Ben Shapiro recently said that social security should be abolished and people should be expected to work until they die.
My first thought was how stupid it was to say something like that during an election year. The Republican base is elderly people and a lot of them rely on social security. Expecting 80 year olds to have to work to survive is a pretty grim vision for the country and one that nobody would vote for.
On the other hand, interest on our debt is probably going to be larger than the GDP way before I'll be eligible for social security. The program seems like a product of another time that's practically doomed to fail eventually. It's a ponzi scheme, but it's one that people are counting on.
At the same time, Ben is the last person who should be talking about cutting social security while advocating we send more money to Ukraine and Israel. Benefits that actually go back to the taxpayers are the last things that should ever be cut. But our ruling class is set on sending as much money as possible overseas. They'll never have the political capital to get rid of social security without committing electoral suicide. That's just my thought.
In any normal situation we would be discussing how we could taper the People out of it, and also first making exiting the program voluntary. How and how much folks would receive back in exchange for voluntarily signing off on never receiving Social Security is a negotiation. What we have instead is a 1 or a 0 retarded conversation. You cannot have people in their 60s or more just left high-and-dry after 30+ years of paying into this insane system. Equally, you should not require young people to pay into a system that they know will never be there for them.
It could be there for the younger people too, if you would get the damned crooked fingers out of it.
It should set up as a 401K dedicated to the individual that pays it in, and no one else should be able to touch it. This raiding SS to put the money in the hands of criminal POS politicians must be stopped.
If a $10k IRA was set up for every US citizen at the time of their birth, invested in a low-fee Vanguard-ish S&P 500 tracking ETF, and with no ability to do any sort of early withdrawal of any kind, every American would retire a millionaire. So that would fix one problem.
The other problem is that the ghouls who run our economy are inflating the USD to nothing. So a million of a dollar when it is worth nothing is no security at all.
Both need to be fixed for any sort of durable government answer to this. It would be better to mandate financial education for all citizens and leave them to manage their own retirement, and keep government out of it except for those incapable of doing this for themselves (mentally incapable, etc.).
The vampires can still get at it.
Firstly they can increase the penalties and taxes for withdrawals of course. But that's not all.
They could restrict the sort of investments that could be made with the money in the account, as the British do. This amounts to corporate welfare, where only the favored companies (British Telecom, British Petroleum) can be a part of the investment portfolio, and nothing else. Government picking winners and losers, and of course those winners will be winners for them, not for you, you mudman.
They could "increase taxes on corporations to make sure they pay their fair share" (Current Biden slogan), which would result in lower corporate profits, which would then result in lower stock performance and fuck you out of a better return in a way that you would never see. Bastiat's Broken Window ... but this time it's in your house. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/joe_biden_wants_to_raid_americans_retirement_accounts.html
They can continue to erode the value of the USD, and often it seems to me that asset appreciation in the stock market doesn't fully keep up with the debasement of the USD, even though mathematically it should. This is well underway and accelerating, and showing no signs of stopping.
It was voluntary...until it wasn't, just like taxes.
I had meant exiting the program could be initially voluntary. I corrected my post to make that clearer.
100%.
Bernanke was the first person to admit the truth. That they can guarantee the payments, but cannot guarantee the purchase power of those payments. He's admitting that they are going to print to the moon, to inflate their way out of the problem.
Folks who make decisions like these, with nary a vote by the People on the topic, should be staked out in the sun for the ants.