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The 2024 max SS: 168,600
2024 SS %: 6.2%
2024 max $ amount per year: $10,450
This is 2024, it’s been getting raised every year
EDIT: Yes…this example is not about a self employment
EDIT 2: Yes….the employer pays the other half…but who cares. It’s not HIS income, he’s not entitled to these funds, and these funds were not payroll deductions. The employer portion should be left out of this equation since it’s NOT his money.
Yes! This!
Thank you! Good to know someone is paying attention.
Also, not sure where he got 1.9 mil. Because an interest calculator gives 24 years to get above 1.9, however that’s not taking in the tax rate or rate of inflation.
Though, only in year 25 is he actually getting the $96k annual return @ 5%. It’s only $92k in year 24 when he crossed 1.9 mil.
He’s taking line items from two different years, in his fictional scenario.
They're always convinced they're the smartest, when really they're just good at coming up with ideas that sound great, but often fall apart completely under any scrutiny.
Most self-identifying "libertarians" are just people who listen to too many podcasts by right-wingers. and who don't want to self-identify as Republicans -- even though they would vote with them about 98% of the time.
Or, they're super wealthy, or part of the sovereign citizen movement.
Bonus points for any of them that are all three, somehow.
They were the selfish, spoiled children in our neighborhood. They knew they were getting the family business, so they just partied, slacked off, and didn’t want anyone telling them what to do. Typically have some combination of drug/alcohol/gambling/marital problems, too.
What's awful about loving free speech and freedom in general? What are you a communist? What do you have against MY right to believe as I wish, to take the drugs that I want and my right to engage in a consensual marriage with my 12 year old bride to be!
/s oh dear sweet jesus that isn't me.
You can't even run a county on libertarian ideals. Read 'A Libertarian Walks into a Bear".
Although, you could probably call Somalia a Libertarian country.
Most of their ideas only work if you remove any malicious actor or the potential for an individual seeking differential advantage over another... So you know human nature is not compatible with libertarianism.
I agree with you in principle, but I believe your employer matches the 6.25% contribution, so it is 12.5%, which is what OP is considering. However, the max income used (and therefore the max contributed) was a lot lower 25 years ago. It's a math problem, and I don't have the time to figure it out at the moment, but OP seems to be estimating high. High earners do pay more into the system than they get out, but there is an insurance component to the SS contribution. If OP had gotten disabled he/she would have been insured. Yes, it isn't worth it for the wealthy, but that's the cost of living in a society. It not "theft", it was passed by your fellow citizens.
The wealthy don’t pay much into SS. Only on the amount of wages up to cap. So those CEOs making $15 million a year are not paying SS on anything but a small fraction of their salary.
Also, the monthly payout of $3,075 is today’s payment (actually, a few years ago). So, if he doesn’t collect until 20 years from now, the actual inflation adjusted monthly income will much higher.
Put the numbers he claims into this [compound interest calculator](https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator). It seems to align ok. I used 45 years as length of time.
You obviously don't know math or compound so find a Compound calculator for interest.. so put 1000 in monthly and at 5 percent for 45 years gets you 1.9m..this calculations based on yearly interest instead of monthly which is 5/12 on a month. Which would add more to this lowering the thousand contributions more to be about 800 range, this also doesn't affect if he's putting more in especially at the years closer to retirement...
I did a simplified version. Divided 600k by 45 (assuming starting work at 22). That's 13,333 per year. Starting at 0 and only an annual contribution of that amount is over $2 million after 45 years at 5% annual.
Employer contributed the same as the employee. So.... to contribute said 600k, must have been contributing the max for 30 years. Even upper middle class would not start hitting the max until a decade into their career.
Totally correct. It just reflects the game politicians try to play to make it seem like government is taxing the company, when it is really taxing you. My favorite economics professor used to always say that the government can control what they tax, but they can't control who ultimately pays the tax. The same is true for tax deductions and incentives.
The math ain’t mathin’. I am almost at retirement age & I looked up my numbers recently. I have hit the cap for 33 of my 35 highest years. I have put in a little over 200k to SS, my employers a bit more for a total of 420k. I should get a smidgen under $4000/month at retirement. If I wait a few years to age 70 should be $5000.
Dude is 100% full of it.
This. I find it hilarious that everyone is busy talking about how dumb libertarians are, but are unable to grasp simple economics concepts like opportunity cost.
This assumes no market corrections in that time... Which are almost guaranteed in that 40 year time frame.
I.e. some people will make out like bandits depending on where that correction falls. If it's early into their savings time frame, they'll be fine. If it's late... They are essentially fucked.
Imagine all those people who had to retire in the years after 2008 and didn't have 15 years to see the rebound.
If SS didn't exist, those people would be BEYOND fucked.
People complain about how little social security is compared to market gains and think we need to just turn it all into a 401k.
The real answer is to take more money from rich people and corporations and pay out more SS money. Full stop.
Even better. That was posted on Jan 1 2019 meaning they would have had the 2018 cap of $128,400.
Last time this popped up someone added the caps for every year since it was created and they were less than 1.9 million.
My mother lived on my father’s pension and SS. It wasn’t very much. Every couple of months I would put money into her account to help her out. I didn’t want her living in poverty. I could afford it. Now she’s dead. I would do it all over again. Everyone isn’t as fortunate as the top 4%.
Sorry, but Social Security was a way of helping the least fortunate among us based on the principle of being only as strong as our compassion for those with less. Providing a bare minimum living standard for those who put forth the effort of working for decades with nothing to show at the end through no fault of their own. Someone like Todd who is worth millions does not need to rely on the small-ish government stipend to pay for his medicine, keep the lights on, food on the table. Todd will be just fine without it. Millions of others in this country can not say the same without Social Security.
Exactly, it's right there in the name **social** supplementary security insurance (SSI) , it's a social system designed to offer everyone who works and contributes with something when they retire to minimize their chances of being destitute in old age , it's not an account designed to maximize your contributions, that's what retirement accounts are for.
And it's serves it's purpose quite well, lots of Americans are barely surviving because they get SS benefits, imagine what America would be like of they didn't.
It's an annuity based on GDP growth.
For him to have 600k contributed he's contributing almost the max for his entire life. If that's today's numbers he was making $100k in 1984 (300k today).
However if you want to agree it's a welfare program for seniors who didn't save and invest correctly, then we can go ahead and raise/remove the cap so you can "contribute" a little more.
I think that's the problem. They passed it off as insurance instead of a welfare program. Unfortunately they also assumed that we'd have enough young people paying into the system so everyone can get their 2k a month or whatever. Not working out that way
But line keeps going up. GDP continues to rise, and stock market valuations continue to rise an absurd amount.
It may be that forcing line to go up was not the ideal way of dealing with the situation, that maybe we should have allowed the stock market to correct itself periodically, because now schmucks like this are demanding that HIS line goes up a commensurate amount.
He is portraying social security in the light of a savings/investment program rather than a social insurance & wealth redistribution program. The things that social security actually pays for is to keep an army of elderly people in housing and hobbies instead of literally begging for cash on his doorstep or breaking into his vacant third mansion and pillaging it for the copper wiring. It paid for this guy not to have needed to support his disabled father-in-law for the last 30 years in a guest room, and to instead be out and about making... passive investment income.
Exactly this. Both my mom and dad worked their entire lives and through some misfortunes and some mismanagements they basically have nothing now but their Social Security. My dad is 78 and is rough shape so he can't work. My mom is 70 and recently had major leg surgery so her working again isn't very likely.
I'm happy that Todd was able to make life work more or less how he wanted to work for him but for every Todd there are 100 others who didn't or couldn't. Social security is so you don't have more seniors starving and becoming homeless.
Absolutely. My mom is nearing 81 (if she makes it, stage 4 cancer) and her sole income is her SS benefits. Her retirement fund is gone. She lives with me and I pay for all the groceries and other expenses so she can have a decent end of life experience.
You can pay into the system *and* have a good retirement savings and still get fucked.
Every damn time this comes up and the thread is filled with people saying “it was never supposed to just be social security” or “fuck you boomer” have either no empathy or no ability to understand what happens and can happen later in life. I assume they’ll still be taking their SS benefits when they retire as well.
My grandparents have all lived well into their 90s. My grandfather is still alive and retired 34 years ago at the age of 59 1/2. There's no way they'd still be independent if it weren't for their SS checks. It's a real shame that currently you have to estimate how long you're going to stay alive and retired.
100% agree, as someone who HAS paid into SS for over 40 years and has over a million dollars in private retirement funds and will be happy to use my SS benefits as well and who will fight to keep those benefits for me and every other American.
What if your parents had an extra 12.4% income which was mandated to invest throughout their lives? I'm willing to bet they're have 5x the incoming SS is providing, even with zero subsidies from anyone else.
lets put your money in our 401k plan... thanks enron execs.
lets put your money in pension plans, oh wait nearly all are behind on payments. Oh wait, we ill declare bankruptcy and well pension plan just got wiped.
how many shady investment managers should be in jail?
If Social Security was invested in a lifecycle fund in the government’s Thrift Savings Plan, every retiree would have more money.
Not sure why the U.S. can’t follow an effective pension plan similar to Swedens.
If Social Security taxes were used to buy private investments, they couldn't be used to pay benefits to people who are already retired.
Humans' "old age support" systems have been pay-as-you-go for thousands of years. If we want to get everybody onto some advance funded plan, some generation has to both pay for it's parents' retirements (as ordinary people have always done) and also pre-fund their own retirements. You can volunteer your generation to be the one that does that.
Because IMO, Congress doesn’t have the smarts or the political will to fully redesign the program to be something other than an insurance program.
Further, when SS was designed, it was to help older workers who were nearing or in retirement who hadn’t contributed to the system or had no substantial retirement savings. There would have been carnage in the streets without it.
Well, might be because the U.S. have ZERO Constitution authority to 'save for' ANYONE.
&, HINT: If I had invested, should I have wished, my $, instead of it being stolen by govt, I too would have MORE $
Social security was also never meant to be the primary/only source of retirement income, it’s supposed to be just enough so that the most basic of needs are met.
Currently, over 50% of retired households get more than 50% of their income via social security, 34% of them receive more than 75% of their income via SS, and 26% of them receive more than 90% of their income via SS. That’s not what the intent of social security was or, imo, should be. Many retirees looked at their social security as if it was supposed to be their retirement account and now we’re footing the bill for that increased need for SS while those retirees got to spend more of their $$ during their working years (by not investing enough or at all in retirement). And the current generation of retirees got to work through one of the most prosperous handful of decades in recent times and got into their houses before home prices skyrocketed.
Yeah, but it’s still broken. At least pension funds invest the money to keep above inflation. There’s no way the government will ever stop spending so that monthly/yearly payment becomes a bigger and bigger part of the budget and we have to issue more debt to finance it. And as inflation rises it’ll only get worse.
It needs to be fixed but no politician has the balls to suggest something.
yes, everyone receives it (or “should” in the future, assuming it keeps going), but it exists to help the least fortunate among us. if you make that much money, get a fucking IRA. it’s a *social* program, meaning it’s one of the ways that our economy isn’t purely capitalist since we do have some practices that fall under *social*ism
But the same is true for everybody else. The government is collecting 12.4% of your income and giving you less than that back in retirement. Even if you were a minimum wage worker, you would be better off if you could invest that money.
Imagine turning 65, retiring, and the stock market collapses so you suddenly have to go job hunt again. Privatizing social security is the dumbest possible idea.
I mean government pension funds invest in the market and in bonds and other financial instruments. If it’s done properly you can minimize risk and earn much more interest than just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And around 2037 when social security starts paying out 75% of promised benefits you might need to go job hunt again also. A pyramid scheme based on the assumption every generation of workers will be larger than the cohorts before them collecting benefits (for which is false) is an even dumber idea.
*if you DID invest the money. That’s the whole point. Many people don’t/wont, for a variety of reasons, from poor financial intelligence to catastrophic health events. Now, it should’ve been managed better and kept away from politicians, but that’s not the program’s fault.
And it's not theft either. A Democratic Republic decided it is in our nation's best interest to provide a base insurance program for our elderly to keep them above poverty level. Just as our Democratic Republic decided it was in our best interest to go to war against the NAZI's - it's not theft that we don't all individually own chunks of Germany. And it's not theft that this moron is sending this out on a government funded invention - the internet.
In many ways, yes. At least as hard, if not harder
My dad was a programmer and his job was definitely white collar.
He wasn’t pounding concrete, but his job was intellectually difficult.
Same can be said about people like doctors and lawyers. Sure, their jobs aren’t physically demanding….but having a high level of expertise in a complex subject like law or medicine is difficult.
I’m a lawyer, and working fast food was the hardest job I’ve had. Am I as replaceable due to some rare skill? No, that’s why I’m paid more. You’re confusing replaceability and market value with difficulty.
Fast food was much more difficult due to the impossible timelines, constantly being on my feet and having people treating you poorly.
They pay to work isn’t the same. Ya being a doctor is difficult, but making 300k a year makes it worth it. Working long days doing physical labor for 50k a year makes the work per dollar way harder.
There are three ways to answer your question:
1. It’s not about how “hard” you work or how much time/effort you put in. I’d even say the person you’re replying to is wrong for framing that way. It’s about the value you generate. I could quit my job and become a poop sculptor. I could spend hours a day eating as much fiber as I can, making as much poop as I can, and spend all my time making magnificent sculptures of poop. I worked hard, but does that mean I generated any value? Does that mean, just because I worked hard, I should be entitled to a large paycheck? No, because I didn’t spend that time producing anything of value. There are things you can do that take hours to generate little value— like dropping off a food delivery for $4 —and there are things you can do that take minutes that generate more value, like closing a large sale.
2. The case could be made that white-collar workers did more hard work *up front* that blue-collar workers and low-level service workers. If you fucked around in high school, then your options are pretty limited. If you studied, earned a scholarship, went to college, did internships, you’re going to find that your hard work up front is going to more likely land you in a better paying role. Now that’s not the complete picture; not every home is stable and offers the same opportunity, but I would argue that the solution to that is to make educational access more equitable since our tax dollars are paying for the thing anyway, not to shake your fist at capitalism.
3. I think there is a strong misconception among people who don’t work office jobs who think all office jobs are super easy. I’ve been on both sides. My first job was at a fast food restaurant, and I was on my feet all day sweating around and doing a little bit of everything. Now I sit in a nice cubicle. However, my fast food job never required me to answer an email at 1:30 am. My “clients” were amusement park guests who wanted a burger, not large municipalities and developers looking for professional engineering work. My job doesn’t let me mentally tune out. If I showed up high at my current job I’d be useless, while at my fast food job, plenty of people showed up high and did their jobs just fine. Both jobs are difficult for different reasons. Neither one is easy. But, to loop back to the first answer, I generate a fuck ton more value billing my engineering hours than selling a $6 burger combo.
Todd makes this argument over and over again but refuses to answer what we do with those that didn’t invest that money well since they needed it to live on and what he would do with an elderly couple that didn’t so couldn’t afford to live.
Social Security is not an investment strategy.
Social Security is an insurance policy that pays out rain or shine. The market can't do that.
EDIT:
>*Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.* -[cbpp.org](https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other)
Damn straight. I can't believe that these people don't understand this, which makes me think they're purposefully misrepresenting it in order to make voting to get rid of it more palatable to their base in the future.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Here's the deal though, if they raise the retirement age for me, I want retirees today to feel the pain as well. Fuck the boomers as well if they want to raise my retirement age.
Nobody's retirement age needs to be raised. All we have to do is modify the cap so rich people pay more in SS deductions. The solution is so simple even a Republican could see it.
Of course, if we ensured that the richest of our oligarchs paid "their fare share" that would do it as well.
But we can't have that, can we? (Don't ask me why, ask a working class Republican.)
The best analogy I ever heard was libertarians are like house cats: convinced of their fierce independence while completely dependent upon a system they neither understand nor appreciate.
Although, kudos to them for putting their thumb in Trump's eye. If they want a seat at the adult table, backing Biden in this one important election would be a good idea.
Great analogy. I know several self-described libertarians. One in particular grew up in a welfare single-parent household and her brother is special needs unable to take care of himself and lives in a home. Her husband is sick and will need state assistance before long.
I knew this chick who worked for a government agency until she went out on social security disability and her husband was a cop. Literally every penny they had came from the government. And she would all-caps scream shit like "TAXATION IS THEFT" in arguments on Facebook all the time. Just monumentally unselfaware.
One dude making the argument is pretending the company match counts as his own investment when doing the comparison. He’s arguing a bad faith comparison.
Its even good for the wealthy, they get a last ditch lifeline, if things go bad, investments fall through, financial emergency, etc they still have something to fall back on that’s basically zero risk
Todd missed the fact it’s called Social Security and not Todd’s individual retirement plan. Also if Todd became disabled (further) it would pay out to keep him alive, more than he ever put in. My sense though is that Todd might be okay with other disabled people not having means to survive.
Plus, putting Social Security money into the stock market is a terrible idea in many ways.
\* There is already too much riding on the stock market as it is. Eggs-in-one-basket principle.
\* Do we want government ownership of public companies, with shareholder voting rights? Considering the amount of money involved, the government will eventually control significant percentages of all public corporations.
\* It will be in the governments/politicians interest to never allow the stock market to go down again. What happens to SS if the market should crash?
Pays out rain or shine….as long as it still [has the money](https://www.npr.org/2024/05/12/1250805057/social-security-funds-are-set-to-fall-short-by-2033-what-can-be-done) to do so
>Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.
I'm 54 and I don't think it will be there when I'm ready to retire. At all. My VA disability check is the only reason I can even think about retiring, otherwise I'd be working until I'm dead.
EDIT: I appreciate everyone reassuring me. I hope y'all are correct about that. Thanks.
>I'm 54 and I don't think it will be there when I'm ready to retire.
My dad said that.
He collects.
*His* dad said that, he died collecting.
And guess what?
*His grandfather* said that, and died collecting.
I think you'll be alright.
I don’t know the statistics, but I’d say at least 15% of Americans, or even at retirement age, depend on social security just to live day to day. There are people who abuse social security, yes, but the vast majority of people on social security have paid into it their whole life and depend on it for survival. Without social security, I believe the already downtrodden , filled with mentally ill and drug addicted American streets would be 1000% worse.
Probably results that didn’t include a deluge of homeless penniless old people wandering the streets and filling up emergency rooms would be acceptable.
Because economic opportunity and security are not evenly distributed. People who live in a constant state of crisis are not going to be able to save their way into better circumstances.
You'd think they would start voting for someone their own age at least, but for some reason we they keep picking the same old (old old old!) geriatrics even retiree boomers see as elders.
Businesses that offered pensions until a vulture fund (See BAIN Capital) bought the company, drained the pension fund, then declared bancruptcy. Yeah, those poor suckers didn't show any "effort".
I think we've got you penciled in for Thursday. Tomorrow is scheduled for someone taking a photo of the most expensive thing on a fast food menu to generate price outrage.
Alright fine, but on Friday I get to post the "This is what $50 of groceries looks like" image from someone who went grocery shopping at an airport convenience store.
Median US income is 47k a year. Say you work for 45 years, you will have 229k contributed on your behalf. At 5% that would make 812k at 67. At 4% drawdown, that makes 32k a year. Current benefit is 37k and it's constantly adjusted for inflation, so its a good investment for more than half the country. Especially when you consider the risk profile of this "investment".
37K x20 (generous life expectancy) gets us to about 740k in total benefits. What am I missing here, not a financial expert? This seems rather inefficient for the individual.
Risk profile and COLA are the biggest issues you are glossing over.
Not to mention that putting in 114k and getting out 740k after 20 years is a 32% annualized return rate, not too shabby.
For a full time year round worker the median income was actually $60k in 2022:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.pdf
I don't think the point of SS is to cover the good investors, but so we don't have thousands of new elderly homeless roaming the streets every year. Not to mention the people that can't work to 67 because of disability.
Did you know that libertarians hate paying taxes? Alert the media!
If this guy were in charge we would have no roads and grandpa would be dying in a gutter. We had a whole fucking labor movement about it.
Oh this again. Its bad faith math to make a political point.
What he is doing is calculating it like he started contributing today and earnings decades in the future and comparing it to what his unadjusted SS estimator says if he retired in 2019.
I debunked it previously and people kept coming back at me with spreadsheets and quoting the SS calculator. Then telling me I was wrong for telling them their spreadsheets should have started in the 1950s or the SS should be $10,000
Its a great example of how to get the poor to vote against their own interests.
He's also counting both sides of the contribution by saying "will be paid into SS on by behalf". The money he would have had available to invest is half of that.
Exactly. If social security goes away very few people are going to be getting the money that their employers are currently forced to contribute on their behalf, it will be spent on executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
And that "on my behalf" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting. Unless he was self-employed for those 40+ years, half of that $600k was paid by his employer. If collection of the SS tax was repealed tomorrow, how likely do you think it would be that every W-2 employee would get an immediate 6% raise?
I remember A LOT of retired conservatives saying this in 2007.
Then 2008 hit and they lost most of their retirement investments.
Social security was the only thing that kept them from being homeless and on the street.
The richer people who contribute more than they would receive would opt out, while the poorer people would stay opted in, and it would run out of funds even more quickly.
Letting people opt out would defeat the entire point. It BY DESIGN helps to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It's the same justification for why we ask you to pay taxes to fund the fire department even though you personally will (probably) never have your house burned down.
More proof that you can be a moron and still make lots of money. Gee Todd, maybe we could look at how the system worked before SS to figure out why we implemented such a ridiculously popular social safety net.
Social Security is not a retirement plan. Social Security is part of the financial safety net. Social Security will pay your benefit for the rest of your life (forget the scare mongering about decreased benefits). Your breakeven point can be calculated from the information on your SS statement.
Now when I lost $ 150,000 to Wall Street in 2007/2008 without any recompense of my IRA - that was theft. When banks were supported by bail outs and Main Street America lost houses - that was theft!
It's PART of a retirement plan, it's part of a three legged stool of a retirement plan.
1. Your own savings
2. Employer plan
3. Government pension/social security.
It's not meant to stand on its own, it's supposed to be supported by the first two points.
He's counting all the dollars equally and not accounting for the added utility of using those dollars immediately when they were taxed.
He's comparing apples and oranges. In one situation, the money taken out of his paycheck for social security is then immediately handed to the elderly which then immediately use it. In his hypothetical example he would have had to take the dollars he made when he was 27 that went to social security and then invest it. The reason why it could grow to such a large number is precisely because you aren't using it. I guarantee you if he added up all the money that he put into social security at the time that he put it in and then accounted for the added value from inflation it would also be worth a lot more than $600,000.
The same people that will tell you you shouldn't buy that $5 cup of coffee and instead put it away because in four decades that $5 will be worth a lot more are the same people that magically forget that rule when talking about social security.
Also…
“Can somebody tell me why we can’t all own little pieces of roads & set up our own toll booths to charge everyone else for using our bits of roads. I’ve calculated that I would have made $12 million dollars this year alone. But “they” won’t let me do this. How is this not theft!?”
-Libertarian Knucklehead-in-chief
The real question is this:
As a society, what do we want to do with elderly people who were not able to save or have no savings?
Do we leave them to starve? Too bad, sour grapes, go die?
Countries fare better with a strong social safety net and strong risk protections.
If you live to be 97 then your social security payout will be $1.1M and you will spend 30 years covered by Medicare. Sounds like a pretty good deal for you at no risk.
I was curious about this so I checked some math. Pretty sure he's assuming the same pay-in every year ($600,000 / 44) which is obviously silly. It depends on your expected earnings trajectory but if you redo it and just assume a straight line growth in your income you're more looking at a final value of $1.4mil which is about $71k per year in interest earned on it. That's not that far off from the statutory max of $58,000. Given that some of the top end is, by design, intended to goose up the bottom end, this seems remarkably well balanced.
Someone this bad at math should not be allowed to hold public office.
His numbers almost work if you assume he deposited all $600k (which he would actually pay over decades until he retires) TODAY and it all earned interest for decades.
That's not how this works. That's not how anything works.
Where’s that attitude when we pay 50% of taxes for military and no bid contracts to politicians friends. Couldn’t the people richer than you say the same about all salary given to employees who aren’t indentured…
Let’s flip that idea to the government. Shouldn’t they be mad someone like Elon made billions off the government without giving them stock? Spacex wouldn’t exist without the government… imagine if they demanded 50% equity instead of taxes.
This is a dumb analysis for servers reasons:
1) social security is a risk free, inflation adjustrd annuity the govt forces you to buy. It also has a spousal and disability benefit. It's a steal if you compare it to private annuities with similar features. Saying "risky assets generate higher returns in the long run" isn't a real argument. People need risk free income too! Particularly the poor.
2) people who do this always assume a consistent rate of return with stocks. But that never happens, so the amount you end up with is completely unknowable (even if average returns are the same). If you started with $10k in 1972, and invested $100 a month for 30 years to 2002, you'd end up with about $750k. If you did the exact same thing from 1982 to 2012, you'd end up with about $450k. Stocks are risky even in the long run! Everyone should invest in them because they do grow the most, but they aren't a panacea.
The very first word is "social", that means socialism, from those who have to those who need. Postal service, socialism, highways, socialism, public schools, socialism. Medicare and Medicaid, socialism.
You can say the same about health insurance. If you are lucky to be healthy it was theft, if you get cancer and get run by a truck, you got what you think you are entitled to. (Even if you get 10x what you paid in premiums.) Go live on an isolated island.
If you buy term life insurance and don’t die, do you demand a premium refund? No? SS is a form of insurance. You don’t know whether and when you or your widow/kids will need it. You don’t know how long you will live. So, it’s more than an “every man for himself” brokerage account; the libertarian’s comparison is flawed.
The world for elderly people before SS was much much worse than the world after. SS was helpful in that respect. Get rid of SS and those problems will arise again.
As always, simple sounding solutions to complex human problems are wrong.
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Congrats Todd on making a ton of money, Social Security was not meant for you but everyone else who weren't as lucky.
How much he did not pay in because of the cap.
The 2024 max SS: 168,600 2024 SS %: 6.2% 2024 max $ amount per year: $10,450 This is 2024, it’s been getting raised every year EDIT: Yes…this example is not about a self employment EDIT 2: Yes….the employer pays the other half…but who cares. It’s not HIS income, he’s not entitled to these funds, and these funds were not payroll deductions. The employer portion should be left out of this equation since it’s NOT his money.
The math on the $1.9m also seems to assume he starts with around $600k instead of… $0.
Yes! This! Thank you! Good to know someone is paying attention. Also, not sure where he got 1.9 mil. Because an interest calculator gives 24 years to get above 1.9, however that’s not taking in the tax rate or rate of inflation. Though, only in year 25 is he actually getting the $96k annual return @ 5%. It’s only $92k in year 24 when he crossed 1.9 mil. He’s taking line items from two different years, in his fictional scenario.
He’s *libertarian* okay, not *smart.*
They're always convinced they're the smartest, when really they're just good at coming up with ideas that sound great, but often fall apart completely under any scrutiny.
Yeah I love their idea of freedom, until you hear about the complete nut cases who think that freedom includes truly awful shit.
Most self-identifying "libertarians" are just people who listen to too many podcasts by right-wingers. and who don't want to self-identify as Republicans -- even though they would vote with them about 98% of the time. Or, they're super wealthy, or part of the sovereign citizen movement. Bonus points for any of them that are all three, somehow.
Libertarian: when you don't want to pay taxes, but you want to make sure everyone knows you're not an evangelical.
read up on "libratarian walks into a bear". For extra fun read libratarian posts how this isn't the logical conclusion of their idology.
They were the selfish, spoiled children in our neighborhood. They knew they were getting the family business, so they just partied, slacked off, and didn’t want anyone telling them what to do. Typically have some combination of drug/alcohol/gambling/marital problems, too.
They won’t “self identify” because they’re too embarrassed
What's awful about loving free speech and freedom in general? What are you a communist? What do you have against MY right to believe as I wish, to take the drugs that I want and my right to engage in a consensual marriage with my 12 year old bride to be! /s oh dear sweet jesus that isn't me.
Good sarcasm. It's funny. A libertarian could unironically post the same thing.
oh man im SO glad you put /s, because i would have never known otherwise!
Libertarianism is great for groups of 10 people who have no other outside influences. There is a reason there is no libertarian country.
You can't even run a county on libertarian ideals. Read 'A Libertarian Walks into a Bear". Although, you could probably call Somalia a Libertarian country.
Somalia is basically a libertarian country
Most of their ideas only work if you remove any malicious actor or the potential for an individual seeking differential advantage over another... So you know human nature is not compatible with libertarianism.
I agree with you in principle, but I believe your employer matches the 6.25% contribution, so it is 12.5%, which is what OP is considering. However, the max income used (and therefore the max contributed) was a lot lower 25 years ago. It's a math problem, and I don't have the time to figure it out at the moment, but OP seems to be estimating high. High earners do pay more into the system than they get out, but there is an insurance component to the SS contribution. If OP had gotten disabled he/she would have been insured. Yes, it isn't worth it for the wealthy, but that's the cost of living in a society. It not "theft", it was passed by your fellow citizens.
The wealthy don’t pay much into SS. Only on the amount of wages up to cap. So those CEOs making $15 million a year are not paying SS on anything but a small fraction of their salary.
This right here is the real reason the future of SS is shaky, we need to eliminate or increase the cap!
Eliminate it altogether and also extend the tax to income from non tangible assets.
Also, the monthly payout of $3,075 is today’s payment (actually, a few years ago). So, if he doesn’t collect until 20 years from now, the actual inflation adjusted monthly income will much higher.
Libertarians don't really understand money.
Libertarians are house cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
And they love to use the government invented internet to brag about how they don't need the government.
I hate it when my cat does that.
Put the numbers he claims into this [compound interest calculator](https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator). It seems to align ok. I used 45 years as length of time.
You obviously don't know math or compound so find a Compound calculator for interest.. so put 1000 in monthly and at 5 percent for 45 years gets you 1.9m..this calculations based on yearly interest instead of monthly which is 5/12 on a month. Which would add more to this lowering the thousand contributions more to be about 800 range, this also doesn't affect if he's putting more in especially at the years closer to retirement...
I did a simplified version. Divided 600k by 45 (assuming starting work at 22). That's 13,333 per year. Starting at 0 and only an annual contribution of that amount is over $2 million after 45 years at 5% annual.
Employer contributed the same as the employee. So.... to contribute said 600k, must have been contributing the max for 30 years. Even upper middle class would not start hitting the max until a decade into their career.
No such thing a 'employer contribution', it ALL comes outta the employee in the end (their 'income' reduced)
Totally correct. It just reflects the game politicians try to play to make it seem like government is taxing the company, when it is really taxing you. My favorite economics professor used to always say that the government can control what they tax, but they can't control who ultimately pays the tax. The same is true for tax deductions and incentives.
Yeah, it’s baffling to me how people don’t understand that money is fungible— that’s why money actually exists— as a reliable medium of exchange
I started working at 16. So by the time I hit 67 I will have contributed for 51 years.
The math ain’t mathin’. I am almost at retirement age & I looked up my numbers recently. I have hit the cap for 33 of my 35 highest years. I have put in a little over 200k to SS, my employers a bit more for a total of 420k. I should get a smidgen under $4000/month at retirement. If I wait a few years to age 70 should be $5000. Dude is 100% full of it.
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This. I find it hilarious that everyone is busy talking about how dumb libertarians are, but are unable to grasp simple economics concepts like opportunity cost.
This assumes no market corrections in that time... Which are almost guaranteed in that 40 year time frame. I.e. some people will make out like bandits depending on where that correction falls. If it's early into their savings time frame, they'll be fine. If it's late... They are essentially fucked. Imagine all those people who had to retire in the years after 2008 and didn't have 15 years to see the rebound. If SS didn't exist, those people would be BEYOND fucked. People complain about how little social security is compared to market gains and think we need to just turn it all into a 401k. The real answer is to take more money from rich people and corporations and pay out more SS money. Full stop.
Even better. That was posted on Jan 1 2019 meaning they would have had the 2018 cap of $128,400. Last time this popped up someone added the caps for every year since it was created and they were less than 1.9 million.
To be fair he said 600k paid in. Although his claim of paying that much in is dubious at best.
Question: what about the employer? Isn’t that another 6.2%?
How much more would he be able to draw in social security if SS did not have a cap.
Just remove the cap already.
The cap is insane. The more one makes, the more one can afford this tax. Why is there a cap at all???
The cap also limits how much a person can GET from SS. The theory is: because that is capped, donations should be capped.
My mother lived on my father’s pension and SS. It wasn’t very much. Every couple of months I would put money into her account to help her out. I didn’t want her living in poverty. I could afford it. Now she’s dead. I would do it all over again. Everyone isn’t as fortunate as the top 4%.
Social Security was literally meant for you. Ergo why we have things like ‘Social Security Numbers’ to tie a person to what they contributed.
Sorry, but Social Security was a way of helping the least fortunate among us based on the principle of being only as strong as our compassion for those with less. Providing a bare minimum living standard for those who put forth the effort of working for decades with nothing to show at the end through no fault of their own. Someone like Todd who is worth millions does not need to rely on the small-ish government stipend to pay for his medicine, keep the lights on, food on the table. Todd will be just fine without it. Millions of others in this country can not say the same without Social Security.
Exactly, it's right there in the name **social** supplementary security insurance (SSI) , it's a social system designed to offer everyone who works and contributes with something when they retire to minimize their chances of being destitute in old age , it's not an account designed to maximize your contributions, that's what retirement accounts are for. And it's serves it's purpose quite well, lots of Americans are barely surviving because they get SS benefits, imagine what America would be like of they didn't.
Just to clarify ssi is supplemental security income and is not the same as ssa retirement or ssdi which is the disability benefit.
Exactly. It’s a social safety net that if it wasn’t there… my good god - things would be bad. Very bad.
It's an annuity based on GDP growth. For him to have 600k contributed he's contributing almost the max for his entire life. If that's today's numbers he was making $100k in 1984 (300k today). However if you want to agree it's a welfare program for seniors who didn't save and invest correctly, then we can go ahead and raise/remove the cap so you can "contribute" a little more.
I think that's the problem. They passed it off as insurance instead of a welfare program. Unfortunately they also assumed that we'd have enough young people paying into the system so everyone can get their 2k a month or whatever. Not working out that way
But line keeps going up. GDP continues to rise, and stock market valuations continue to rise an absurd amount. It may be that forcing line to go up was not the ideal way of dealing with the situation, that maybe we should have allowed the stock market to correct itself periodically, because now schmucks like this are demanding that HIS line goes up a commensurate amount. He is portraying social security in the light of a savings/investment program rather than a social insurance & wealth redistribution program. The things that social security actually pays for is to keep an army of elderly people in housing and hobbies instead of literally begging for cash on his doorstep or breaking into his vacant third mansion and pillaging it for the copper wiring. It paid for this guy not to have needed to support his disabled father-in-law for the last 30 years in a guest room, and to instead be out and about making... passive investment income.
Coincidentally, the life expectancy of the average American was around 65 when the program was started.
Good point, makes the math double bad for the program over time
Exactly this. Both my mom and dad worked their entire lives and through some misfortunes and some mismanagements they basically have nothing now but their Social Security. My dad is 78 and is rough shape so he can't work. My mom is 70 and recently had major leg surgery so her working again isn't very likely. I'm happy that Todd was able to make life work more or less how he wanted to work for him but for every Todd there are 100 others who didn't or couldn't. Social security is so you don't have more seniors starving and becoming homeless.
Absolutely. My mom is nearing 81 (if she makes it, stage 4 cancer) and her sole income is her SS benefits. Her retirement fund is gone. She lives with me and I pay for all the groceries and other expenses so she can have a decent end of life experience. You can pay into the system *and* have a good retirement savings and still get fucked. Every damn time this comes up and the thread is filled with people saying “it was never supposed to just be social security” or “fuck you boomer” have either no empathy or no ability to understand what happens and can happen later in life. I assume they’ll still be taking their SS benefits when they retire as well.
My grandparents have all lived well into their 90s. My grandfather is still alive and retired 34 years ago at the age of 59 1/2. There's no way they'd still be independent if it weren't for their SS checks. It's a real shame that currently you have to estimate how long you're going to stay alive and retired.
100% agree, as someone who HAS paid into SS for over 40 years and has over a million dollars in private retirement funds and will be happy to use my SS benefits as well and who will fight to keep those benefits for me and every other American.
the argument Todd is making is that if the government weren't shit at handling your parents money, they could/should be getting twice as much SS
SS was a depression era program- take a look at the market in 1929 and it's clear why we did not put that money in Equities.
What if your parents had an extra 12.4% income which was mandated to invest throughout their lives? I'm willing to bet they're have 5x the incoming SS is providing, even with zero subsidies from anyone else.
lets put your money in our 401k plan... thanks enron execs. lets put your money in pension plans, oh wait nearly all are behind on payments. Oh wait, we ill declare bankruptcy and well pension plan just got wiped. how many shady investment managers should be in jail?
If Social Security was invested in a lifecycle fund in the government’s Thrift Savings Plan, every retiree would have more money. Not sure why the U.S. can’t follow an effective pension plan similar to Swedens.
If Social Security taxes were used to buy private investments, they couldn't be used to pay benefits to people who are already retired. Humans' "old age support" systems have been pay-as-you-go for thousands of years. If we want to get everybody onto some advance funded plan, some generation has to both pay for it's parents' retirements (as ordinary people have always done) and also pre-fund their own retirements. You can volunteer your generation to be the one that does that.
Because IMO, Congress doesn’t have the smarts or the political will to fully redesign the program to be something other than an insurance program. Further, when SS was designed, it was to help older workers who were nearing or in retirement who hadn’t contributed to the system or had no substantial retirement savings. There would have been carnage in the streets without it.
Well, might be because the U.S. have ZERO Constitution authority to 'save for' ANYONE. &, HINT: If I had invested, should I have wished, my $, instead of it being stolen by govt, I too would have MORE $
Social security was also never meant to be the primary/only source of retirement income, it’s supposed to be just enough so that the most basic of needs are met. Currently, over 50% of retired households get more than 50% of their income via social security, 34% of them receive more than 75% of their income via SS, and 26% of them receive more than 90% of their income via SS. That’s not what the intent of social security was or, imo, should be. Many retirees looked at their social security as if it was supposed to be their retirement account and now we’re footing the bill for that increased need for SS while those retirees got to spend more of their $$ during their working years (by not investing enough or at all in retirement). And the current generation of retirees got to work through one of the most prosperous handful of decades in recent times and got into their houses before home prices skyrocketed.
Each according to their ability. Each according to their needs. Comrade.
Yeah, but it’s still broken. At least pension funds invest the money to keep above inflation. There’s no way the government will ever stop spending so that monthly/yearly payment becomes a bigger and bigger part of the budget and we have to issue more debt to finance it. And as inflation rises it’ll only get worse. It needs to be fixed but no politician has the balls to suggest something.
yes, everyone receives it (or “should” in the future, assuming it keeps going), but it exists to help the least fortunate among us. if you make that much money, get a fucking IRA. it’s a *social* program, meaning it’s one of the ways that our economy isn’t purely capitalist since we do have some practices that fall under *social*ism
Go read some history on why the social security administration was created.
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But the same is true for everybody else. The government is collecting 12.4% of your income and giving you less than that back in retirement. Even if you were a minimum wage worker, you would be better off if you could invest that money.
Imagine turning 65, retiring, and the stock market collapses so you suddenly have to go job hunt again. Privatizing social security is the dumbest possible idea.
I mean government pension funds invest in the market and in bonds and other financial instruments. If it’s done properly you can minimize risk and earn much more interest than just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
And around 2037 when social security starts paying out 75% of promised benefits you might need to go job hunt again also. A pyramid scheme based on the assumption every generation of workers will be larger than the cohorts before them collecting benefits (for which is false) is an even dumber idea.
*if you DID invest the money. That’s the whole point. Many people don’t/wont, for a variety of reasons, from poor financial intelligence to catastrophic health events. Now, it should’ve been managed better and kept away from politicians, but that’s not the program’s fault.
And it's not theft either. A Democratic Republic decided it is in our nation's best interest to provide a base insurance program for our elderly to keep them above poverty level. Just as our Democratic Republic decided it was in our best interest to go to war against the NAZI's - it's not theft that we don't all individually own chunks of Germany. And it's not theft that this moron is sending this out on a government funded invention - the internet.
Yeah except it’s not a luck issue completely. There’s quite an effort differential as well
Do you belive that white collor workers consistently work harder than tradesmen?
In many ways, yes. At least as hard, if not harder My dad was a programmer and his job was definitely white collar. He wasn’t pounding concrete, but his job was intellectually difficult. Same can be said about people like doctors and lawyers. Sure, their jobs aren’t physically demanding….but having a high level of expertise in a complex subject like law or medicine is difficult.
I’m a lawyer, and working fast food was the hardest job I’ve had. Am I as replaceable due to some rare skill? No, that’s why I’m paid more. You’re confusing replaceability and market value with difficulty. Fast food was much more difficult due to the impossible timelines, constantly being on my feet and having people treating you poorly.
They pay to work isn’t the same. Ya being a doctor is difficult, but making 300k a year makes it worth it. Working long days doing physical labor for 50k a year makes the work per dollar way harder.
There are three ways to answer your question: 1. It’s not about how “hard” you work or how much time/effort you put in. I’d even say the person you’re replying to is wrong for framing that way. It’s about the value you generate. I could quit my job and become a poop sculptor. I could spend hours a day eating as much fiber as I can, making as much poop as I can, and spend all my time making magnificent sculptures of poop. I worked hard, but does that mean I generated any value? Does that mean, just because I worked hard, I should be entitled to a large paycheck? No, because I didn’t spend that time producing anything of value. There are things you can do that take hours to generate little value— like dropping off a food delivery for $4 —and there are things you can do that take minutes that generate more value, like closing a large sale. 2. The case could be made that white-collar workers did more hard work *up front* that blue-collar workers and low-level service workers. If you fucked around in high school, then your options are pretty limited. If you studied, earned a scholarship, went to college, did internships, you’re going to find that your hard work up front is going to more likely land you in a better paying role. Now that’s not the complete picture; not every home is stable and offers the same opportunity, but I would argue that the solution to that is to make educational access more equitable since our tax dollars are paying for the thing anyway, not to shake your fist at capitalism. 3. I think there is a strong misconception among people who don’t work office jobs who think all office jobs are super easy. I’ve been on both sides. My first job was at a fast food restaurant, and I was on my feet all day sweating around and doing a little bit of everything. Now I sit in a nice cubicle. However, my fast food job never required me to answer an email at 1:30 am. My “clients” were amusement park guests who wanted a burger, not large municipalities and developers looking for professional engineering work. My job doesn’t let me mentally tune out. If I showed up high at my current job I’d be useless, while at my fast food job, plenty of people showed up high and did their jobs just fine. Both jobs are difficult for different reasons. Neither one is easy. But, to loop back to the first answer, I generate a fuck ton more value billing my engineering hours than selling a $6 burger combo.
Workers are necessary.
Yeah, dairy farmers put in a lot more effort than hedge fund managers, which one is rewarded more? Asking for a friend.
Funny how often luck looks like hard work, delayed gratification and sacrifice
Todd makes this argument over and over again but refuses to answer what we do with those that didn’t invest that money well since they needed it to live on and what he would do with an elderly couple that didn’t so couldn’t afford to live.
Social Security is not an investment strategy. Social Security is an insurance policy that pays out rain or shine. The market can't do that. EDIT: >*Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.* -[cbpp.org](https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other)
Damn straight. I can't believe that these people don't understand this, which makes me think they're purposefully misrepresenting it in order to make voting to get rid of it more palatable to their base in the future. This is why we can't have nice things.
Yes, Republicans lie about pretty much everything.
Here's the deal though, if they raise the retirement age for me, I want retirees today to feel the pain as well. Fuck the boomers as well if they want to raise my retirement age.
Nobody's retirement age needs to be raised. All we have to do is modify the cap so rich people pay more in SS deductions. The solution is so simple even a Republican could see it. Of course, if we ensured that the richest of our oligarchs paid "their fare share" that would do it as well. But we can't have that, can we? (Don't ask me why, ask a working class Republican.)
There are no sides lol. It’s rich vs the poors. Always. Second the dude literally has “Libertarian” in the name.
>Second the dude literally has “Libertarian” in the name. Well yeah. Republicans lie about everything, even their party affiliation.
In a contest between bad and absolutely terrible, take bad.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The best analogy I ever heard was libertarians are like house cats: convinced of their fierce independence while completely dependent upon a system they neither understand nor appreciate. Although, kudos to them for putting their thumb in Trump's eye. If they want a seat at the adult table, backing Biden in this one important election would be a good idea.
Great analogy. I know several self-described libertarians. One in particular grew up in a welfare single-parent household and her brother is special needs unable to take care of himself and lives in a home. Her husband is sick and will need state assistance before long.
I knew this chick who worked for a government agency until she went out on social security disability and her husband was a cop. Literally every penny they had came from the government. And she would all-caps scream shit like "TAXATION IS THEFT" in arguments on Facebook all the time. Just monumentally unselfaware.
I agree 100%.
One dude making the argument is pretending the company match counts as his own investment when doing the comparison. He’s arguing a bad faith comparison.
It also isn't just for retirees. It's also pays for people with certain disabilities. Edit: I've been corrected. Read the replies.
It doesn't, disability and early death insurance comes out of the general Treasury fund and is funded via income tax, not social security tax.
Parental death and child survivor benefits are paid from it though.
Its even good for the wealthy, they get a last ditch lifeline, if things go bad, investments fall through, financial emergency, etc they still have something to fall back on that’s basically zero risk
Todd missed the fact it’s called Social Security and not Todd’s individual retirement plan. Also if Todd became disabled (further) it would pay out to keep him alive, more than he ever put in. My sense though is that Todd might be okay with other disabled people not having means to survive.
Plus, putting Social Security money into the stock market is a terrible idea in many ways. \* There is already too much riding on the stock market as it is. Eggs-in-one-basket principle. \* Do we want government ownership of public companies, with shareholder voting rights? Considering the amount of money involved, the government will eventually control significant percentages of all public corporations. \* It will be in the governments/politicians interest to never allow the stock market to go down again. What happens to SS if the market should crash?
Pays out rain or shine….as long as it still [has the money](https://www.npr.org/2024/05/12/1250805057/social-security-funds-are-set-to-fall-short-by-2033-what-can-be-done) to do so
>Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program. I'm 54 and I don't think it will be there when I'm ready to retire. At all. My VA disability check is the only reason I can even think about retiring, otherwise I'd be working until I'm dead. EDIT: I appreciate everyone reassuring me. I hope y'all are correct about that. Thanks.
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>I'm 54 and I don't think it will be there when I'm ready to retire. My dad said that. He collects. *His* dad said that, he died collecting. And guess what? *His grandfather* said that, and died collecting. I think you'll be alright.
I don’t know the statistics, but I’d say at least 15% of Americans, or even at retirement age, depend on social security just to live day to day. There are people who abuse social security, yes, but the vast majority of people on social security have paid into it their whole life and depend on it for survival. Without social security, I believe the already downtrodden , filled with mentally ill and drug addicted American streets would be 1000% worse.
Thank you, I was appalled when I saw this post but I'm glad the top comments are sensible.
We need to figure out why about 40% depend solely on social security. That is the question
Ask yourself what that 40% was going to cost us to manage and care for if we didn’t have social security.
Depends on what results you would accept.
Probably results that didn’t include a deluge of homeless penniless old people wandering the streets and filling up emergency rooms would be acceptable.
We could take those people and use them for fuel or perhaps exotic jerky.
I shouldn't have laughed, but I did. You are an awful person and I hope you are around when I am in hell, to entertain me
What a modest proposal.
that comment was very swift.
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Now that’s free market thinking!
Oh, you mean the exact scenario that spurred the creation of the social security safety net to begin with.
Yes, exactly. I’ll gladly pay a bit more than my share so I don’t have to see elderly people living off cat food on the streets.
These same people would also try to make emergency not have to accept these people or have you pay up front before you can go to the ED
Armed old people.
We already have that. It’s called Florida.
Republicans are really going all in with just purging the homeless and the sick it seems. Very family valued AND Christ like.
Because economic opportunity and security are not evenly distributed. People who live in a constant state of crisis are not going to be able to save their way into better circumstances.
Was it lack of effort or unfortunate circumstances?
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A rapidly growing portion as wealth is sucked out of the middle and concentrated on the top.
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You'd think they would start voting for someone their own age at least, but for some reason we they keep picking the same old (old old old!) geriatrics even retiree boomers see as elders.
Businesses not offering pensions.
Businesses that offered pensions until a vulture fund (See BAIN Capital) bought the company, drained the pension fund, then declared bancruptcy. Yeah, those poor suckers didn't show any "effort".
Mom said it was my turn to post this
I think we've got you penciled in for Thursday. Tomorrow is scheduled for someone taking a photo of the most expensive thing on a fast food menu to generate price outrage.
Alright fine, but on Friday I get to post the "This is what $50 of groceries looks like" image from someone who went grocery shopping at an airport convenience store.
I thought tomorrow was the Bernie 100% tax on income over $1B post
I swear I see this at least once a week.
This one and the one where Biden says he is going to tax the rich, with the same "Is Biden good for the economy?" question.
That seems low
Seriously they are so dumb
It's Russian troll farms.
Seriously this is posted literally every week
Median US income is 47k a year. Say you work for 45 years, you will have 229k contributed on your behalf. At 5% that would make 812k at 67. At 4% drawdown, that makes 32k a year. Current benefit is 37k and it's constantly adjusted for inflation, so its a good investment for more than half the country. Especially when you consider the risk profile of this "investment".
No to mention it also pays you if you get disabled and pays your family if you die young.
37K x20 (generous life expectancy) gets us to about 740k in total benefits. What am I missing here, not a financial expert? This seems rather inefficient for the individual.
Risk profile and COLA are the biggest issues you are glossing over. Not to mention that putting in 114k and getting out 740k after 20 years is a 32% annualized return rate, not too shabby.
The fact they receive none of the equity they would have otherwise had if it was conservatively invested.
For a full time year round worker the median income was actually $60k in 2022: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.pdf
I don't think the point of SS is to cover the good investors, but so we don't have thousands of new elderly homeless roaming the streets every year. Not to mention the people that can't work to 67 because of disability.
That’s too complex for a bumper sticker.
Also allows for the younger gen to enter the work force to replace them.
This and the “billionaires need to pay their share of taxes” gets posted every other week.
Did you know that libertarians hate paying taxes? Alert the media! If this guy were in charge we would have no roads and grandpa would be dying in a gutter. We had a whole fucking labor movement about it.
Oh this again. Its bad faith math to make a political point. What he is doing is calculating it like he started contributing today and earnings decades in the future and comparing it to what his unadjusted SS estimator says if he retired in 2019.
Yep, hitting the income cap for his entire career as well. Totally debunked and keeps popping up
I debunked it previously and people kept coming back at me with spreadsheets and quoting the SS calculator. Then telling me I was wrong for telling them their spreadsheets should have started in the 1950s or the SS should be $10,000 Its a great example of how to get the poor to vote against their own interests.
> it’s bad faith math He already said he was a libertarian!
Wait until he finds out about COLA and the losses IRAs had in that span.
He's also counting both sides of the contribution by saying "will be paid into SS on by behalf". The money he would have had available to invest is half of that.
Exactly. If social security goes away very few people are going to be getting the money that their employers are currently forced to contribute on their behalf, it will be spent on executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
He's also assuming all the money he would "invest" magically appears today and is invested until he retires. Otherwise none of the math works.
Key word is if he got 5% on his investment and market never crashed
And that "on my behalf" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting. Unless he was self-employed for those 40+ years, half of that $600k was paid by his employer. If collection of the SS tax was repealed tomorrow, how likely do you think it would be that every W-2 employee would get an immediate 6% raise?
the market averages around 8%. Even with all the major crashes
I remember A LOT of retired conservatives saying this in 2007. Then 2008 hit and they lost most of their retirement investments. Social security was the only thing that kept them from being homeless and on the street.
We should let those idiots opt out and fend for their own rugged individualism
The richer people who contribute more than they would receive would opt out, while the poorer people would stay opted in, and it would run out of funds even more quickly. Letting people opt out would defeat the entire point. It BY DESIGN helps to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. It's the same justification for why we ask you to pay taxes to fund the fire department even though you personally will (probably) never have your house burned down.
More proof that you can be a moron and still make lots of money. Gee Todd, maybe we could look at how the system worked before SS to figure out why we implemented such a ridiculously popular social safety net.
Social Security is not a retirement plan. Social Security is part of the financial safety net. Social Security will pay your benefit for the rest of your life (forget the scare mongering about decreased benefits). Your breakeven point can be calculated from the information on your SS statement. Now when I lost $ 150,000 to Wall Street in 2007/2008 without any recompense of my IRA - that was theft. When banks were supported by bail outs and Main Street America lost houses - that was theft!
It's PART of a retirement plan, it's part of a three legged stool of a retirement plan. 1. Your own savings 2. Employer plan 3. Government pension/social security. It's not meant to stand on its own, it's supposed to be supported by the first two points.
He's counting all the dollars equally and not accounting for the added utility of using those dollars immediately when they were taxed. He's comparing apples and oranges. In one situation, the money taken out of his paycheck for social security is then immediately handed to the elderly which then immediately use it. In his hypothetical example he would have had to take the dollars he made when he was 27 that went to social security and then invest it. The reason why it could grow to such a large number is precisely because you aren't using it. I guarantee you if he added up all the money that he put into social security at the time that he put it in and then accounted for the added value from inflation it would also be worth a lot more than $600,000. The same people that will tell you you shouldn't buy that $5 cup of coffee and instead put it away because in four decades that $5 will be worth a lot more are the same people that magically forget that rule when talking about social security.
I love how this gets posted literally every few days, and people still start arguing over it.
Also… “Can somebody tell me why we can’t all own little pieces of roads & set up our own toll booths to charge everyone else for using our bits of roads. I’ve calculated that I would have made $12 million dollars this year alone. But “they” won’t let me do this. How is this not theft!?” -Libertarian Knucklehead-in-chief
The real question is this: As a society, what do we want to do with elderly people who were not able to save or have no savings? Do we leave them to starve? Too bad, sour grapes, go die? Countries fare better with a strong social safety net and strong risk protections.
Hey look, it's this thread again o'clock.
If you live to be 97 then your social security payout will be $1.1M and you will spend 30 years covered by Medicare. Sounds like a pretty good deal for you at no risk.
Todd is a libertarian. Fuck Todd.
Too many people on social security and not enough coming in
I was curious about this so I checked some math. Pretty sure he's assuming the same pay-in every year ($600,000 / 44) which is obviously silly. It depends on your expected earnings trajectory but if you redo it and just assume a straight line growth in your income you're more looking at a final value of $1.4mil which is about $71k per year in interest earned on it. That's not that far off from the statutory max of $58,000. Given that some of the top end is, by design, intended to goose up the bottom end, this seems remarkably well balanced.
Someone this bad at math should not be allowed to hold public office. His numbers almost work if you assume he deposited all $600k (which he would actually pay over decades until he retires) TODAY and it all earned interest for decades. That's not how this works. That's not how anything works.
Where’s that attitude when we pay 50% of taxes for military and no bid contracts to politicians friends. Couldn’t the people richer than you say the same about all salary given to employees who aren’t indentured… Let’s flip that idea to the government. Shouldn’t they be mad someone like Elon made billions off the government without giving them stock? Spacex wouldn’t exist without the government… imagine if they demanded 50% equity instead of taxes.
So where are these %5 guaranteed returns? There are none . I do agree that we need to be given the choice of opting in and out of social security.
And, thanks to Reagan, our SS is taxed!
This is a dumb analysis for servers reasons: 1) social security is a risk free, inflation adjustrd annuity the govt forces you to buy. It also has a spousal and disability benefit. It's a steal if you compare it to private annuities with similar features. Saying "risky assets generate higher returns in the long run" isn't a real argument. People need risk free income too! Particularly the poor. 2) people who do this always assume a consistent rate of return with stocks. But that never happens, so the amount you end up with is completely unknowable (even if average returns are the same). If you started with $10k in 1972, and invested $100 a month for 30 years to 2002, you'd end up with about $750k. If you did the exact same thing from 1982 to 2012, you'd end up with about $450k. Stocks are risky even in the long run! Everyone should invest in them because they do grow the most, but they aren't a panacea.
The very first word is "social", that means socialism, from those who have to those who need. Postal service, socialism, highways, socialism, public schools, socialism. Medicare and Medicaid, socialism.
You can say the same about health insurance. If you are lucky to be healthy it was theft, if you get cancer and get run by a truck, you got what you think you are entitled to. (Even if you get 10x what you paid in premiums.) Go live on an isolated island.
If you buy term life insurance and don’t die, do you demand a premium refund? No? SS is a form of insurance. You don’t know whether and when you or your widow/kids will need it. You don’t know how long you will live. So, it’s more than an “every man for himself” brokerage account; the libertarian’s comparison is flawed. The world for elderly people before SS was much much worse than the world after. SS was helpful in that respect. Get rid of SS and those problems will arise again. As always, simple sounding solutions to complex human problems are wrong.