital gains tax of something like 70% on all homes sold by anyone born before 1965 and use those proceeds solely to fund the Social Security benefits of anyone born before 1965. In that way, it would essentially be an intragenerational wealth transfer from those Boomers that have benefited the most over the last 50 years to their fellow Boomers that have the greatest need. And leave the rest of us out of it.
Long term capital gains are, to a large extent, a tax on inflation. If Boomer Joe paid $85k for a house in 1978 and sold it for $453k in 2026, he'd owe nothing if you adjusted his basis for inflation or $257k if you taxed nominal dollar basis as the current code does at your proposed 70% rate. The whole thing is insidious.
“The fact that this is unsustainable is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 25 years.”
Try “for the last 80 years.” I knew this as a sophomore in high school in 1980. The system was always going to collapse. And everything they have ever done to “fix” the system has simply prolonged the timetable and guaranteed that the devastation will become more catastrophic.
But the system was never intended to be sustainable over the long term. It was meant to buy votes right now. Concentrated benefits/distributed costs is a scam that will always work with the majority of people because the beneficiaries are highly motivated and the opposition is not.
There have been halfhearted atttempts to “reform” social security. Republicans tried floating alternatives in the 1990s. They just caved when the usual suspects objected to their cash cow being threatened.
“ if the money that was "paid in" i.e. deducted from paychecks as well as employer contributions, were deposited into discreet "individual retirement accounts" where they were then allowed to compound and grow over time”. Nothing wrong about doing that all by yourself. Except of course the employer contributions. But if the employer didn’t have to do that, maybe he’d pay you more, or hire more folks, or buy new equipment, or design a new product, or…. Hmmm.
"The Boomers have literally been the WORST generation in history"
This is off the hook, Hank.
As if it was OUR fault we were born to the "Greatest Generation" who authored the SS bill and did so under duress of the worst depression in US history. Boomers did nothing but pay in to the SS and FICA as we were all FORCED to do as soon as we got a SS #, again required to get a damn job.
The real problem is Congress, their continued legacy of FAILING to act:
-- failed to design the SS admin as an adaptable system monitoring birth rates, inflation, wages, mortgage rates, and death rates among others and then reacting to them with intelligence without delay.
-- failed in every Congress in the last 40 years to act decisively to head off the catastrophe predicted LONG ago.
-- failed to reduce benefits 40 years ago to build the trust fund levels to a point that retirement draws would equal paycheck draws.
I could go on but suffice it to say, blaming a "generation" is pointless and solves nothing. Both you and el Gato.
YES!!!!!!!
> As if it was OUR fault we were born to the "Greatest Generation" who authored the SS bill and did so under duress of the worst depression in US history. Boomers did nothing but pay in to the SS and FICA as we were all FORCED to do as soon as we got a SS #, again required to get a damn job.
It's your fault for not voting the bastards who authored that *out*, and for not *replacing* them with folks who would do so.
> The real problem is Congress, their continued legacy of FAILING to act
Well... MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED FOR BETTER CONGRESSMEN!
In 1980, the so called "Greatest Generation" was 45 million people. In 1970, the "Silent Generation" (who ultimately also deserve some blame for this) were 48 million people. In 1980, the Baby Boomer population was 79 million people.
In 1980, Gen X (or the "Baby Bust") -- the eldest of whom was 15 -- had a population of 65 million people.
By 1990? Greatest Generation -- 43M. Silent Generation -- 38M. Baby Boomers -- 79M. And yes, Gen X -- some of whom were finally old enough to vote -- still just 65M people.
Yeah. Sorry that it hurts to take the blame. But it was, in fact, literally your generation who could have fixed things, and didn't.
Does Gen X share some portion of the blame, for not just running you down and kicking our grandparents to the curb? Yeah, probably. But the fact is that we *were* outnumbered here. and by the time we recognized the problem, the folks who should have already fixed it were entrenched in the system.
> -- failed in every Congress in the last 40 years to act decisively to head off the catastrophe predicted LONG ago.
> -- failed to reduce benefits 40 years ago to build the trust fund levels to a point that retirement draws would equal paycheck draws.
Hunh. You mean... in 1986? Well... the very *first* members of Gen X were able to vote at that point... But it was mostly "Greatest", "Silent", and the Boomers in charge at that point, and *all* of the Boomers could vote by then.
Yeah, you make a good point. I just can't *imagine* why folks look at the Boomers with disgust and rage.
You are not thinking clearly.
Citizens vote for who SHOWS up on the BALLOT. Citizens (99% of them) have NO control who is ON it.
If Jo Blo is the most honest guy in the world, loves his country, has a resume' that blows away everyone in the world and is NOT on the ticket, I can NOT vote for Jo.
If I vote for JIM BLOUGH who is really close to Jo in most respects but I am OUT voted because liberals voted in Jane Wampum, a Commie, is that my fault?
Is it the fault of MY generation?
Apparently your backwards reasoning is YES!
OK,then, buh, bye.
> Citizens vote for who SHOWS up on the BALLOT. Citizens (99% of them) have NO control who is ON it.
Did *you* try to show up on the ballot?
Wave bye bye all you want. I aim to actually *be* on the ballot in '28. And if I win... well, I'm just going to *also* wave bye bye.
What did they do with it? They paid then current retirees' benefits and lent the excess to the government which pays it back with interest (taxes on current workers)....
What have they done with all that money? They faked 5 moon landings in three years and started wars all over the world. We know how to launder money if nothing else.
No need to rummage in the details. That's just to distract from the big picture. The parallel cancer program has provided profits to reap and culling to trim the recipients. The new turbo boost is kicking in as planned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYqvCbM82bw
Yeah, I couldn't help but notice how effective Covid was at killing older people and had to wonder if it wasn't designed that way... but then again, older people have a harder time fighting disease. The clot shots were not effective in this regard in killing and disabling working young people, instead of targeting the elderly for elimination. Disable a 25yo and it costs you much more than you'd save by killing off a number of 75yo people.
"but, and this is a huge but, this does not mean that they do not also have some valid points as well. they do.
in 2021, housing was at generational levels of affordability, but in the last 4-5 years, housing has become stratospherically expensive. that’s a real issue and if you, boomerisimos, were in their shoes instead of owning homes and benefitting from this, you too might find the fit not to your liking."
We Boomers didn't do that. Covid's money-printing did that.
"you paid far, far less than you will take out and during a long period in which you held unchallenged political control of the US."
I controlled *nothing*. My political voice was never heard. "Unchallenged political control of the US" was NOT in our hands; it was in the hands of a small cabal of people who almost NEVER did what we wanted (and STILL don't; see Thune et al).
I was forced at the business end of a gun, metaphorically, to "contribute" (what a fucked up description of money CONFISCATED from me) to SS. I had NO opportunity to take those funds and invest them where they would've provided returns FAR greater than SS, AND, would be assets I could pass on to my heirs, unlike SS which, if I die tomorrow at 65 and without having taken even one dollar of benefits, everything I "contributed" remains in SS to pay out to total strangers.
So fuck that "blame Boomers" shit. We were FORCED to play this fucked up game, and I'll damned if I'M gonna sit by passively and be blamed for it.
Covid money-printing certainly added fuel to the fire, but housing costs really shot up when our government allowed 21 million people into the country over four years - there was no plan for housing supply with that massive surge in demand. So prices soared. Add to that food, utilities, healthcare - and well, "everything". Apparently, "compassion" has a cost. Who knew?
And I submit that most Boomers want ALL illegal aliens deported and ALL fraud rooted out and the perps prosecuted, sentenced, and executed. Well, not the Leftist Boomers; they don't want any of that.
In which case, this column should be directed at Leftists, not Boomers. Because ALL Leftists, of EVERY stripe, want the things that help destroy America.
Damn straight.
Totally agree. I was all for when Bush wanted to privatize part of SS, as I wanted to do this ever since seeing how it was confiscated from my meager earnings in the 1970s. Yet Bush rolled over when he was criticized for even bringing it up, when he could have defended it and pushed it through. I've been against this money-printing for years, and was aghast when the last bout was caused by the "Inflation Reduction" Act. It's rich that bad cat wants to blame a generation for the business end of a gun, as you so accurately depicted it. I'd love to just get what I put in, adjusted for inflation, and walk away. And don't get me started on Medicare.
I disagree. Bush was an idiot in a myriad of ways but I was very impressed with the strong effort he made to reform/fix SS. NO ONE ON EITHER SIDE CAME TO HIS AID. The Republicans and Democrats both suck
You are saying the same thing I said, but giving him more credit for trying to reform SS. At this point, it doesn't matter how much effort he put in--he still rolled over.
I agree with you in general. I never planned on living on SS so I do have other means. Other part of the problem is SS has become a monster. Coworker had a loser ex-husband who left her with three kids. When he died, after never paying child support, her kids got $3k/mo from SS until they graduated HS. Even though she remarried and was relatively affluent. The whole system has been whored out and was never meant to be what it has become. Mark my words, they will come for your retirement funds.
Bingo! Yes, they will indeed come for our retirement funds. It’s already started in California. Once they get people to accept the idea that taking “a small percentage” from “billionaires“ is a good idea, it won’t take very long until everyone’s retirement accounts will be taxed at higher and higher rates. Politicians will be glad to oblige the masses calling for those of us who have prepared for retirement to “pay their fair share”. I really don’t see how we avoid collapse.
Never believe a poiitician when he/she says it's ONLY a small percentage. Once it's on the books, it never comes off. It never goes down. But it always goes up.
And that's among the myriad reasons why, as Kurt Schlichter says, buy guns and ammunition.
Pelosi floated that in the past. Thieves
You didn't know my mom was the Boomer Mastermind behind all of Social Security's mistakes? She really should have done better.
I think the Los Angeles mayotal election is proving that the common man has no recourse in the political field. That fraud has always existed, it is just more blatant now with the internet of constant news.
And you know the "blame Boomers" crap is just that when the millennials and snowflakes who throw the label around classify anyone older than 45 as a "Boomer." When you ask them what age demographic makes up Boomers, you get the "zzzz" moment in the eyes of "I can't compute" because they don't even know. I'm a proud Generation X (there are some videos of us on YT that hit the nail on the head.) I made my own way. I paid for my bachelor's and master's degrees and paid my small loans back because I signed that I would. I don't expect anyone except me to take care of me. I made some boneheaded financial decisions in the past so have to work a long time now to save up enough, but that was my fault and I have to live with the consequences. I don't throw a temper tantrum because I don't get my way.
I'll always remember talking to a grad school classmate on our FB group several years ago and she was whining in favor of wealth redistribution. I work in financial planning so have many clients who have large portfolios from hard work and sacrifice over the years. I asked her "so you are saying that one of my clients who worked for every penny they saved should be forced to give you some of the accumulated wealth because you didn't?" She unashamedly said "yes, I do." I left the group never to return. And she in her late 60's now.
Don’t forget the impact on home prices when BlackRock, et al, bought up vast quantities of houses; and then there’s high mortgage interest rates, and the high cost of over regulation, NIMBYS, the college loan scam, needing to house the above noted 20,000,000 +\- illegals, the unbelievably massive amount of entitlement fraud. And I could go on.
You need to blame big money, not the “boomers” the whole artificial generational construct is part of the distraction / confusion / fear / anxiety / identity / anger system used to prevent us from focusing on such things as the massive transfer of wealth that occurred during Covid - from all generations. Your enemy is not the boomers, it’s nebulous and it’s hiding behind complexity.
And where does BlackRock get the majority of its money?
Covid money printing was an animal of the political system that tolerated money printing for dozens of different reasons over the years, I don't give anyone who ignored deficits a pass on that one.
Boomers are hardly the only ones who "ignored deficits".
Without question.
Its because you tolerated it in 2008, in fact, what was really different between 2008 and 2020? They used fear in both to get you to let them do what they wanted to do.
Heck, even go back to the 1980's. The defense spend deficits were huge (at the time) and things improved out of the malaise, so everyone quit thinking about them for a while, then moved on to all out denial when faced with the political consequences of reining them in.
Indeed they were. Go back even further to the 70's. Was the Bretton woods agreement a contract between the united states and the rest of the world? How do you define a default on a contract? If gold isn't worth anything, why wouldn't we gladly give it out in exchange for paper money? My point is, we can go back ages and point fingers, sacrifice and standing for something is what is needed now.
Sooner or later someone will have to put a stop to it by whatever means they can muster. The longer it goes on the worse it gets. You didn't. We (X) didn't.
If it falls to the kids to do it, because it's become so dire they have no other choice but to risk their necks when the corruption is worst and most difficult to remedy, how kindly do you think they're gonna look upon us? How much do you think they're gonna care about "I couldn't do anything"s and "don't blame me"s?
I'd consider adopting some contrition and apologies over belligerence and deflection if you don't want to be left to rot in a ditch after the dust settles. Or maybe you'll get lucky and die off before that happens. Lucky for us (X), we'll just blame you and say sorry we fucked up and failed to stop you. Everybody gets off scott free.
We, X, have never controlled the Presidency. We've been on the planet since 1965 and never had a President younger than we are. The Boomers have held the Presidency every year since 1993, except for Biden. I suspect a Millennial or Z President will rewrite the order of society, but an Xer President would cut benefits to X in a second so long as the Boomers get hit too. We can hope.
Warmek (1976 model Homo Sapiens) for President!
I guarantee it'll be a wild four years!
Since we were never allowed to invest these monies in equities we were deprived of our only defense against the real culprit, theft by inflation. I’m pretty sure my father was critical about SS back in the 50’s. Simply put the huge amounts of earned money given to government oversight was a bridge too far, an attempt to inoculate us against the natural foe POVERTY and since long term studies were never done we ended up surprised by the greedy nature of both the elected and the electorate. Yes, you must kill this beast and hope in the process you don’t bleed out also.
"'Unchallenged political control of the US' was NOT in our hands; it was in the hands of a small cabal of people who almost NEVER did what we wanted..."
That small cabal still depends on democratic legitimacy. Hence, everyone voting to continue their status quo these last four decades has some responsibility for upholding it. If that wasn't you, congrats, you don't fit into Mr. Gato's generalization. Don't take it so personally.
"That small cabal still depends on democratic legitimacy."
Nonsense.
Q: How do they react when there's a 7% voter turnout in off-year or school board or special elections?
A: They are ecstatic, because only their party faithful, like teacher's unions show up.
We’ve already seen this movie. Remember defined benefits pensions? That’s basically what Soc Sec is. Now we have 401k and Roth instead. Soc Sec needs to transition similarly. It will be painful and take a long time but is probably the only way to save Soc Sec. Didn’t some South American country already do this?
No. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme not a defined benefits pension. A defined benefits pension has to be funded with investments. Social Security is just an out and out scam. You pay an income tax AND a payroll tax; they promise they’ll give some of it back to you later. In the meantime the spend it on windmills, solar panels that are net economic losers, and bullet trains that never get built. Well, some solar stuff that never gets built either (e.g., Solyndra, etc. )
Yep. But it needs to be across the board. No more defined benefits programs for anyone. Especially government employees, who are on both sides of the negotiation table.
If private sector wants to try to run one, be my guest, but the hatchet men and hostile takeovers of the 80s proved that to be a game for suckers. Nothing is easier to get financing for than a big pile of money.
They made it illegal to do to a private pension what they themselves did to social security. The feds throw you in jail if you attempt their accounting tricks.
That may be a fatal conceit - saving Social Security. It was NEVER an honest, decent program. It should not be saved, IMO. We need a different system.
Same. 👍🏻
I’d be a little more sanguine about SS cuts if it weren’t for the trillions in annual fraud depleting the treasury.
I’m not going to be too happy copping a haircut when hundreds of billions are being allowed to be stolen and sent overseas to enrich people who hate me.
What frosts me is that whatever means testing or paygo or whatever else is applied to SS, we will still be taxed to provide the defined benefit programs for gov't retirees. And it's not just the money. It's that those retirees are bidding up prices that the rest of us have to pay to live.
It has to be across the board or it absolutely wrecks the supply-demand curve. The high incomes near the capital retire and use their pensions (Fauci gets about half a million, for example) to bid up prices where others are trying to make a living.
It sounds like you are asking for justice.
Ok, fine.
Everyone who voted democrat forfeits their share of SS and Medicare. They voted for infinite illegal aliens with unlimited government benefits, and the money has to come from somewhere...
(Only sorta facetious here. I wonder how many old people protesting ICE would fling down their signs and scurry away if their checks were being docked.)
2000 POTUS debates. Gore: lockbox on SS. W: yes unless shtf. It did didnt it? And thereby the lockbox was opened. Also, W tax cuts implemented realizing the debt would be retired otherwise.
Ask the Pentagon to cut their bloated budget by 24% and see what happens.
Ask the government to repay the $$$ they "borrowed" from SS over the years for who knows what...see what happens.
Ignore the Socialist party ( formerly the Democratic party) pushing the WEF agenda.
Read books instead of being spoon fed Socialist media psy ops.
Cut the Pentagon by 76%, perhaps. That's the major source of funding for DC. They won't like that but it could save the rest of us quite a bit.
As to socialism, do you oppose the SS formula that pays more to poor people? You could start there.
Part of the actual function of the federal government is to maintain a strong defense.
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it was supposed to pay people from cradle to grave.
As our Founders warned, the minute people find that they can get money from the government it would herald the end of the Republic.
Yep, and I’d add when the government became the charity champion of the country we crossed the line of common sense. It’s also de-incentivized self reliance and personal responsibility.
Yup. Like the sign in the National Parks saying “Please don’t feed the animals or they’ll become dependent.”
Even worse is that it drastically cut or removed entirely the sense of moral and civic duty that used to be present in communities. Churches and civic and fraternal organizations that used to do the heavy lifting of charities are shadows of their former selves. Businessmen would try to find some way of accommodating pretty much anyone's handicap. And along with this decline went the sense of pride in community of the giver, and gratitude of the recipient.
Precisely. The Amish, who aren't part of SS or Medicare, seem to have better sense of community (for that matter, so do the Somalis who grift the public system to support their extended clan networks). Because they don't tax the young to transfer wealth to the old, the young of childbearing years can still afford children. Family sizes are 6-8 children on average.
People who believe in the promises of the State will disappear in the face of that demographic wave.
And yet, having a window into the absolute fuck-fuck circus that is military spending, I'd say they're just flat out wasting our money and enriching their friends. I wouldn't mind so much if there was *any* sort of fiscal punishment for utter failure to deliver.
The biggest cradle to grave for a LONG time has been the "defense" budget. It's mostly a welfare program for military contractors who build overpriced weapons systems. Contrast what Iran spent on its cheaper drones and missiles versus the cost of JASSMs and reaper drones. It's only recently that the cost of SS passed the military budget and that might not hold.
Now, do you oppose the socialistic formula in SS that pays higher percentage of lifetime earnings to poor people? That seems a lot like socialism.
🎯
Ok, cool. We cut military spend by 24% ($240 billion on the current budget). Social Security is funded for 57 whole days. ($240 billion/$1.53 trillion ~= 15.6%). If using the hypothetical FY 2027 budget, it would be 85 days.
Any other ideas, or are we going to keep avoiding the elephant in the room that is entitlement outlays?
I’m 70, and have paid into the system for 50 years. My SS income is now $ 14,184 per YEAR. That’s right, I now live on a little more than $14,000 per year. You think that’s too much?
dont be angry at the math. calculate what your ss income would be had you taken that tax and put it in the s&p 500 over your lifetime; then be mad the government stole that future from you.
And that matters nothing to her now.
And realistically, it matters even *less* to *us* now.
It’s a social security supplemental plan, it’s not supposed to replace your entire income in retirement.
I have savings and assets. It’s just the income that’s small. But I want Gen Z to realize that I’m doing alright BECAUSE I have savings and assets, not because I’m living like a king from Social Security. I lived frugally all my life, paid off the student loans, paid off the credit card debt, paid off the mortgage. If they want to retire in comfort, they have to do the same.
Yes. I always saved a small % even when frugally shopping.
Exactly. That’s why people need to learn to save, invest, work long enough for private pensions.
It's far too little to live on, and no one who worked for 50 years should be in such a position. To the extent he thought that he could, he chose not to make decisions such to avoid his future being tied to political fate instead of more closely related to his own control. I know everyone in power told you otherwise with earnest protestations of "lock boxes", but take it from another Gen X'er, people in power lie, often, and especially when it concerns money.
Suggested edit, Chimp: "people in power lie, often, and especially when it concerns money."
Should probably read, " people in power ALWAYS lie, especially when it concerns money."
Good add....
The last good generation
@GBill- what did you do for a lving? That's awfuly low. My husband was (retired and now back at it) a diesel mechanic and his SS is way higher. He will be 70 next month.
Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!
It’s clear you’d be much better cash wise if you’d had private savings. Then there is the Medicare benefit to consider as well. Whew, it’s certainly not sustainable, the solution will not be easy, because the people that have contributed for decades are going to get harmed, going forward it should be replaced by individual accounts imho.
Note that they confiscate part of your SS benefit to pay for Medicare.
I understand, my point was not clearly stated, my apologies. I’m currently watching several mid 70 thru early 80 aged friends/family and another 54 year old on as disability spend millions of dollars on healthcare all on Medicare. I’m not claiming to have an immediate solution, I’m saying we need to start finding one asap. This was a good topic by El Gato it’s certainly important.
So long as we have Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCrap and cadillac lifetime health for government workers, we cannot do anything about prices. At a zero price, there is practically infinite demand, and nothing we do on supply side can fix it.
Fed Gov't family here! The Gov't people who work in politics in DC have very different benefits than Civil Servant gov't workers. Those rules changed about 30 yrs ago. My husband and my neighbor were hired by the gov't 6 months apart and a lot of her benefits (under the old system) are much better than my husband's.
OK, I stand corrected. I mostly see it locally anyway, where retired highway workers and teachers make several times what retired CNC operators and engineers get from SS, while the former paid in between 0% and 3%, while the latter paid in about 18%.
I have a personal calculation to back this idea. There are 18 states that do not fully participate in SS. Ones I recall offhand are MA, ME, CT, GA, LA, TX, CA. I know someone who worked for one of these states back in the 90s and got 18% of their salary put into a private account. That person went on to work on Wall Street at a top salary for many years, so high that the years working for the state government would not have counted as the 35-highest-earning years. In other words, the money paid to SS during those state-government years would not have increased their benefits by one penny. The balance with the state plan was forgotten until recently, when it was found to be about 300k.
If you take 4% of 300K, which should be a safe withdrawal level forever, you get $12000 a year, $1000 a month. How bad a deal is SS? paying in for four years in the 90s would have cost this person $1000 a month in benefits.
I was entrepreneurial, so there were many years of extremely low income, while I tried to create viable companies (good try, but no cigar). Plus, times of industry recessions (unemployment-insurance income only), which lead me to try my hand at going solo. In 1987, for example, my total income was $6000. I have an engineering degree and a master’s degree. I’m no slouch. I ended up with enough assets to live on. But I want young people to realize that Boomers aren’t raking in $80,000/yr from SS. The people who are getting that kind of benefits are the Somalian freeloaders who get free housing, food stamps, medical care, etc. - yet still commit fraud to get more!
Thanks for your story.
It was two years ago that I had to do a deep dive on the US tax system for a venture I was undertaking. There's the slave system where 14.21% of your nominal income is taxed away for SS and Medicare (92.35/107.65), and then the rest gets taxed. A married couple gets a standard deduction of about 32k and then everything above that level is "profit" and subject to tax. A business does not pay tax on income until all costs are accounted for, and then at a rate capped at %21, I think.
I hope you will teach the young people about the importance of taking an entrepreneurial approach and avoiding the slave system as soon as possible. The precious experience you acquired will be critical for them.
Look. My husband and I are Boomers. Yes, we paid into SS over the years, but we are made of sturdier stuff. So if SS goes “belly up” we will not boo-hoo or engage in a pity-poor-us party. We grew up sacrificing. We can and will do it again without complaining. We also squirreled away monies throughout our working lives for just a time as this. You see, our parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression and WWII. We were taught by example to be frugal—something younger generations do not and, possibly should, though, cultivate. Boomers didn’t cause your problems. We didn’t vote for Wilson or FDR. Stop the whining. We live in the best country the world has ever known. Adults find a way. Grow up and be an adult—or whine about some other generation.
boomers being the main political voting bloc and in power for the last 40 years are literally the cause of most of our problems.
No, you're talking about the Greatest Generation. They're the ones who put in place the corrupt, asshole politicians who've created, nursed, and expanded the current paradigm. Blame them.
We Boomers wanted to privatize the g/d system, the the pols put in place by the Greatest Generation refused.
[Edit: I meant to blame the Silent Generation but blamed the Greatest Generation because I thought they preceded the Boomers; my apologies to the Greatests. And thanks to Thomas Schmidt, below, for setting me straight.]
Would it help if the 25-40 million people receiving benefits, who are not entitled benefits, were removed from the system? How about all the illegals who were invited in and given benefits without having paid in one cent? Or the millions of people collecting SS Disability for many, many years who aren’t disabled? I’ve known several. It’s easy to game the system. How many people pay in for years and die before collecting one cent? Who gets their stolen money?
Shitting on the Boomers is getting old. Until you’ve driven a 20 year old car, lived in 1000sf house with two kids and one bathroom, shopped in thrift stores and consignment shops, eaten more tuna casserole than you care to remember, and scrounged change from the sofa cushions for gasoline…and never complained. It was just the price of being young and starting out. But we scrimped and saved and did without many things we wanted. I never drove a new car until I was in my 40s. Many of us worked two jobs for years. Now finally we get to enjoy the fruits of our labors and we’re resented for it.
Gen Y and Z are the most privileged generations ever. When $7.00 daily coffees, $700 monthly new car payments, $40 Door Dash meals and $150 a month cellphone fees are considered “necessary” then there’s an issue. Of course, they’re not fully to blame. Someone raised them to feel this way.
It was the Silents who couldn't stop conferring benefits on the greatest. The Fourth Turning is Here is the book on this. Well worth a read.
A pox upon me. I thought Boomers were preceded by Greatest, I forgot about the Silents. Mea culpa. I meant to blame the Silents.
Proof that that generation was well-named!
Blaming won't get us anywhere, but the only Silent President did not do a lot to fix things with his immigrant invasion.
The mentality of WHY the Silents so honored the Greatest is covered in the Fourth Turning is Here. Well worth a read, because they talk about the reset that will rework society to redirect assets towards the young. Maybe that reset means de-mythologizing WW2... but the change has to come or the society ends.
Blaming won't get us anywhere, but it deserves to be thrown back when it's thrown at.
I guess what I mean is, your generation had the opportunity to reverse course and fix it, and did not. I clearly don't mean you personally, because if here its highly we are like minded on this issue as confirmed by the above statement.
You think we were a cohesive voting block? Now pull the other leg.
of course not, but do you think the taliban cared that that a bunch of people in the towers also didnt agree with american foreign policy? rubber always meets road at some point.
Golftdibrad, you could not be more wrong and you obviously have not read all the points being made by others: do you consider yourself to be “in control” due to your voting history? Do you think you have “control” over how your politicians of choice vote? Do you have “control” over how your social security monies are spent? Do you have separate savings and investments or are you trusting your politicians of choice to be looking out for you in your senior years? No one generation is inherently at fault…the self serving politicians of all generations are at fault…and you, sir, are forced to contribute to them with every paycheck. So you are also participating in the griff and therefore are responsible. But, you are in control, right?
Idiotic and hateful.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Gen X is about to be more numerous than Boomers. Maybe 2 more years if the clot shot keeps pace. Millennials and Z have always been larger. And if you adjust for the fact that Boomers cover a 19 year span, while X is a mere 15 year span, Boomers have never been a majority on a per-year basis except before '65.
Cry some more whiner! Jealous much that our children, Millennials, are more respected than your lame generation that thinks The Breakfast Club and 80s music are great! What a joke; you are pathetic!
You misunderstand. Gato (and whomever I replied to) is saying his generation can't affect things because there are too few of them. Yet the peak year for boomer births is a little over 4 million, the leanest year for X was a little over 3 million. Not drastically different. And as boomers die off, X will soon be more numerous than booms, while the other generations already are. Even though they comprise fewer years. If you add in immigration, boomers are already the smallest cohort.
His article explains what the problem is -- life expectancy. But the solution to that, increasing retirement age, is not going to make you happy. You are already angry that we are still holding the top positions, and not retiring and letting the younger generations take over.
I am not unhappy. I live a fulfilling life. Stop projecting your generation’s angst. So sad an existence. Sucks to be you.
"We can and will do it again without complaining. "
Wel, yes, you and similar minded folks. But, believe me, the Democrat Party is full of Boomers who will bitch and whine and say they can't afford to live. I say, if after a working life you have not saved enough - outside of SS - no one should shed a tear for you. Maybe it is time for you to become a Walmart Greeter!
"We were taught by example to be frugal—something younger generations do not and, possibly should, though, cultivate."
You were born in a year when a US dime was 90% silver, and you still keep that sound money in your head when it has LONG since passed. Being frugal means economizing on items spent now to accumulate more fiatbux. That was sensible until the 70s and became so again in the 80s. It's time has passed and your advice to younger generations will leave them with a niggardly-lived life and a pile of worthless assets.
EGM posted the Kevin Spacey video a few months back that IS the way to do things: buy high-quality assets that yield a return. The kids are doing the right thing by not being frugal with fiatbux.
There is a real problem with this obsession about generations. The boomer generation covers those born from 1946 to 1964. There were many changes during those years that meant that the experiences of those born in them differed dramatically, The same goes for other generations,
That's not what I think of as "frugal". It's more of a "Do I really need that thing, or can I live without it?" I think the word you are thinking of is more "miserly" or "hoarder".
The smarter kids are doing what we always thought frugal meant -- wise investing. The average kid, though, is doing what our average boomers did -- piss it away as fast as possible, and have nothing to show for it.
Merriam Webster agrees with you:
"Frugal means being prudent and intentional with money and resources, avoiding waste, and maximizing value without sacrificing quality. It is a value-driven approach aimed at freeing up resources for long-term goals rather than a fear-based focus on spending the absolute least amount possible."
It's the latter approach I see with, e.g., my own parents who are blessed with enough money to afford high-quality nutritious food but who consistently focus on price over quality. In that sense, the Millennial spending on avocado toast is being more frugal than they.
The tragedy is that saving money in silver coin once WAS a form of frugality and I think my parents remember this. Saving fiatbux is folly.
“We live in the best country in the world.”
And what makes it so? We sure like to destroy the shit out of other nations trying to better themselves. This certainly keeps us on top. Does that truly make us better? We don’t offer our citizens healthcare but we sure know how to blow things up. Is that what makes us better?
I mention this because what you display is so very very boomer. Before you call me a lefty understand that I am anything but. I am a person who asks pertinent questions and I do not fit in any of your boxes.
There are many reasons why we are the best country in the world, and MANY of them are contained in the First Amendment. But we could do even better still, did government stay in its Constitutional limits.
What makes you think I fit into your boxes? The whine is strong with you, Luke! Oh, and if you don’t like living in this country, you are free to choose a better one. Shut up.
So you have no answers for my out of the box questions. Instead you stick your fingers in your ears, scream and call names. There is indeed a box for you.
No, it's just that most adults have come to the realization that there are some things that, while unpleasant, must be done. By someone, sometime. And usually the sooner the better, before it gets worse.
Had Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc. taken the Iran situation seriously, most of the ME problems we have today would have been much less.
Your obvious problem is that you are a Democrat and possibly a Canadian!
Hmm....where do I start?
Are you factoring in all the fraud of the social security system? I lived across from a guy who drew SSDI benefits at age 26.......he was not disabled, just gamed the system. Does this come into play at all?
I paid $142,000 into the system in my lifetime. I am more than happy to draw out exactly what I paid in and be done with it....but I am not permitted to do that.
I'm on the cusp between boomer and X. I have heard SS is running out of money for my entire life.....not sure what to believe anymore. But I don't worry about it. I have no plans to retire. I'm 62. I'd be bored to death not working.
Exactly. We have heard this running out of money warning for as long as we have worked. My ex and I made financial plans and saved as though we would never see a penny of what we paid into the system. And now it seems we are being called greedy for amassing enough to support ourselves over a 20 - 30 year possible retirement period (The reality is no one wants to hire you after 65 or so). We lived very simply in our twenties to forties, foregoing much of what I see my children's generations splurging on, in order to be secure now. I am growing weary of this effort to create war between generations.
Yep, same here. And seeing how things are going, likely our savings, which we sacrificed vacations and worked overtime for, will be used against us as justification to be the ones who first (and perhaps, solely) experience the first reduction in SS benefits.
I think it is more like no one wants to hire anyone 50 and over.
Exactly. Back in the '90s, the saying was, "Why hire a 50 $50 when you could hire 2 25 $25s?" It sound better without the dollar signs.
It has run out but the voting block has demanded it be paid up till now but they are dying off. The next block of voters will end it.
That’s how Congress works ( solely to get reelected).
I, too, was told SS would be bankrupt. I was in 7th grade and we had a speaker talk to our class who was very adamant.
But we shouldn't be satisfied to only receive back an amount that is not adjusted for inflation. Your estimated portfolio value today, using a future value of an annuity calculation (regular contributions growing at a constant rate):
At 7% annual return: ~$700,000–$800,000.
At 10% annual return: ~$1.5–1.8 million (or higher if contributions were back-loaded).
We were sold a bill of goods.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_dff458f3-db16-4635-9d28-73655e64263d
I am at the tail end of boomers, and I take precisely zero personal responsibility for the disaster that's coming. The weapon aimed at me is a dud.
I'm staring retirement in the face (and looking forward to it, oh boy) and I've arranged myself in such a way that the projected 24% cut to SocSec will be noticeable but not death-dealing.
I am among the very many who have recognized the difficulty presented by SocSec since I was in my 20s -- so very long ago -- and there was a time when I attempted to re-arrange myself in a surprisingly drastic manner so as not to be forced into the ride. It didn't work. It really, really, really didn't work.
So now I have finances in the usual assortment of resources one expects to find for a late-career, high-value professional and they, not SocSec, will be my primary retirement economic driver. Yes, SocSec is and can be important, but if it disappeared entirely tomorrow, I'd work it out. The economic skill of life is not sitting around while waiting for other people to fund oneself; it is finding the way to do it on one's own. And even in the aftermath of that former failed effort, I have done all right.
Park that mantle of responsibility where it belongs: Among feckless politicians, never real statesmen, who refuse to do what's right.
SocSec was never right in the first place, definitionally and /ab initio/. It was a socialist program by design, and as in all such matters, eventually we run out of others' money.
Amen
The cat's math is wrong due to the absence of investment income in his figures, as has already been established. What is also wrong is his idea that people who have designed a retirement based upon a promise CAN afford a 25% pay cut. As soon as my Millenial children discover that we can no longer afford an independent life and are moving in with them their attitude on this issue will change quickly. The biggest issue with Gen Z and Millenials is their insufferable "Peter Pan" syndrome (thus the wildly childish income expectations). If the little shits would grow up a bit, this issue would look different.
It is also incorrect to describe Social Security as a boomer program. It was established in 1935 by the prior generation.
Went into effect in 1936.
Social Security began on August 14, 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. [1, 2]
But it did not go into effect until the following year.
There is a third option. The government can put the money back. The same way they can fund wars. Even if it is a symbolic no interest accrued repayment. The gains on the money actually being invested over the next 10 years will fix the hole in the bucket and raise future retirees out of poverty.
Whose money? That’s also just another ponzi on top of ponzi.
The federal government has no money - only that which it collects in taxing you.
It makes FAR more money printing dollars.
...which is collateralized with tax money. They don't print for free, they have to be good for the interest on the borrowing of the printed dollars, which is covered by revenue.
That too, is another ponzi and they’re still playing fast and loose with your tax dollars.
It’s true, it pisses me off to see how fast China is moving forward. And NOT because I am upset with China. They have 300mph trains all over creation. We have nothing but embezzled money trails everywhere. The Zionists/Neocons make sure we are constantly spending our money and technology on wars. The Neoliberals are just as bad and most of the time they work together at the betterment of themselves.
Boomers didn't exist when SS was created, and when SS was created, it was a bullshit dishonest government confiscation scheme from the start.
Consider: retirement age was set at life expectancy.
That's right. The government took your money for Social Security KNOWING that, at least as originally structured, most people would NEVER collect much, if anything. Because they wouldn't retire...until they were likely to die!
Yeah, pretty damn grim, that math.
Think about people with diseases like, say, Huntingtons. They will never collect at 65. Yet they are forced to pay in. SS taxes the young, poor, and sick to transfer benefits to the older, wealthier, and healthier.
"...to transfer benefits to the older, (some) wealthier, and (some) healthier who themselves were forced without any choice or say in the matter to contribute their OWN hard-earned wages...in order to transfer THEIR benefits to the older, wealthier, and healthier."
Yes, it's a deceptive system. I mentioned elsewhere about the bias towards poorer people in the system, where they get 90% of covered salary while the richer people get a marginal 15% of their highest earnings back. But that obscures the fact that the unhealthy young (I think here of some Type 1 Diabetics I know) pay taxes to support the wealthy and presumably healthy (because Didnt die young from disease) old. That older generations are wealthier is obvious. Individuals within May vary, as you point out.
First, there is no SS trust fund and there never has been one. It's a lie, so why did you even put that in this post. It's a total fabrication. All SS taxes are immediately paid out and anything left over is put into the general fund. Please don't pretend voters have any control over what congress does so the fact that what we pay in SS taxes is never invested to grow in value is the governments fault. All the fraud we see in government proves there is enough money for SS if the government stops allowing it to be stolen. I know plenty of people my age and older who still have to work and if they didn't have SS they'd be homeless. Stop blaming them and put the blame right where it belongs on the politicians who have been looting the USA foreer and for allowing a lot of other crooks to do the same.
There was a stand-alone SS Fund, and LBJ moved it to the General Fund so they could tap into that money.
The problem begins and ends with we, the people, ever allowing to ourselves to become dependent upon a government program. That was the poison pill that was swallowed in allowing even the concept of Social Security to even happen, and, inevitably, as it goes with nearly all government entitlement programs, it has created an across the board demographic of very-soon-to-be-wanting dependents of every stripe.
In short, when you lie down with the government, you’re going to wake up with fleas.
Mr Bad Cat I’m calling BS.
This isn’t intergenerational. This is political. Put the blame where it belongs — on the Democrat Party.
FDR gave us the Social Security (SS) in 1935. It was at the time, ‘old age insurance’. Originally a 1% hit on your earnings. And the payouts were not taxable (just like insurance). Yes it was ‘pay as you go’, but the accurate name for that is Ponzi Scheme, which is a fraud and would have been illegal even back then for any private actor. The Boomers weren’t even born yet.
The Democrats have constantly expanded the program and subtly backdoored the population. In the 60’s Johnson pulled the SS Trust Fund into the General Revenues meaning he stole the principal while adding Medicare and Medicaid to the mix. He also made payout taxable. BTW, that’s when the Boomers were still in Grade School, High School and College. They had literally no influence.
Then in the 80’s the Republicans tried to fix the system. (BTW this is the first time Boomers had any say in this and even then not much.) Because they were trying to be ‘bipartisan’ they couldn’t get it straitened out. But they increased the retirement age, increased the taxation of benefits, pulled in the Civil Service, and made this an explicit part of the retirement calculations for the general public. Ten years later Clinton expanded the taxable portion of the assets.
Speaking of taxes - the payroll tax has always increased. Now it’s 15.3% including the Medicare Tax.
The Republicans tried to institute private accounts. The Democrats blocked them. The actual return on investment of SS for a middle class worker is about 2%. For the stock market 9%. Private accounts would have much better for them. But SS and Medicare are mostly transfer payments. The middle class puts in more than it gets out. The Lower Middle Class and poor get much more than they put in.
And while we’re at it, let’s consider the rampant fraud in the Medicare system and how it somehow gets recirculated back into Democrat Party coffers.
This isn’t a Boomer vs Gen Whatever issue. That’s false framing. It’s a corrupt Democrat money grab which the Republicans have been ineffectively trying to constrain since 1935.
This is so ripe for an "I told you so" moment.
When the R's suggested the privatization of SS, the howls of injustice and accusations of corporate greed were deafening. The R's chickened out, perhaps wisely, knowing that the D's had scared Ma and Pa into believing they were about to be robbed. Something something honor among thieves....
Anyway, the math is pretty simple, I did it fast, but intuitively this seems about right. Between 2005 and 2025, the SS "trust fund" received between ~$600B and $1,300B from actual people that would otherwise have received the cash that they or their employers forked over to Uncle Sugar. If they had instead taken that cash and put it in the S&P, which returned ~11% CAGR over the same time frame, that strip of payments would be worth about $48 trillion today. Invest that $48 trillion into something paying just 5.5% and the interest alone would be more than double 2025 projected FICA withholdings from all sources. That ignores whatever the "trust fund" was supposedly worth in 2005, it's just the payments that were made after the privatization effort failed.
We were robbed, fiscal conservatives and the mathematically literate were acutely aware of it from the time FDR proposed this garbage, and boomers had the opportunity politically to embrace reality, but they chose unequivocally in 2005 to embrace the engineered failure that was their education and follow the D's and the sugar rush of seeing that yellowish tan envelope in their mailbox. You've been Pavloved, congrats.
The D's wanted to keep looting your payroll and keep you beholden to their money printer. Pure and simple.
I never thought the system would survive this long. I always planned my retirement to be adequate to my needs without social security. I always voted against the Democrats, especially the ‘lockbox’ idiot Al Gore. Trouble is that you can only do so much. Given how much Democrats cheat (take a look at LA, California and Minnesota in general), it is likely that most of us wanted the system fixed. But the Corrupt prevented it. But again, it wasn’t the Boomers. It was the Democrats. So quit blaming the wrong people. And let’s not let the Generation Whatever Democrats off the hook. They’re gigantic part of the problem.
Whoever didn't laugh the D's out of the building when they postured the federal fisc as a stable alternative to the diversified American economy is to blame. Voters had a choice, and they failed the marshmallow test in 2005. It may be unfair to lay that on any one demographic, but a responsible path was within a politically plausible option and voters chose to believe the people that lied them into the situation in the first place.