Long term solution is going to hurt, flat out. An immediate payout of any amount paid in, with an immediate closure of the program.
We can't keep living in a country where the same thing is used as a political platform for decades. It needs to stop, and no better time like that present.
They talk about the social security trust fund going broke all the time, but if it was to be paid out to all beneficiaries, they’d get something like $45,000-$90,000 each, because Congress raided it years ago, as all governments do with ”trust” funds. (Nothing against trusts themselves, but governments can’t manage them). The majority of social security payouts are made from present receipts, and the trust fund is more like a small rotating buffer account than an actual fund.
It’ll definitely hurt to close it out, and people are going to find out that their “retirement savings” was a money laundering slush fund, their trust was in error, and they should have been more skeptical and paying better attention. (IRA’s could potentially end up going the same way.)
There may be ways to soften the blow for some people, and they’ll need to be voluntary and highly auditable, but overall, having assets to mitigate the bankruptcy and children to soften what’s left are the only two paths that seem available as a whole.
That said, it’ll be nice to restore family unity and the intergenerational dependencies and connections that we’ve allowed to be broken, and there may be a way to do it that’s a bit softer that what I expect. We’ll see.
Long term solution is going to hurt, flat out. An immediate payout of any amount paid in, with an immediate closure of the program.
We can't keep living in a country where the same thing is used as a political platform for decades. It needs to stop, and no better time like that present.
They talk about the social security trust fund going broke all the time, but if it was to be paid out to all beneficiaries, they’d get something like $45,000-$90,000 each, because Congress raided it years ago, as all governments do with ”trust” funds. (Nothing against trusts themselves, but governments can’t manage them). The majority of social security payouts are made from present receipts, and the trust fund is more like a small rotating buffer account than an actual fund.
It’ll definitely hurt to close it out, and people are going to find out that their “retirement savings” was a money laundering slush fund, their trust was in error, and they should have been more skeptical and paying better attention. (IRA’s could potentially end up going the same way.)
There may be ways to soften the blow for some people, and they’ll need to be voluntary and highly auditable, but overall, having assets to mitigate the bankruptcy and children to soften what’s left are the only two paths that seem available as a whole.
That said, it’ll be nice to restore family unity and the intergenerational dependencies and connections that we’ve allowed to be broken, and there may be a way to do it that’s a bit softer that what I expect. We’ll see.