The following essay has been making the rounds
on social media:
A woman died at age 65. She paid into the system for almost
50 years and collected NOTHING? Keep in mind all the people that die
every year that were paying into the system and got nothing! And these
governmental morons mismanaged the money and stole from the system, so that
it's now going broke.
BEAUTIFUL! and they have the audacity to call today's seniors
"vultures" in an attempt to cover their ineptitude.
DISGRACEFUL!
The real reason for renaming our Social Security payments is so
the government can claim that all those social security recipients are
receiving
entitlements thus putting them in the same case as welfare, food
stamp recipients.
THIS IS WORTH THE FEW MINUTES IT TAKES
TO READ AND DIGEST!
F.Y.I. By changing the name of SS contributions it gives them a
means to refute this program in the future.
It's free money for the government to spend under this guise.
The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a
*Federal Benefit
Payment*?
I'll be part of the one percent to forward this. I am
forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you.
Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it.
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a
"Federal Benefit Payment." This isn't a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned
income! Not only did we all contribute
to Social Security but our employers did too. It totaled 15% of our
income before taxes.
If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close
to $180,000 invested in Social Security.
If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in
social security ($375/month, including both you and your employers
contributions) at a
meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of
working you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved!
This is your personal investment. Upon retirement, if you
took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month.
That's almost three times more than today's average Social
Security benefit of 1,230 per month, according to the Social Security
Administration. (Google it – it's a fact). And your retirement fund would last more than
33 years (until you're 98 if you retire at age 65)! I can only imagine how much better most
average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just
invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.
Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger *Ponzi
scheme* than Bernie Madoff ever did. (Lyndon Johnson)
They took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh
yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn't have
a referendum
to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they
didn't pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they've told
us that the
money won't support us for very much longer. (Isn't it funny that
they NEVER say this about welfare payments?)
But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now,
to add insult to injury, they're calling it a *benefit*, as if we never worked
to earn every
penny of it. Just because they borrowed the money, doesn't
mean that our investments were a charity!
Let's take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security
and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our
government. Find a way to keep Social
Security and Medicare
going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it.
Then call it what it is:
Our Earned Retirement Income.
99% of people won't forward this.
Will you? [sic]
There’s a large measure of truth there. But it’s
inaccurate in important ways. Here is my rebuttal:
True; Social Security is
thoroughly corrupt—which is why I won’t be forwarding this e-mail.
Your Social Security taxes
are in fact not a “personal investment”. They are a wealth transfer
payment from you who earned it to those who didn’t earn it. The Social Security
“trust fund” is a fraud. The taxes that go into it are immediately paid out to
other people—people you don’t even know—or “lent” to Congress to spend as they
see fit. Unlike a pension fund, which legally must contain real assets
sufficient to fund the vested benefits, the SS trust fund is a pile of
IOUs—non-tradeable treasury bonds—that can only be repaid by additional taxes
levied on us, the same people whose SS taxes funded it in the first
place! The “system” is not “going broke”. It has always been broke, by design.
You have no property right to
that money you pay “into the system”—and never have. You are not legally
entitled to the promised benefits—and never have been. The politicians can
lower or rescind the benefit at any time. As CATO reports, “One of the most
enduring myths of Social Security is that a worker has a legal right to his
Social Security benefits. Many workers assume that, if they pay Social Security
taxes into the system, they have some sort of legal guarantee to the system’s
benefits. The truth is exactly the opposite. It has long been law that there is no legal right to Social Security.”
So yes, the benefits are in
fact Federal Benefit Payments in the nature of welfare and food stamps—and
funded the same way, with other people’s taxes. Social Security payments are
not “earned retirement income”. You money is long gone, along with the
potential return on investment. Those Social Security monthly checks are
literally handouts funded by taking money out of other people’s pockets. What
about the money you “paid in” all those years? That’s long gone. A more proper
term to describe Social Security benefits is restitution. You are
entitled to receive the promised benefits for the same reason you are entitled
to get your wallet back from a street thug who mugged you. But that is not a
return on investment of your money. Those monthly checks are only made possible
by government doing to others what it did to you all those working, taxpaying
years. If that isn’t moral corruption, then the term has no meaning.
Social Security, like all
socialist programs, is corrupt to it core. It forces everybody into a chain
gang of reciprocating slavery and dependency, with the state as the master and
“benefactor”. Re-labeling won’t change that. “Need” won’t change that. Social
Security shouldn't be saved. It should be phased out and abolished. Until that
is politically feasable, I advocate for a personal account system. The taxes
future participants must pay—all 15.3% of it—should at least be deposited
directly into a real account, in the individual's name, invested as the
individual sees fit, inheritable for the individual’s heirs, with an iron-clad
statutory ban on politicians, other retirees, or anyone else getting their
hands on one nickel of it for any reason.
Government-forced savings are
not right, either—but much less bad than the current fraud. At least each
“contributor” would see where his/her money goes and watch it grow, via monthly
statements, like an IRA or 401k. Only by establishing the individual’s property
right to his payments could the money drawn out be honestly called Earned
Retirement Income.
I don’t believe for a second
that 92% of our population need Social Security; that most Americans are too
incompetent to plan for their own futures without picking each others’ pockets.
If it is the case that only 8% of Americans still want freedom, then America is
philosophically dead, Marxism has won, and economic collapse, Gulags, and gas
chambers are only a matter of time.
I don’t believe in the basic
incompetence of the vast majority of the American people. But I do believe in
the saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Think of what it could mean to keep
the current system going. It’s definitely unsustainable. But the proposed cure
is worse than the disease. Many politicians have suggested “means testing”
social security benefits; a fancy way of saying if you have private savings
built up over a lifetime, the state will cut your social security payments for
the sake of increasing benefits of others who “need” them, thus screwing the
responsible because they were responsible enough to save. Saving Social
Security and Medicare means cutting a
lot of people’s benefits.
Think it’s bad that the woman who died at 65 got screwed? Wait until people who
don’t die at 65 get screwed. That’s what it’ll take to “Find a way to
keep Social Security and Medicare going . . .” (Contrary to scaremongers,
Social Security can be radically altered or even ended without harming people who have planned their
lives around it and now count on it.)
If we’re going to continue
Social Security, it should at the very least be radically altered. If we’re
going to rename anything, it should be to rename “Social Security” into
“Personal Security”—and mean it. We must establish an ironclad individual
property right to the money taxed away from each of us as well as the returns
generated by means of personal, private accounts. People whose political power
depends on keeping people dependent on politicians for their payments won’t
like it. Neither will people who hope to collect more than they earned or
people who want to evade the responsibility of taking care of themselves. But
those of us who believe it is the individual's right and responsibility to plan
his own life will be the big winners.
Related Reading:
Protect Your Corn: 3 Ways to
Self-Fund Retirement in a Means-Tested Social Security World -- David Reyes
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